The trading post sat exactly where Due said it would, on the line where Therasia's influence ended, and neutral territory began.
It belonged to neither side, and both sides used it anyway.
Low stone building, covered porch, a storage yard behind it, stacked with crates.
A hand-painted sign above the door that advertised nothing.
The kind of place that is useful to everyone and loyal to no one.
A woman was restacking crates on the porch when they arrived.
She didn't look up right away, finishing the last crate first before she stood and looked at Due with a flat expression.
Sharp-faced, middle-aged, with dust on her coat and ink stains on her right hand.
Her eyes moved from Due to Alistair and back to Due quickly.
"I wondered when you'd show up," she said.
"Sable," Due said.
"You look the same." She crossed her arms. "Somehow."
Due frowned. An unusual expression on his face, something that looked close to guilt.
"Years underground tend to preserve a person," he replied.
Sable looked at Alistair, taking in the covered hair, the dark armor, everything about him that suggested someone who had recently survived things he probably shouldn't have.
"Thorne," she said.
Alistair said nothing, 'How does she know?'
"I read the dispatch." She turned and walked inside without inviting them, leaving the door open.
Alistair narrowed his eyes; however, he deemed it a coincidence for now.
Due glanced at him – the look that meant wait – and followed her in.
The interior was practical and organized, every surface serving a function.
Sable poured tea into three cups without asking whether they wanted any, then set the pot down and turned to face Due.
"Before anything else," Due said.
Sable's eyes narrowed slightly.
Due reached into his cloak and placed something small on the table between them.
Alistair couldn't see what it was from near the door, only that Sable's expression changed when she saw it.
Something older passed across her face, less managed than the rest of her.
"My debt is fully settled now," Due said.
Sable stared at the item, then at Due, then back at the item.
"You came back to this region after years underground," she said slowly, "and the first thing you did was find a way to settle a debt." A pause. "…That's either admirable or insane."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive," said Due, a slight smile crossing his face.
She picked up the item and put it in her coat pocket without examining it further.
Then she picked up her tea, took a measured sip, and said, "What do you need?"
Alistair had been watching the entire exchange from near the door. Silently.
He'd understood Due's Characteristic as a compulsion, something done to him rather than chosen.
However, watching him clear a years-old debt before asking for anything, in the middle of everything pressing down on Sun Harvest, with Therasia's army reorganizing and Elara inside hostile territory, it didn't look like compulsion.
'The most deliberate thing he's done since we surfaced,' thought Alistair.
"The Duke of Therasia," Due said.
"His consolidation started months before Arphus died. It keeps coming back to Elara. I need to know what he's building toward and why her Characteristic is central to it."
Sable set down her cup and looked at the map on the wall.
The Oasis of Grain spread across it in faded ink, settlements marked, borders indicated with lines that hadn't been accurate for a while.
"I've been watching Caldren's movements for eight months," she said. "Supply patterns, personnel rotations, which commanders get summoned to the capital and which don't. The pattern was obvious three months in."
She paused for a moment, "It always comes back to Elara. Not as a political asset. Not for negotiations or alliances or the usual ways a Duke uses a daughter. Something more specific."
"How specific?" Alistair asked.
Due didn't tell him to wait, the debt was settled.
"Favor at full expression," Sable said carefully, "not the ambient version people usually experience from her, but deliberate, sustained, and targeted, has the power to anchor an entire population's loyalty without their awareness."
Alistair widened his eyes, while Due seemed mostly unsurprised.
Sable continued, "Caldren is creating something in this region that needs people's agreement. It's not about soldiers or alliances. It's something the Echelon can't easily find as coercion because it won't look like coercion on the surface."
'So Due was right,' thought Alistair. 'That is a ridiculous power.'
The stove ticked in the corner. Outside, the wind moved across the storage yard.
"He needs her to be willing," Due said.
"Or controlled," Sable replied. "Whichever he can get first."
A heavy silence settled over the room. Sable picked up her cup and set it back down without drinking.
"There's something else. It might be nothing, but…" She moved to the map and pointed to a location near the border, neutral territory, unmarked.
"A boy. He has white hair, a teen at most, with a grain on his ear like Sunborne children wear. I've seen him near this area three times in the past two weeks.
Alone, which the Sunborne don't usually allow this close to the border, and watching something, though I couldn't determine what."
Due went quiet for a moment.
"Osren," he said, his voice level.
Sable looked at him. "You know him?"
"I know of him. The Sunborne doesn't send him anywhere without a reason." Due looked at the marked location, "If he's watching this border, he's watching for something specific."
"Or someone," Sable added.
Alistair looked at the map. The marked location sat almost directly between where they were standing and Therasia's city, the city where Elara was.
Where Caldren's faction meetings happened, and where someone with a suppressed Characteristic signature had been tracking them since before they surfaced from the underground palace.
Seeing this, he looked at Due.
Due's expression was the one that meant he'd already reached the same conclusion and was deciding which part of it to say out loud first.
"We need to move," Alistair said. "Before Caldren gets what he's waiting for."
Due nodded without a second thought. Then he looked at Sable. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me." She picked up her tea. "Stay alive long enough to make this worth the trouble. That's all I ask."
Due laughed under his breath. "You don't need to tell me that."
They left through the door, past the stacked crates, back onto the road where the Oasis of Grain stretched toward Therasia's edges in every direction.
The city was half a day's walk. Elara was inside it.
And somewhere between here and there, on this same road, Osren was watching something he'd been sent to watch.
Alistair pulled his hood up.
"Due, prepare yourself." He kept walking. "We're stepping into the real thing now."
Whatever Caldren was building, it wasn't waiting for them to arrive. It simply was already in motion.