The horses were exactly where they'd left them.
Dusk stood against the tree with the particular stillness of an animal that had decided long ago that patience was more dignified than anxiety.
He looked at Marcus with his broad black eyes as he approached, steady and unbothered, like he'd been perfectly comfortable waiting and would have continued being comfortable indefinitely.
"Good boy," Marcus said and untied him.
Liz was already up on her white mare, tilting her face slightly toward the cold morning air. "Nice day," she muttered, more to herself than anyone.
She looked at the cave rubble one more time, at the crooked sign buried somewhere inside it, at the white boulders sitting quiet and innocent like they'd never been anything else.
"You know most people who survive something like that take a moment," she said.
"We survived it," Marcus replied, swinging up onto Dusk. "That's the moment."
She looked at him sideways. "You're genuinely terrible at this."
"At what."
"Being a person."
Marcus said nothing. He turned Dusk east and the horse moved under him like he'd been waiting for exactly this.
Liz pulled alongside and they found the road without discussing it, the comfortable silence between them settling back into place the way it always did, easy and unforced.
They rode for a while before Liz spoke again.
"That thing you did in the chamber," she said.
"When you pointed at the wall and told Malachar where to hit."
"Soul Reading."
"You used it like you knew what you were doing." She glanced at him. "When did you learn that."
Marcus thought about it honestly. "I didn't."
"Then how did you know where the anchor point was."
"I didn't know I knew," he said. "It just happened. Like the summon words in the village. My mouth opened and something older came out."
Liz looked at him for a moment. "That doesn't concern you at all does it."
"Abilities that work without being told to work are more efficient than ones that need permission," he said. "I'll figure out the rest later."
She shook her head slowly and turned back to the road. "You are a very strange man."
"You keep following me anyway."
"Don't make it weird."
The trees thinned gradually and the road widened introducing a rough rocky terrain settling around them. They rode in comfortable quiet for another stretch before Marcus spoke without preamble.
"Something's pulling me east."
Liz looked at him. "Pulling you how."
"Like a direction that has more weight than the others." He kept his eyes on the road. "Started around the time we came out of the cave. Not Soul Reading. Something underneath it. Like an instinct that knows something I don't yet."
Liz was quiet for a moment. "The visions that brought me to that village felt like that," she said.
"Not a voice and not a vision exactly. Just a direction that felt more right than any other direction."
"Then you understand it."
"I understand it and it still concerns me when it shows up in you," she said. "Because the last time I followed a direction that felt like that I ended up watching you fight a gravity monster in a collapsing cave."
"And we're both still breathing."
"Barely."
"Barely counts," Marcus giggled.
She looked at him for a moment longer then let it go the way she let most things go with him, not dropped but stored somewhere she could come back to later.
They rode another hour before a town appeared on the horizon.
It came into view gradually the way real settlements did, smoke first, then the suggestion of rooftops, then the actual rooftops, then the walls.
Real walls, stone and maintained, with guards on the parapet who tracked two approaching riders with the professional attention of people who took the job seriously.
Marcus took in the walls and the guards and the guild banners visible above the roofline and filed it all without expression.
"Redmere," Liz said. "Biggest town in the eastern corridor. Three guilds operating inside, two of them legitimate." She glanced at him. "Don't talk to anyone from the Ironseal guild. They collect information and sell it to whoever pays most."
"Noted."
"Also don't look at anyone the way you're looking at the gate right now. You look like you're calculating how long it would take to breach it."
"Four minutes," Marcus said. "Maybe three with Malachar."
Liz closed her eyes briefly. "Please don't say that to anyone inside."
The gate guards stopped them at the entrance, standard procedure, names and business. Liz handled it with the easy confidence of someone who'd talked her way through harder checkpoints than this.
Traders, she told them, coming from the western settlements. The guards looked at Marcus's coat, at the way he sat on the horse, at the complete absence of anything resembling approachable, and then looked back at Liz and waved them through on the strength of her smile alone.
Inside, Redmere was everything the exterior suggested. Busy and layered, people moving through the same streets as Veldrath natives with the friction that always created, each group navigating around the other with varying degrees of success.
Market stalls ran the main thoroughfare. Guild halls sat visible at the far end of two different side streets.
A notice board near the central well drew a crowd of people reading and occasionally arguing about what they were reading.
Marcus was off Dusk before Liz had finished tying her mare.
The notice board had the usual texture of these things. Bounties, lost items, requests for skilled labor, warnings about road conditions. His eyes moved through it quickly and stopped.
ASHFANG FACTION: WANTED FOR RAID ACTIVITY ACROSS EASTERN SETTLEMENTS. BOUNTY ISSUED BY REDMERE GUILD COALITION. INFORMATION LEADING TO COMMANDER IDENTIFICATION REWARDED SEPARATELY.
Underneath the main notice, smaller text. A supply route location. Dates. A name Marcus didn't recognize but Soul Reading pulsed faintly against the back of his eyes when he read it, the same low frequency it had produced in the cave when something was present worth paying attention to.
He read the name twice. Filed it.
"Ashfang bounty," he said when Liz appeared beside him.
"I saw." She kept her voice low. "Half the hunters in this town have been chasing that bounty for three months and none of them have collected it. The Ashfang commanders don't stay visible long enough."
"The supply route information is current," Marcus said. "Two days east. Whoever posted this had recent access."
"Which means someone inside Redmere has been watching the Ashfang closely enough to know their schedule." Liz looked around the square with the casual thoroughness of someone who'd learned to make surveillance look like sightseeing. "That's either very useful or very dangerous depending on why they're watching."
"Both," Marcus said. "Usually both."
He stepped back from the board and observed the town around him. Seems peaceful around here.
"We need supplies," he said. "And information about who posted that notice."
"I'll handle the social side," Liz said. "You handle not frightening anyone."
Marcus looked at her.
"That wasn't a compliment," she said.