The common room had maybe a dozen people in it. Marcus observed them all within two minutes and found nothing worth worrying about.
"Tell me about the Ashfang supply routes," he said.
Liz looked up. "You want a geography lesson over dinner."
"I want to know what we're riding into."
She set down her spoon and thought for a moment.
"The eastern corridor runs between two kingdoms, Halveth to the north and Crestmere to the south. Neither of them controls the middle territory effectively. The Ashfang operate in that gap, using the forest roads to move supplies between four or five locations we know about and probably twice that many we don't."
"The route on the board."
"Runs through a valley called the Greymere Pass. Single road in, single road out, dense forest on both sides." She picked up her spoon again. "Good place for an ambush if you were planning one."
"I'm not planning an ambush."
"What are you planning?."
"An interception," Marcus said. "Different thing."
Liz looked at him with the expression she'd developed specifically for moments when his distinctions made technical sense and practical nonsense simultaneously.
"What's the difference."
"An ambush is about destroying the target," he said. "An interception is about getting information from it first."
She considered that. "The merchant. Corvin. You think he's with the caravan."
"I think Soul Reading flagged his name on that board for a reason and I'd rather find out what that reason is before we walk into a valley with one exit."
Liz was quiet for a moment. Outside the inn the town had settled into its evening rhythm, voices lower, foot traffic thinning.
"You trust it that much already," she said. "The Soul Reading."
"I trust what it showed me in the cave," Marcus said. "It hasn't been wrong yet."
"Yet."
"Yet," he agreed and finished his food.
The inn's common room thinned out slowly around them until it was just Marcus and Liz and a man three tables away who had fallen asleep over his drink and showed no signs of reconsidering that decision.
The fire in the hearth had burned down to something low and orange that pushed back the dark without quite winning against it.
Liz turned her cup slowly in her hands. Not drinking. Just turning it.
"Ashveil is east," she said.
Marcus looked at her.
"Not far from the Greymere Pass corridor." She kept her eyes on the cup. "I've been thinking about that since you showed me the supply route location on the board. The Ashfang operate all through that region. They were operating through it when
Ashveil was raided."
"You think the supply route connects to what happened to your city."
"I think the Ashfang don't do anything without a reason and the reason they hit Ashveil was never just a raid." She set the cup down. "My mother knew something. She wasn't just a resident, she was too deliberate about getting me out.
Too specific about what I was supposed to do after." She finally looked up. "Find The One. That's what she said. Not run. Not hide. Find The One. Like she'd been waiting for the moment she'd need to say those words."
Marcus said nothing. He let her have the silence the way she sometimes let him have his.
"I'm not asking you to go to Ashveil," she said. "I know that's not your road."
"We follow the supply route," Marcus said.
"Whatever it connects to, we follow it."
She looked at him for a moment with something she didn't name and he didn't ask her to.
"Get some sleep," he said. "We leave before light."
********
They were on the road before the sun committed to rising, the sky pale grey and cold, the kind of morning that hadn't decided yet what it wanted to be.
Dusk moved at an easy pace beneath Marcus and the road east stretched ahead of them through thinning trees and darkening earth.
Four hours in, Soul Reading sharpened.
Not dramatically. Just a shift in frequency, like a signal finding its source. Marcus straightened slightly in the saddle.
"There," he said.
Liz looked at the treeline. "I don't see anything."
"Give it a moment."
She gave it a moment.
The caravan emerged from the tree line two minutes later. Four carts, six mounted guards, and between the second and third cart a figure on foot with his hands bound to the side rail, head down, clothing torn in the way that came from days without the option to change it.
Soul Reading hit Marcus like a closed fist.
Not corruption. Not the directed darkness from the garrison's lower level. Something rawer. Grief and fury wound together so tightly they'd become one thing, and underneath both of them the specific anguish of someone watching something they loved being taken apart piece by piece while they stood close enough to see it and too far away to stop it.
"That's Corvin," Marcus said.
Liz studied the bound figure. "He doesn't look like a merchant."
"He doesn't look like anything right now." Marcus watched the guards, their spacing, the cart formation, the sight lines from the tree cover.
"Malachar takes the right flank. You take the left. I'll take the conversation."
"And if they don't want a conversation."
"Then Malachar takes everything else."
Liz drew her sword and rolled her neck once. "Try not to start with the face Marcus. It tends to end conversations before they begin."
"I don't know what that means."
"You have a very specific face when you're about to do something violent. Lead with the other one."
Marcus looked at her. "I have two faces."
"Apparently not." She clicked her mare left into the trees without waiting for a response.
Marcus watched her disappear into the undergrowth and then looked back at the caravan moving through the valley road below, unhurried, unaware, the guards riding with the loose posture of people who hadn't been surprised in long enough to stop expecting it.
He gave Liz thirty seconds to reach position.
Then he nudged Dusk forward out of the treeline and onto the road directly ahead of the caravan, sitting completely still in the saddle with his hands visible and his face giving them absolutely nothing to read.
"Hey there".