They left Carenfall before dawn.
Not through the main gates — through the craftsmen's district on the city's western edge, where the morning movement of people beginning early work provided a specific kind of cover that was not invisibility but something more practical: the cover of being unremarkable. One older man with a pack. One younger man beside him. Both moving with the specific efficient pace of people who had somewhere to be.
The city's stone gave him something as he moved through its edges.
Not the deep quality of the lower quarter's foundation layer — the city's outer districts were newer, their geological connection to whatever was in the substrate less developed than the lower quarter's ancient bedrock. But a quality of recognition. Not the strong directional quality he had felt in the basement's stone, but the ambient version of it — the specific sensation of moving through a space that had a relationship with the kind of thing he was, even if the relationship was faint and mostly historical.
He filed this.
The road east was different from the valley road south.
The valley road had been ancient, the specific geological age of a landscape that had been doing what it was doing for ten thousand years. The eastern road was newer — not recent, not within any human lifetime, but newer in the geological sense, the specific quality of a road that ran through territory that had been more recently shaped. The resonance was shallower here. The Echo-Sight received less of the deep-patient quality and more of the human historical layer, the accumulated impression of a trade route.
He walked and read and thought.
Borin walked beside him with the easy pace of a man who had walked long distances many times, and they talked in the intervals between the stretches of silence, and the talking was not the organized delivery of the back room but something different — the specific texture of two people who were figuring out how they talked to each other.
"Your father," Borin said, in one of the morning's middle intervals. "What do you want to know?"
Corvin considered this carefully.
"What he was like," he said. "Not the function. Not the Warden role. What he was like as a person."
Borin was quiet for a moment.
"Patient," he said. "Patient in a way that I think you have inherited, from what I have seen of you in three days. Not passive — patient. The specific quality of someone who was paying attention while waiting rather than simply enduring the wait." He paused. "He was also — careful about people. Not cold. Careful. He paid attention to people in a way that they felt but that was not immediately legible. People felt seen by him without always being certain what it was he was seeing."
Corvin walked.
"Your mother was different," Borin said. "She was — warmer. More immediately present. Where your father was patient, she was present. She paid attention to people in a way that was direct rather than accumulated." A pause, and in the pause the grief that Borin managed so carefully was briefly present at the surface. "She was the one who made the estate feel inhabited rather than functional. Your father made it function. She made it alive."
Corvin walked.
"The night of the massacre," he said carefully. "Where were you?"
"In the estate's lower quarter," Borin said. "The service wing. We had received — there were signs, that evening. Your father had put us on a specific preparation. I was in the service wing with the things he had asked me to have ready." A pause. "The attack was faster than we had prepared for. Faster than your father had assessed it would be." Another pause. "He had assessed many things correctly. He had not fully assessed the speed."
"You got out."
"I got out because your father's instructions included the specific route and the specific priority order and I followed the priority order rather than the one my own judgment would have chosen." Borin's voice was steady. "My judgment would have turned back. His instructions said: do not turn back. Take what you are carrying and do not turn back." A long pause. "I have thought about that instruction every day for seventeen years."
Corvin said nothing.
The road continued east.
On the second day of travel, the locket changed.
Not dramatically — no blazing, no communication, no quality of presence becoming suddenly louder. The warmth shifted direction. Still south, but now with a competing orientation — east. The same warmth now distributed between two directions, the south component and a new east component that had not been present before.
He noted this.
He thought about what was east.
Vera. The eastern mountain district. The woman who had spent fifteen years on the pre-founding records and who had received Aldric Valerius's letter twelve years ago and had written back to Borin and had been, ever since, someone who knew the shape of the thing they were all operating inside without yet knowing whether the heir existed.
He thought about what else was east.
He thought about anchor points and how they were distributed across the kingdom's geological substrate. He thought about what the Veil's maintenance structure looked like from the outside, from the perspective of someone who knew the anchor points existed but did not yet know their specific locations.
He thought about whether the eastern mountain district was east because that was where Vera had settled or whether Vera had settled there because something in the eastern mountain district was significant.
He filed this.
He walked east.