Wren did not lower the rock.
He counted to ten.
She did not come out.
"I can hear you breathing," he said.
The breathing stopped and then started again, a hand came through the gap in the rubble, open and palm-out, fingers spread.
Then a shoulder, and then an old woman folded herself through the gap with her knees going sideways at the last part.
She straightened up and looked at the rock in his hand and then at his face.
"Put that down. I'm sixty-three."
'Watch the hands.'
Her hands were empty, the fingers were not moving toward anything, and her coat had no shape to it that suggested a weapon underneath.
She was thin, grey-haired and she was watching him with the flat attention of someone who had already made a decision.
[Living Target Detected — Devour Unavailable]
[Soul Integrity: 99%]
No itch.
No pull behind his eyes, no reach in his chest toward her the way it had reached toward the wolves.
She was alive and the class read the difference.
He put that information away because it was useful.
'So it only wants the dead things.'
He kept the rock where it was.
"How long have you been back there?" he said.
"Since before you arrived." She was looking at the wall behind him rather than at him.
"I watched you check the perimeter twice but you missed me both times because you were looking for animals."
"What do you know about the spear?"
She let out a breath and held still for a moment.
"They posted a notice in Eisenwall's market square three days ago. Your face is on it."
'Three days.' The spear had gone through him on Branding day.
They had written his face onto a board after his body was cold.
If the notices had gone further than the market square, then Gerold had seen one.
"What does the notice say?"
"Bearer of a proscribed Brand. Kill on sight."
She said it the way someone reads a sign they have passed too many times. "No name. Just your face and the charge."
'Kill on sight.' Not arrest or contain.
They had already done it once and he was up again, and now they had written the instruction down so anyone with a sword could finish what the guards at the Grand Hall had started.
He looked at his palm.
The Brand had moved past the raw stage into something darker, and she had seen it when he reached for the rock.
She had already decided something about him and was still sitting here.
"Why are you telling me this?"
She picked up a piece of flatbread from her bundle near the rubble gap and broke it into thirds without answering.
She held one out to him and ate another piece herself.
The silence lasted long enough that he understood the answer was going to come in its own time or not at all.
He took the bread and ate it in two bites.
"My name is Ingrid," she said.
"There's a settlement called Grauheim one day east. Below the ridge, off the main cart track, away from checkpoints. People there don't ask questions they don't need answered."
"Why would you take me there?"
"I didn't say I was taking you. I said I'm going that direction."
She finished her piece of bread and brushed the crumbs off her hands.
"Walk with me or walk separately."
'She knows what I am and she's not running.'
That was either very good or very bad, and he did not have enough information to know which.
He followed because the rock was not going to keep him alive past the second day and she knew where the checkpoints were not.
◆ ◆ ◆
Ingrid set a pace he had not expected from watching her fold through the rubble gap, steady and low, reading the ground three steps ahead and picking around frost-hard ruts without breaking stride.
She did not speak on the move and did not look back.
His knee started clicking after the first hour and he dropped a half-step without deciding to.
She dropped a half-step at the same time and held it there, and neither of them said anything about it.
They found the dead thing at midday.
It was in the path, or what was left of it was in the path.
A deer, opened from chest to haunch by something with claws wider than Wren's hand.
The kill was fresh, maybe two hours old, and steam was still rising from the parts that had been inside.
[Devour Available: Ashwilds Deer (F)]
[Estimated Yield: Minor Trait — Heightened Hearing]
[Cost: 1% Soul Integrity]
[Accept / Decline]
The pull was stronger than it had been with the wolves.
It climbed from the back of his jaw up into his temples and his fingers twitched toward the carcass before he caught them. Predator's Lunge was humming in his legs.
'But I didn't kill it.'
The system didn't seem to care.
The deer was dead and the class wanted it, and his right hand was already halfway to the carcass when Ingrid's voice cut through.
"Keep walking."
He looked at her.
She had stopped ten feet ahead and was watching him, but her weight had shifted to her back foot and her hands were no longer at her sides.
'She knows what the Brand does.'
She had seen something before, or she knew enough to recognize what was happening to his hands.
He pressed Decline and walked past the deer and did not look back.
The itch faded to the baseline hum after about thirty steps, and by fifty it was back in its usual place at the base of his skull.
[Devour Declined.]
[Soul Integrity: 99%]
[Devours Declined: 2]
'Rule two: walk away from every kill.'
His own rule, and he had almost broken it on a deer he had not even killed.
The compulsion was getting worse, or he was getting tired, or both.
[WARNING: Devour compulsion increases proportionally with proximity to viable targets.]
[Extended proximity to undevoured kills may result in involuntary acquisition.]
He read that twice because the word involuntary changed everything.
The system was telling him that if he sat next to a dead thing long enough, the Devour would happen whether he wanted it to or not.
The class had a leash, and the leash was around his neck.
Ingrid fell back into step beside him.
She did not say anything about what had just happened.
◆ ◆ ◆
The settlement came into view in the late afternoon, low in a hollow below a bare ridge.
The buildings had been repaired so many times that the original material was hard to identify in most of the walls.
Two chimneys had smoke.
Ingrid walked through the gate without stopping and Wren followed two steps behind.
A woman near the fire pit looked up when they came through.
Her eyes went to Wren's face, then to his right hand and then back to his face.
Her expression did not move.
Her name was Mathild, and Wren learned it ten minutes after arriving when Ingrid used it in passing.
Mathild showed him to a bench near the fire, said stew was on and went back to a length of rope she was working a metal ring onto.
Ingrid went to find a man she needed to speak with about a crossing somewhere south of the ridge.
The stew came in a clay bowl, thick and had been on long enough that nothing in it was individually identifiable anymore.
He picked up the spoon and then set it back down.
His hands had already moved through a motion he did not ask for, sectioning off a third of the stew from the right side of the bowl and nudging it to the left.
'Force of habit.'
At home, he always ate the smaller portion first and left the larger one for Gerold, because his uncle worked the bellows all day and needed the food more.
He had done it so many times that his hands did it without him.
Now they were doing it in a settlement far from the forge for an uncle who was not there.
He moved the bowl back in front of him and picked up the spoon.
"There's more in the pot," Mathild said from across the fire.
"Force of habit," Wren said. "My uncle eats second."
She pulled the rope to the next loop and said nothing.
He ate the right-side portion.
The stew was hot and had plenty of salt in it but he was done faster than he expected.
Then he looked at the left-side portion.
'He's not here. Eat it.'
But his hand sat on the bench and did not pick up the spoon for a while.
When he finally did he ate the second portion slower than the first.
It tasted wrong even though it was still hot.
He rinsed the bowl at the water barrel and stacked it back in the kitchen.
When he came back to the bench Mathild had set the rope down in her lap.
She was watching his right hand where it rested against his thigh.
She had been watching it long enough that when he turned toward her she did not look away.
"You're the one from the Eisenwall notice," she said.
'So the notices made it this far.'
He looked at the gate he had walked through, the distance between the gate and the treeline, and at the fact that Mathild had put down her rope.
"Yes," Wren said.
Mathild looked at him for another long moment, then she looked toward the building Ingrid had gone into, and then she looked back at him.
"There was another one," she said. "Before you. Seven years ago."
The fire cracked and Wren's hands went still.
"Another what?"
"Another Aschenschlund."
Mathild picked up the rope again and threaded it through the next ring without looking at him.
"The notice looked the same "Kill on sight" He made it three weeks before they found him."
The fire cracked again and somewhere behind the buildings a door closed.
Wren sat on the bench with the Brand burning faint on his palm and across the fire a woman who had seen this before was not looking at him anymore.
'Three weeks.' That was how long the last one lasted.
"What happened to him?" Wren said.
Mathild pulled the rope tight.
"Ask Ingrid."
[Soul Integrity: 99%]
[Active Talents: 1]
[Devours Declined: 2]