The town arrived before he was ready for it.
One moment the road was empty on both sides, trees and scrub and the occasional collapsed stone wall half-reclaimed by weeds. Then the road widened slightly, and there were wheel ruts worn deep into the stone, and the trees pulled back, and he came around a long curve and there it was.
Not large. A main road running through the center of it, buildings on both sides, most of them timber-framed with the upper stories leaning out over the street in a way that made the gap between them narrow and dark. A few stone structures further in an inn, maybe, or a hall of some kind, with a covered entrance. Smoke from chimneys. The smell of animals and coal and something being cooked somewhere that his stomach responded to before he'd consciously registered it.
He stopped at the edge of it.
You need food, he thought. Water. You've been walking for hours.
He hadn't eaten since before the forest. He didn't know how long ago that was. Long enough that his hands had started to feel slightly separate from the rest of him, which he recognized as the early stage of something he needed to address.
You look like you killed someone, he thought.
He looked down at himself. Torn tunic, stiff with blood on the left side. The improvised wrap on his forearm, dirty and slightly stiff. Scrapes on his knuckles. Dried mud from the slope worked into the fabric of his trousers.
He looked like he'd spent a night in a forest being hunted, because he had.
There's nothing to do about it, he thought. Go in or don't.
He went in.
The street was not busy but it was not empty. A cart was being unloaded outside a low building on the left, two men working in silence passing crates between them. Further down, a woman with a basket was moving toward the far end of the street without looking at much. A dog sat outside the inn and tracked him with its eyes as he passed.
He kept his left arm slightly tucked not enough to look deliberate, he hoped, just enough to keep the wrapped forearm less visible. He kept his pace steady. He kept his face at what he hoped was neutral and not the specific expression of a person trying very hard to look like they were not hiding anything.
Stop thinking about your face, he thought.
He pushed through the door of the inn.
Inside: low ceiling, long tables, a fire at the far end that had burned down to coals. It was early enough that the room was nearly empty. A man behind the counter looked up when the door opened and did a brief, professional assessment of him that lasted about two seconds.
"Food," the man said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Sit anywhere. Pay first."
He reached for the inside of his jacket and found the small purse he kept there still there, which was something and counted out what the man asked for without trying to negotiate it, because he didn't have the energy and also because a person who argued about the price of a meal after walking in looking like this would be memorable, and he did not want to be memorable.
He sat at the end of one of the long tables, back to the wall, facing the door.
The food came without ceremony: bread, a bowl of something grey and thick that smelled like root vegetables and old fat, a cup of water. He ate slowly because eating fast would make him sick. He drank the water in three long swallows and a girl came and refilled it without being asked.
He kept his eyes on the door.
Two other people in the room an older man at the far table nursing something from a cup and not looking at anything, and a younger one in the corner eating with his head down. Neither of them paid him any particular attention.
Good, he thought. This is fine.
He ate. His hands felt more like his hands again by the third mouthful. The grey food was bad and he ate all of it.
The trouble started because of the cup.
He'd finished the water and set the cup down near the edge of the table, and when he reached across for the last of the bread he caught the cup with his elbow and it went off the edge. He caught it left hand, fast, snatching it out of the air before it hit the floor.
He set it back on the table.
Then he registered what had just happened.
His left arm. The one with the fractured forearm. The one he'd been keeping slightly tucked, slightly protected. He'd thrown it out sideways and caught a falling cup at speed without thinking, without pain, without the arm failing to do what he'd asked it to do.
He put both hands in his lap under the table.
When did that happen, he thought. Not panicked. Just the question arriving flat.
He'd been managing the arm all morning. Walking with it held slightly in, not swinging it fully, compensating. And somewhere between the road and this table it had finished whatever process it had been running, and he hadn't noticed, and now it was just a functional arm.
He pressed his thumb into the forearm through the wrap.
Tender. Still tender. But the tenderness was the normal tenderness of tissue that had been through something, not the deep wrongness of bone sitting where bone shouldn't sit.
It finished while I was walking, he thought. And didn't tell me.
He was becoming aware of a problem. Not a new problem the same problem from last night, the same problem he'd been turning over on the road for hours. But it was clearer now.
He didn't know what his body was doing at any given moment.
He'd been compensating for an arm that was already healed. He had a wrapped forearm and a bloodstained tunic and he'd walked into a settlement looking like the aftermath of something serious, and some portion of that damage was already gone, and he hadn't known.
You need to check, he thought. You need to actually know what condition you're in before you walk into places.
He filed that. He kept his hands in his lap and kept his face toward the door and finished the last of the bread.
The older man at the far table got up and left. The room was down to him and the one in the corner.
Then the man in the corner looked up.
Not at anything in particular. Just the general look-up of someone who'd finished eating and was deciding what to do next. His gaze moved across the room and reached the door and came back, and on the way back it stopped on him.
He didn't react. He kept his eyes on the door and kept his expression at neutral.
After a moment the man in the corner looked away.
Fine, he thought. That was nothing.
He stayed seated for another few minutes anyway.
He found the trough at the side of the inn by following the sound of water. A pipe from somewhere above was running a thin stream into a long stone basin, and he stood over it and unwrapped the forearm first.
The cut was a thin line, closed, already fading to the pale color of skin that was finishing the process of repairing itself. A few days old, it looked like. The cut was from this morning.
He washed the dried blood off his hands and his forearm and splashed water on his face and stood there dripping and thought about the shoulder.
He worked the collar of the tunic down and looked at it in the grey morning light.
The raised ridge of tissue he'd felt last night was flatter now. Smooth, almost. A slightly different texture than the surrounding skin, slightly lighter in color the kind of mark a wound left when it finished healing completely. Not the appearance of something that had happened last night.
The appearance of something that had happened weeks ago.
He stood with his collar pulled down and looked at the mark that should not look the way it looked, and he thought about the man in the corner who had looked at him and stopped.
He saw something, he thought. Or you're being paranoid.
He didn't know which one. He had no way to know.
He pulled his collar back up. He looked at the line of the healed cut on his forearm.
The problem wasn't only that his body was doing things without asking him.
The problem was that the evidence of it was visible. The shoulder should be a fresh wound. It wasn't. The forearm should have a cut on it from this morning. It was already closing. A person who looked at him closely a person who knew what injuries looked like and how long they took would find things that didn't add up.
So don't let people look at you closely, he thought.
That was one answer.
But it wasn't a complete answer, because he didn't know where the edges of this were. He'd tested this morning and found that surface damage didn't trigger it. But something had decided the cut on his forearm was worth closing anyway, on a slower timeline, without him asking. Something was running a continuous process and he had no access to the controls.
What does it look like from the outside, he thought. If someone watches you long enough.
He didn't know.
He needed to leave. He'd been at the trough for too long already.
He pulled his sleeve back down over the healed forearm and straightened up and looked at the back wall of the inn and thought about the man in the corner and the two seconds his gaze had stopped.
Probably nothing.
He left the trough and walked back toward the main street. The dog outside the inn was still there. It tracked him on the way in and it tracked him on the way out and when he was ten feet past it he heard it make a sound not a bark, not a growl. Something between the two, low and short, the sound a dog made when it didn't know what it was looking at.
He didn't stop walking.
He hit the main street and turned right, the direction the road continued, away from the way he'd come in.
Behind him the dog made the sound again.
He kept walking and didn't look back and thought: it's a dog. Dogs make sounds. That's nothing.
But he walked faster.
He was at the far edge of the settlement when he heard footsteps behind him.
He didn't stop. He kept his pace even and counted the footsteps and identified one person, the stride of someone moving with purpose but not running.
The man from the corner, he thought. Maybe. Could be anyone.
He turned his head slightly, not enough to make it obvious, and got a peripheral look.
The man from the corner.
He was looking at him. Not aggressive not the posture of someone who wanted a fight. Just watching. Tracking. The look of someone who had noticed something and was trying to figure out what it was.
He turned back to the road and kept walking.
Don't run, he thought. Running is an answer to a question he hasn't asked yet.
The footsteps followed him to the edge of town.
Then they stopped.
He didn't look back. He kept walking, the road stretching ahead of him, the buildings falling away on both sides, the trees coming back in to replace them.
He walked for five minutes before he let himself check over his shoulder.
The road behind him was empty.
He turned back to the front and kept walking and thought about the way the man had looked at him. Not fear. Not hostility. Just that specific quality of attention focused, working something out.
The quality of someone who had seen something that didn't fit and was deciding what to do about it.
You need to be more careful, he thought.
He didn't know what more careful looked like yet. He didn't know what he was being careful about, exactly what the visible signs were, which ones he could control, which ones he couldn't. He didn't have enough information.
He needed more information and the only way to get it was time, and the only way to have time was to not be somewhere where people were looking at him and noticing things.
He walked.
The road ran straight ahead of him and the clouds sat low and grey overhead and his shoulder didn't ache and his arm swung freely and everything about his body was calm and correct and running processes he hadn't authorized, and he thought: I don't know what I am yet.
And then, because it was the more honest version of the same thought:
I don't know what I'm going to be.