Adrian paced the dark room of his small stone refuge, turning a pale wooden ring between his fingers. He had taken it from her windowsill the night her laugh stopped him cold. Two letters were carved into the wood. He did not know her name, but he knew those initials, and he knew he loved her. The memory was fading. He could no longer picture the color of her eyes. He gripped the ring harder and stepped outside into the wet night. He returned to the spot beneath her window, where a stone figure crouched in the garden. He had stood here once for ten minutes, listening. Tonight the window was dark. The house was empty. A folded paper was nailed to the frame: SOLD. Adrian tore the paper down. She was gone, and he had waited too long. He slid the ring onto his smallest finger and began to walk. He would find her, or he would forget her trying.

Adrian walked until the sky began to gray. The ring on his finger felt heavier with every step. He needed names, deeds, a forwarding address — anything to find where she had gone. But the records sat behind tall white doors that opened only in daylight, and he could not cross that threshold without burning. He stopped beneath a low roof and whistled once. A black bird dropped from the eaves and landed on his wrist. He tied a small note to its leg with shaking fingers. "The sale paper. Her name. Anything," he whispered. The bird blinked its yellow eye and lifted into the pale air, gliding toward the gothic spires across the rooftops. Adrian spent the long day pressed inside a shuttered room, listening to his own pulse. He thought of her laugh and could not hear it anymore. He thought of her eyes and saw only gray. When dusk finally bled across the sky, he ran to the meeting spot behind the library wall, where a hired mortal had been told to leave whatever could be taken. The papers were there. A heap of them, weighted under a stone — deeds, ledger pages, a torn buyer's slip. Adrian dropped to his knees and read. A name. A town three days east. He pressed the slip against the ring and closed his eyes. He had her trail now. But three days east meant three nights of hunger on the road, and he had not fed in weeks.

Adrian folded the buyer's slip into his coat and started east. The road was long and the hunger was worse than the road. By the second night, his hands shook. He smelled every heartbeat through the trees. He told himself he could last. He told himself her face was enough to hold him steady. He came upon a stone arch at the edge of a sleeping village, where travelers paused to rest their feet. Past the arch, a market hall still glowed with low lanterns. A pale blonde boy stood at one of the stalls, counting coins into a baker's palm. Bread for someone waiting at home, maybe. The boy yawned and turned toward the arch, a small loaf tucked under one arm. Adrian meant to step aside. He meant to let the boy pass. But the boy walked under the arch and the smell of him broke something loose. Adrian moved before he could think. He caught the boy by the shoulders and pulled him into the shadow of the stones. The loaf fell. The boy's eyes went wide, then dim. Adrian drank, and drank, and could not stop until the small body in his arms was light as paper. He laid the boy down beneath the arch. The blonde hair stuck to a cold forehead. Adrian's mouth was wet and his hands were steady for the first time in weeks. He pressed the ring to his lips and felt nothing he could name. He had wanted to come to her clean. He stood up and walked east, faster now, carrying a new weight that no road would shake loose.