Thorbran knelt in wet leaves and found nothing he could name. Three days back the sorcerer's path had been clear: a village where brothers sharpened knives for each other, a well no one would drink from, a mother who would not look at her own son. Now the forest gave him only moss and old rain. He pressed two fingers to the dirt and felt for the wrongness he had learned to feel, the small sour pull in the chest. It was there, but faint, smeared, like a scent carried sideways by wind. His father's first bead clicked against the second as he lowered his head. Three winters dead, and still he heard the old man: a cold trail is a question, not a wall. Thorbran rose. The katana and the shorter blade rode quiet at his hip. He had crossed half a country to kill a man whose name he did not know, for reasons that man had not bothered to share, and now the country itself had stopped speaking to him. He walked until the trees thinned and found the shelter he had been told to seek. It was a small thing, pelts stitched over bent poles, painted with a Norse rune of warding and beside it a mark from the east that he had last seen on his master's sleeve. Seeing the two signs together loosened something in his chest. He stepped inside. The shelter was empty of people. A fire pit held warm ash. On a flat stone sat a strip of dried meat, a clay cup of water, and a black feather pinned under a pebble. Thorbran ate the meat. He drank the water. He waited, because waiting was a cut he had practiced as often as any other. The raven came at dusk and landed on the cup. One eye burned white, the other was a wet black bead. It tilted its head and spoke in a voice like dry leather. "You are reading the ground," it said. "He writes on people." Thorbran did not reach for a blade. He asked what that meant. The raven hopped to his wrist, light as a folded cloak. "Three villages east, a man has begun to hate his wife for no reason he can say. Four days north, a priest has stopped sleeping. The trail is warm where men are. Follow the sickness, not the soil." Thorbran turned the words over and found them true the way a whetstone finds an edge. He asked the raven its price. "Carry me," it said. "I want to see how it ends." Thorbran opened his cloak. The raven climbed to his shoulder and settled there as if it had always meant to. He stepped out of the shelter with a heading he could finally walk, and a companion he had not asked for, and the trail, for the first time in days, was no longer cold.

Thorbran broke camp at first light. He rolled the pelts, kicked dirt over the ash, and shouldered his pack. The raven rode his shoulder, its white eye half-lidded against the cold. They walked a rutted road that wound between low hills. He felt the sour pull in his chest grow stronger with every mile, a sign the raven's instruction was true. Sickness lay ahead of him, and somewhere past it, a village. He smelled the goats before he saw them. A crooked pen leaned beside the road, fence rails split, gate hanging open. Inside, a dozen animals stood in their own filth. Their coats hung in patches. One looked at him with yellow eyes and did not bleat. No farmer came out of the small house behind the pen. The door was open. Thorbran did not go in. People had lived here a week ago, fed these animals, kept the gate shut. Now they were somewhere down the road, walking with whatever the sorcerer had put in them. He fixed the picture in his mind before he moved on. The raven stiffened. It lifted from his shoulder, flew ahead, and landed on the high branch of a bare tree alone in a field. From the branch hung an old rope, frayed, swinging in no wind. The raven cawed once and looked back at him. Thorbran understood. They were close, and they were coming. He stepped off the road into the grass and crouched. He heard them then: footsteps, many, uneven. A child's voice, laughing wrong. He drew the short blade only. He left the katana sheathed. He pulled a strip of cloth from his pack and tied it across his off-hand knuckles. Flat of the blade, he told himself. Pommel. Elbow. Knee. His master had made him repeat one cut ten thousand times so that on a day like this he could choose not to use it. These were not enemies. They were the wound. She came through the grass before the others. A young woman, barefoot, hair loose, a ribbon trailing from one braid. She held a sickle. Her eyes were wet and empty at once. He stepped aside from her first swing and struck her wrist with the flat. The sickle fell. She came at him with her hands, with her teeth. He turned her, pinned her, waited for her to tire. She did not tire. She bit through the cloth on his hand. She drove her thumb toward his eye. He saw, in the half second left to him, that she would kill him and not know she had. He drove the short blade up under her ribs. She sagged against him. He held her until she was still. The others had not yet crested the rise. Thorbran knelt and untied the ribbon from her hair. It was red going to purple in the light. He folded it once and put it inside his tunic, against his skin. Then he picked up her sickle, threw it into the grass, and ran.