SHADOWS OF LEGACY, THE CLOVER MAGE'S RECKONING.

Chapter 23:

They peeled off from the column forty minutes before the second checkpoint.

Thorne had timed it carefully ... watching the column's rhythm, identifying the natural gaps in the flow where a group moving away from the road would attract the least attention.

The forest here was thick enough that once you were twenty feet into the treeline, you were invisible from the road. The challenge was the twenty feet.

He needn't have worried about it. The column was too focused on its own concerns to pay attention to seven people stepping sideways into the trees.

Enna got her group moving without being told twice. She was good in forest terrain ... better than several adults Thorne had known, moving with a natural quietness that came either from practice or from temperament. 

The younger children were less sure, but they followed her lead with the trust of people who had learned that Enna's lead was worth following.

Breck had the smallest child ... Sera ... slung against his chest, the little girl's arms wrapped around his neck with the total, uncomplicated trust of a five-year-old who had decided that this large, somewhat battered soldier was safe and had accordingly made herself completely at home on him.

She'd fallen asleep within ten minutes, her weight distributed across his chest, her soft breathing audible in the quiet forest.

Thorne watched Breck's face while this happened.

The soldier had the expression of a man who had not been around small children in some time and had forgotten what it felt like, and was now rediscovering it under circumstances that made it hit harder than it would have in a normal context.

His jaw was tight. He kept his eyes on the terrain.

Thorne filed that away and kept moving.

The forest route was harder than the road, as Sablen had promised. 

The ground was uneven ... old root systems, hidden rocks, the kind of terrain that was fine for two adults moving carefully but required constant attention with children in tow.

Sablen moved at the front, reading the ground several strides ahead, occasionally raising a hand to signal a change in direction or a hazard to step around.

Thorne moved at the rear, watching the full group's pace and the forest behind them in equal measure.

He'd been right about the ankle. The boy ... whose name turned out to be Dav, eleven years old, with a gap between his front teeth and a serious expression that cracked occasionally into something younger ... had started compensating more visibly about thirty minutes in. Thorne moved up beside him without announcement, assessed the situation, and crouched.

"Get on," he said.

Dav looked at him. "I can walk."

"You're walking on the outside of your foot. You've been doing it for twenty minutes." 

Thorne kept his voice neutral. "Get on. We'll make better time."

Dav seemed to weigh his pride against the pragmatism of the situation. The pragmatism won, which Thorne respected. 

The boy climbed onto his back with less grace than Sera had shown but equal determination, and Thorne straightened with Dav's weight balanced across his shoulders and kept walking.

His chest protested. The burns and the residual damage from two days ago expressed themselves in a long, sustained complaint that he acknowledged and moved past.

His back protested. He acknowledged that too.

He kept walking all the way down.

Sablen glanced back at him. He caught the look ... brief, evaluating, not quite the professional assessment she'd been giving everything else.

This was something slightly different. He didn't have time to determine what it was before she turned forward again and 

continued reading the terrain. They walked.

The forest was different from the forest near the cave ... older, with more undergrowth, the trees standing closer together and their canopies blocking most of the sky.

Sound is carried differently here. The ambient noise of the road ... voices, footsteps, the creak of carts ... faded and disappeared within the first fifteen minutes, replaced by the sounds of the forest itself. Wind in the high branches. 

Birds that had gone quiet at their approach and were slowly, cautiously resuming. The distant sound of water.

Enna walked beside Thorne for a stretch, matching his pace. She'd been watching everything ... the forest, Sablen's route-reading, the way Thorne moved ... with those assessing eyes, filing it all away.

"Where are you going?" she asked. Not demanding. Genuinely curious.

"West," Thorne said.

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

She seemed to accept this with more equanimity than most adults would have.

"I'm going west too. I have an aunt in a town called Mirren. I've never been there but I have an address ... my mother gave it to me two years ago, in case of something like this." 

She said the last phrase with a flat matter-of-factness that made in case of something like this sound like routine contingency planning rather than a mother preparing her daughter for the possibility of catastrophe.

"Mirren is south of the capital," Thorne said. "It's a good destination. The city's large enough to absorb arrivals without too much notice."

"Are you from Valeria?" she asked.

A pause. "Yes."

"From the capital?"

He thought about how to answer that. "From near it," he said.

She nodded. Then: "The man at the back. The one with Sera. He's a soldier."

"Was," Thorne said.

"Was," she repeated. "He has the look of someone who lost people recently. A lot of people."

Thorne looked at her. "Yes," he said. "He does."

Enna was quiet for a moment, watching the ground ahead with that expression of hers that was always doing several things at once. 

"My father had that look sometimes. After border skirmishes. He said the trick was not to stop moving.”

“As long as you're moving, your body doesn't have time to tell your mind what happened."

"Your father was right," Thorne said.

Something crossed her face ... quick and private and then gone almost immediately.

“Seriously, your father was right.” Thorne immediately said again.