THE HEIR OF THE FORGOTTEN GOD

CHAPTER 4: The Road North

By nightfall his feet hurt.

Not the manageable ache of a long day in the stables — this was deeper, concentrated in the balls of his feet and the back of his left heel where his boot had worn thin two months ago and he hadn't had the coins to fix it. The road north was unpaved past the first mile marker, compacted dirt that had hardened with the cold into something that hit back when you walked on it long enough.

He'd covered maybe eight miles. He wasn't sure. The light was going fast, the way it did in late autumn when dusk arrived without much warning and the temperature dropped ten degrees in the space of an hour. He needed shelter. Not a comfort — a necessity. The fields on either side of the road were harvested bare, offering nothing, and the treeline to the east was too far to reach before full dark.

He found what he was looking for about a quarter mile further on. A waystation — one of the small stone structures the crown maintained along major roads for travelers caught between towns, technically open to anyone, in practice used mostly by people who couldn't afford the inns. It was single-roomed, barely larger than the tack room he'd changed in that afternoon, with a firepit in the center and a chimney hole above it and three wooden pallets along the walls that served as beds. Two of them were occupied.

Cassian stood in the doorway for a moment, taking stock.

The first occupant was an old woman wrapped in so many layers she was more bundle than person, already asleep and snoring with impressive commitment. The second was a man sitting up against the wall with his knees pulled to his chest and a short blade resting openly across them — not threatening exactly, just visible. Making a point. He was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, broad across the shoulders, with a jaw that had been broken at some point and reset slightly wrong. He had the look of someone who had spent a long time sleeping in places like this and had formed opinions about strangers in doorways.

"Closing the door would be appreciated," the man said. "Either way."

Cassian came in and closed the door behind him.

He chose the pallet furthest from the man with the knife, which was also furthest from the fire, because the fire was closer to the knife than he wanted to be. He sat down, pulled off his left boot and pressed his thumb into the worn patch on the heel, and accepted that it was going to get worse before it got better.

"You're not dressed for the road," the man said.

Cassian looked up. "No."

"House staff. From the estate south of here, if I had to guess. Drost's place." He said it the way people stated obvious things, not to show off but because pretending not to notice seemed like more effort. "You've got stable work on your boots and you're heading north on foot with no pack."

"Observant."

"Bored." The man shifted against the wall. The blade didn't move. "Aldric Mourne. Former King's Guard, before you ask, though the 'former' is doing significant work in that sentence."

Cassian looked at him for a moment. The name meant nothing to him. The King's Guard reference could be true or it could be the kind of claim men made in waystations when they wanted to establish that they were worth being careful around. Either way, volunteering a name felt like an invitation to reciprocate, and he wasn't sure yet whether that was a good idea.

"Cassian," he said. Just the one word.

"Running from something or toward something?" Aldric asked.

"Does it matter?"

"Makes conversation easier." He reached into the pack beside him and produced a strip of dried meat, tore it in half without ceremony, and tossed the smaller piece across the gap between them. It landed on the pallet beside Cassian's knee. "You look like you haven't eaten properly today."

Cassian looked at the dried meat, then at Aldric. "Why?"

"Because I've got enough and you clearly don't. Don't make it complicated."

He ate it. It was tough and over-salted and tasted better than anything he'd had in months, which said something about the quality of servant rations at the Drost estate.

They sat in silence for a while. The fire was low — someone had fed it recently but not generously. The old woman snored on. Outside, the wind had picked up, pushing against the waystation walls with a low sustained pressure that made the structure sound like it was thinking about its life choices.

"You're the one from the estate," Aldric said eventually. Not a question this time.

Cassian went still. "What do you mean."

"There were two men on the road today, asking questions at the inn in Calvert's Ford. I passed through about four hours ago." He was looking at the fire, not at Cassian. "Grey cloaks. No insignia. Asking about a young man who'd left the Drost estate on foot, heading north. Offering coin for information."

The second pulse in Cassian's palm ticked steadily on.

"What did you tell the inn?" Cassian asked.

"I wasn't at the inn when they were asking." A pause. "I left the inn specifically because men in grey cloaks asking questions for coin are the kind of company I've learned to avoid. Personal policy." He finally looked at Cassian directly. Something moved behind his eyes — calculation, or something adjacent to it. "You've got something they want."

It wasn't a question either.

"I don't know what I have," Cassian said. Which was true enough.

Aldric studied him for a long moment. The firelight made the wrongness of his jaw more visible from this angle — the slight asymmetry of it, the healed thickness along the bone. Whatever had broken it hadn't been an accident.

"Get some sleep," he said finally, looking back at the fire. "Men in grey cloaks don't travel at night on unfamiliar roads. You've got until dawn."

"And after dawn?"

Aldric pulled his cloak tighter and closed his eyes. "After dawn you're going to need to move faster than you did today. That heel's not going to help."

Cassian looked down at his boot, still in his hand. He hadn't mentioned the heel.

He put the boot back on, lay down on the pallet, and stared at the ceiling of the waystation while the fire burned lower and Aldric's breathing steadied into something that might have been sleep. He curled his marked hand against his chest the same way he had the night before, feeling that second rhythm tick along underneath his own.

Outside, the wind pushed against the walls. The old woman snored.

He was eight miles from the estate, fourteen copper coins poorer than he'd been yesterday, and a man who'd just told him he had until dawn had somehow noticed the exact state of his left boot without being told.

Sleep didn't come easily. But eventually, it came.

And when it did, he dreamed of a room that had no ceiling, and a fire that burned without fuel, and a voice that said his name in a language he had never learned but understood completely.