THE HEIR OF THE FORGOTTEN GOD

CHAPTER 5: Calvert's Ford

He woke to the sound of Aldric already moving.

Not panicked movement — quiet, practiced, the kind that came from years of waking in places where noise was a liability. The fire had burned down to grey ash and the waystation was cold enough that Cassian's breath showed when he sat up. The old woman was gone. He hadn't heard her leave.

"They're early," Aldric said, without turning around. He was at the door, looking through the gap between the frame and the hinge side, where the wood had warped slightly away from the wall. "Two horses. Coming from the south."

Cassian was on his feet before the sentence finished. "How far?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe eight."

He pulled his boot on, wincing at the heel, and crossed to the door. Through the gap he could see the road — pale grey in the early light, frost on the verge either side, and in the distance two riders moving at a pace that was not leisurely. He couldn't make out the cloaks from here but he didn't need to.

"Back door?" he asked.

"No back door."

"Window?"

"Too small." Aldric stepped away from the door and picked up his pack with the efficiency of someone who had run this particular calculation before and already knew the answer. "We go out the front and east into the treeline. The frost will show our tracks but there's nothing to be done about that. Move."

Cassian noted the we and didn't comment on it. There wasn't time.

They went out the front door and immediately left the road, cutting across the frozen verge toward the treeline. The grass crunched under every step, impossibly loud in the pre-dawn quiet, and the cold hit the back of his throat like swallowing metal. He kept pace with Aldric, who moved faster than his size suggested he should, and didn't look back until they reached the first trees.

He looked back then.

The riders were closer than eight minutes. They were closer than five. They had seen the waystation and were angling toward it, and one of them — even at this distance — had his head turned toward the treeline in a way that suggested he was looking at exactly the right place.

"They know," Cassian said.

"They suspected," Aldric said. "Keep moving."

The trees were pine, dense enough to kill the wind but dark enough that the early light barely penetrated. They moved parallel to the road, heading north, with the sounds of the horses audible for a while and then not. Cassian's heel was bleeding inside his boot. He could feel it — the specific warm wetness of broken skin — but stopping wasn't an option so he catalogued it and kept going.

After twenty minutes Aldric slowed and held up a hand and they both stood still and listened. Nothing. Just trees and wind and a bird somewhere above them registering its displeasure at being disturbed.

"Calvert's Ford is two miles northeast," Aldric said. He wasn't breathing hard. Cassian was, slightly, and resented it. "Market day. Enough people that two more won't stand out."

"And after Calvert's Ford?"

"That depends on several things." Aldric looked at him sideways. "One of which is whether you're going to tell me what you actually are. Because those men back there aren't bounty hunters looking for a runaway servant. The way they ride, the way they move — that's trained. Church-trained, if I had to put coin on it."

Cassian kept walking. The trees thinned slightly ahead. "What makes you say Church?"

"Grey cloaks with no insignia are the Conclave's field agents. The Church uses House colors. The nobility uses House colors. Only the Conclave goes unmarked, because the Conclave officially doesn't exist." He said it matter-of-factly, the way you stated things you'd learned the hard way. "I ran into their work once before. Three years ago, in Dunvaris. Didn't enjoy it."

Cassian absorbed this. "What were they doing in Dunvaris?"

"Erasing someone." A flat pause. "Thoroughly."

The trees gave way to a narrow track that wound northeast through scrubland, frost-pale and empty. They took it without discussing it, because it was there and heading the right direction and the road was now somewhere behind them with two Conclave agents on it.

"There was a room," Cassian said. He wasn't sure why he was saying it. Maybe because the alternative was saying nothing to the man who'd just helped him run, and that felt worse. "In the estate. Hidden. Very old — older than the building. I found it by accident and I touched something I shouldn't have."

Aldric walked on for a moment without responding. "What kind of something?"

"An inscription in the floor. It glowed when I touched it." He kept his voice level. "There was a voice. And when I woke up the next morning there was a mark on my palm."

He held out his left hand as he walked, palm upward. In the morning light it was fully visible for the first time — a branching line following the crease of his lifeline before splitting toward each finger in a pattern that was geometric and deliberate and clearly not a wound.

Aldric looked at it for a long moment without breaking stride. His expression didn't change, exactly, but something behind it did.

"How much do you know about the Divine War?" he asked.

"What everyone knows. The Seven Gods defeated a great darkness a thousand years ago. The Church was founded to preserve the peace. History begins there." He paused. "I'm assuming that's not the whole story."

"It's about as accurate as most official histories." Aldric's jaw tightened slightly. "Which is to say it contains several true facts arranged to obscure everything that actually matters."

They came over a low rise and Calvert's Ford appeared below them — a market town straddling a shallow river crossing, smoke already rising from a dozen chimneys, and the sound of the weekly market starting to fill the main street with the particular noise of people haggling over livestock and root vegetables at an hour most people considered unreasonable.

Aldric stopped at the top of the rise and looked at Cassian directly. In the daylight he looked less threatening than he had in the waystation, which Cassian didn't entirely trust.

"That mark," Aldric said. "I've seen drawings of it. Old drawings, in a text I had no business reading, in a library I had no business being in. Do you know what it is?"

"I have a guess," Cassian said. "I don't like it."

"Your guess is probably right." Aldric turned back toward the town. "Come on. We need boots for that heel before you bleed through the leather, and I need to think, and both of those things require Calvert's Ford." He started down the slope. "Don't use your real name in town."

"Is yours real?" Cassian asked.

A short pause. "Mostly."

They went down into the town together, two more travelers arriving for market day, unremarkable in every way that could be seen. Below them the river crossing glittered in the early light, and somewhere on the road south two Conclave agents were standing in a waystation looking at three empty pallets and deciding what to do next.

Cassian curled his marked hand into a fist at his side and kept walking.

Whatever Aldric had seen in that text — whatever those old drawings had shown — the man hadn't run. Hadn't put distance between them. Had instead said *come on* and started down the hill like the answer to the problem was somewhere in a market town and they just needed to go find it.

That meant something. Cassian didn't know yet if it meant something good.

But he was short on options, and the heel was getting worse, and the pulse in his palm ticked on regardless.

He followed.