The road east of the Oasis stayed empty for two days, and Alistair walked it alone.

He had not done that in many months. The absence of the people he had grown used to walking beside felt strange, not quite loneliness, more like reaching for a weight no longer sitting on his shoulder.

He let himself sit with it for half a day, and then he stopped, because Tobian Marrow did not think about Sun Harvest, or about Due, or about any of them. Tobian Marrow was who he was now, and the sooner Alistair believed that himself, the sooner everyone else would.

The papers sat warm against his ribs, folded into the lining of his coat. Due had placed the seal on them himself, and it had not begun to fade.

By the documents, the third son of the Halversen Marrow line was on his way to Verissan to formalize his Caelmar residency, traveling through a checkpoint that processed minor nobles by the dozen and rarely looked at any of them twice.

The checkpoint came into view at midday.

It was a small stone building set on a wide road, with three guards standing about and one bored inspector seated at the lower window.

A wooden pole lay across the road, which the inspector raised and lowered by hand, since Caelmar had not yet bothered to mechanize a crossing this minor.

Alistair joined the short queue.

Two merchants stood ahead of him, along with a noblewoman shut inside a sedan chair, and a courier on horseback who had already been waved through before the rest of them arrived.

The courier carried a Caelmar seal that the inspector knew on sight, so there was nothing to check.

The queue moved slowly, and the inspector was in no hurry to change that. He had a cup of cold tea on the sill and a half-eaten piece of bread on his lap, and after ten years at the same window, he had no reason left to raise his attention for anyone.

Alistair was tense as the line crept forward, even as he kept his shoulders loose and his face plain.

When it was his turn, the inspector looked up at him the way a man looks at paper he already intends to wave through.

"Papers," said the inspector.

Alistair handed them over without a word.

The inspector read the first line, then the second, then glanced down at the seal. He looked at Alistair’s face, back at the name, then at the face once more.

The look was bored and well practiced, the look of a man who had passed a hundred minor Marrows through this season and expected to pass a hundred more.

"Halversen line," the inspector muttered, mostly to himself.

"That’s right," said Alistair.

"Long road for a third son. Your lot usually keeps closer to the family seat, last I knew of it."

Alistair gave a small shrug and kept his voice easy. "There’s nothing waiting for a third son at home. Verissan still has residency seats open, so I’d sooner be a small name there than no name at all."

Hearing this, the inspector grunted in something close to sympathy, as though he had been given the same answer a dozen times and never found any fault in it.

"Sensible enough," he said, and stamped the papers. He held them back out. "Welcome to Caelmar, young Marrow."

"Thank you," Alistair replied.

The pole came up, and Alistair walked through.

He kept walking until the checkpoint was three hundred paces behind him before he let out the breath he had not noticed he was holding.

’Tobian Marrow, in public, for the first time,’ he thought. ’In a country that has been waiting for me without ever knowing it.’

The road on the Caelmar side was wider than the one behind him. The stones were dressed, and even the drainage channels kept clear, and the trees along it had been cut back at regular intervals. Caelmar does that to its border roads as a quiet way of saying the road will always be here and will always look like Caelmar.

Alistair walked east for an hour. Then his scan caught something.

He kept his pace the same. He did not look up, and he did not break his stride. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

The Equalizer ran its slow correction beneath everything, miscalibrated as it always was now, and returned a reading from half a day ahead of him, on the same road, moving at a pace that never changed.

The signature was familiar.

Alistair had felt it only once before, very briefly, eight years ago, in a different country, on the morning of a hearing he had been ordered to attend.

The man had stood in the room for less than four minutes and had not once spoken to him directly.

Even so, in those four minutes, the man had looked at him the way you look at something you already know the inside of, and Alistair had not managed to shake that look in the eight years since.

He knew the name without needing to reach for it. Renvald Crane, the man the Upholders called the Wreath.

It was how they named all their senior operatives, with titles meant at first to make the man harder to strike at, and which had long since grown harder to escape than the names underneath them.

The Wreath did not interrogate.

He sat with a person for a single afternoon, and by the end of it, he knew everything that person had ever said aloud, including the things they had since worked very hard to forget.

And now the Wreath was on the road to Verissan, half a day ahead, moving with the unhurried pace of a man who knew exactly when he was meant to arrive and intended not to be early.

Alistair’s grip tightened on the strap of his pack, then he forced his fingers loose again.

’He is not here for me,’ Alistair told himself. ’He comes every spring for the residency season. He is in the city because he is always in the city.’

It was a thing he wanted very badly to believe. However, he could not quite make himself do it.

He slowed his pace, only slightly, by the small amount a man slows when his boot has rubbed a blister. He let the gap between himself and the reading on the road ahead grow a little wider.

By every paper folded against his ribs, Tobian Marrow had nothing to hide and no reason to lengthen any gap. Alistair lengthened it regardless, because he was the one doing the walking, and seven years under the Upholders had taught him never to match the stride of a man like Renvald Crane.

Alistair was, despite himself, unsettled.

He kept on until the sun dropped low. Eventually he stopped at a wayside lodging, paid for a small room he did not truly need, ate a bowl of soup he barely tasted, and lay down on the bed in his clothes without taking a single thing off.

The reading on the road carried on east through the evening without him.

By morning, it had already passed into Verissan.