Mallow surfaced from a restless sleep. The morning had been creeping toward them for a while with pale light thinning the dark and birds testing their first notes. Yet his body stayed in that shallow place where sleep pretends its mercy and is mostly a trap. When his eyes opened, Tanel was sitting up, and Harka was crouched near the cold edge of the fire. Poe was on his side with the cord around his wrists.
By the time they put the last of the breakfast away, Mallow had already stopped trusting the direction of their feet. It was the way Poe kept choosing the easiest line through the land, the way he avoided certain dips and gullies as if he knew exactly where a man might be seen from a distance, the way he angled them toward higher ground even when it meant more strain on Mallow’s leg. A Tracker might have called it efficiency, but Mallow had his doubts.
The cord rode from Poe’s wrist to Mallow’s belt in a long, patient loop. It pulled now and then, a reminder with every step that the man in front of them wasn’t a guide by choice. Poe walked as if he’d been born to be watched, shoulders square, chin lifted, the back of his neck holding tension like a knot. Harka kept near him without crowding, black curls catching the light whenever the clouds broke, those faint freckles across his cheekbones making him look too young for what he was doing out here. Tanel followed behind, staff tapping a steady pace that kept him upright by sheer stubbornness.
They didn’t speak much. Walking ate the conversation. The wind came down from the Cloudspine and worried their clothes and hair, made even the pauses feel like something that had to be earned. Mallow let his eyes do the work instead, watching Poe’s head turns, the way his attention kept sliding eastward then correcting, then drifting again as if he were following a thread only he could see.
Midday light thinned into gray. The land ahead broke into a stretch of pale rock and stubborn grass, the kind of open ground that made Mallow feel exposed even when there was no one to be seen. The egg shifted against his ribs as he breathed, its presence steadying in a way he didn’t like thinking about too much. He adjusted the wrap and kept his hands close to it anyway, as if his fingers could guard it better than all the caution in the world.
The first sign of trouble was Harka. He paused, ears straight up, the left one turning this way and that.
Mallow stopped. The cord went taut and yanked Poe back half a step. Poe turned, irritation flaring up, ready to become speech. Mallow didn’t give him time. He lifted a hand, palm out, in a silent command that carried more threat than sound. Rhalir wasn’t here, but the memory of how force moved in a room had taught Mallow a few things.
Poe’s mouth closed.
Harka’s eye went to the horizon.
Tanel shifted his grip on the staff, following their focus. “What is it?” he asked.
“Metal,” Harka said. “I hear metal.”
Mallow stared toward the low rise ahead, where the rock gave way to a shallow trough and a line of stunted brush. He spied a glint of metal, catching the light through the brush. Then another, a fraction farther left.
Harka’s hand slid to the grip of his knife.
Poe made a sound behind his teeth in sudden hungry recognition. His gaze lifted, his body leaning toward that low rise as if being tugged by the throat.
Mallow moved. He didn’t have the speed of a healthy man, but he had the ugly strength he’d managed to develop while making up for what his leg couldn’t do. He lunged forward and yanked the cord hard, down and sideways, using Poe’s own forward lean against him. Poe stumbled, caught himself, and in an instant Harka was there, faster than a struck match, one hand clamped over Poe’s mouth and the other locking Poe’s wrist against his chest.
Poe tried to bite. Harka’s grip held anyway, fingers pressed firm across Poe’s lips and jaw, his forearm braced like a bar. Poe’s eyes went wide with outrage. He bucked, violent, trying to throw Harka off.
Mallow caught Poe by the collar and hauled him down into the brush with them, all moving at once, Mallow half-dragging, Harka half-carrying, Tanel following with a muttered curse. They hit the shallow trough hard, knees and hands in the dirt, bodies pressed down. The egg thumped against Mallow’s ribs and he hissed through his teeth, tightening his arm as if he could cushion it with muscle. It wasn’t delicate; truly it was hard as a rock, but he worried anyway.
Poe fought under Harka’s hand, silent and furious, trying to wrench his head away enough to force sound out. Harka’s face was set, pale with effort, freckles stark, his smaller ears angled back as he pinned Poe to the ground.
Tanel crouched beside him, eyes on the rise, then he sat down on Poe’s legs, holding his ankles together to stop him from kicking.
Mallow lifted his head just enough to see over the brush.
The Brighthand came into view in a staggered line, four men moving with the slow confidence of patrol. This was a search pace, methodical, scanning the ground and the brush and the sky. They were looking for something, or signs of something, though Mallow couldn’t say what. They complained about a long day and a worse road, until one of them laughed and said something that made another laugh harder, about “these goat-girls” and how some sister had “spoken plain.”
Poe jerked at the sound of it, delighted the way a dog is delighted when it hears a familiar whistle. He tried again, a desperate twist of his head toward the trail, and Harka clamped his hand tighter over his face. Poe’s eyes watered. The cord bit into his wrists.
Rhalir would have broken Poe for this, Mallow thought, and then hated himself for how quickly that idea arrived, dressed up as usefulness.
Poe strained under Harka’s hold. Mallow leaned in, mouth near Poe’s ear. “If you make one sound,” he said, “I’ll let Harka’s vote to kill you count for two.”
Harka didn’t look away from Poe’s eyes, as if confirming his willingness.
Poe made a jerky motion that might have been a laugh if he’d had the air for it.
Mallow fished in his pack with one hand, careful to keep his body low. He pulled out his health kit, found a strip of cloth and a ball of wax, not large enough to choke on but large enough for his purposes. He held it up for Harka to see.
They did it fast. Harka shifted his palm just long enough for mallow to shove the wax ball into Poe’s mouth the moment he tried to shout. A bleat escaped him – hardly a shout – and it was killed instantly by a mouthful of off-white wax. Mallow’s heart raced he wrapped the cloth around Poe’s mouth and jaw, knotting it behind Poe’s head. Poe tried to jerk away. Harka slammed him back into the dirt with blunt decisiveness.
The Brighthand on the rise stopped.
Mallow held his breath.
One of them – taller, carrying a spear instead of a sword – lifted a hand and signaled. The line paused. Heads turned. For a moment Mallow thought they’d heard Poe.
Then the man lowered his hand and they continued, drifting along the ridge without looking down into the trough. They moved past, boots crunching faintly on stone, mail giving the smallest metallic clink with each shift. Eventually their boots faded, their voices thinning into the wind. Mallow kept his hand where it was long after the last clink of mail had disappeared.
Only then did Mallow let his lungs fill.
He turned his head to look at Poe.
Poe’s eyes were bright with rage behind the gag, offended beyond sense. He thrashed once, more an argument than an attempt to escape. Harka’s forearm tightened across Poe’s chest and he froze again.
Mallow leaned back on one hand and stared at him. “You were about to call them,” he said softly.
Poe’s jaw worked under the cloth. Perhaps he was trying to eat the wax. His nostrils flared. His eyes cut toward the direction the patrol had gone, then back again, the expression unmistakable even without the words: yes.
Mallow eased his spear across his knee.
Only when the silence had gone deep again did Mallow ease the cloth away from Poe’s mouth, without untying it. Poe spit out the glob of wax and sucked air like he’d been drowning.
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“Are you finished?” Mallow asked softly.
Poe’s glare came quick, then faltered when it met the spear. Even wrapped and resting, it looked wrong.
“You were leading us straight to them,” Harka said, voice tight with shock he hadn’t yet learned to mask.
Poe spat blood-tinged saliva onto the ground – his lip had split somewhere in the struggle – and tried to recover some dignity. “They were Brighthand,” he hissed, as if that explained everything.
“And what do Brighthand do to runaway Elders and Kelthi, little Tracker?”
Poe’s eyes flashed. “You don’t understand –”
“Oh, I understand,” Mallow said, and leaned in just enough that Poe had to look at him properly. “You thought you could get away with leading us straight to a patrol. That was your plan all along, wasn’t it? Guide us to our deaths. You can’t be trusted. Harka was right.”
“No – no, you have to listen –”
“We have to dispose of you.”
Mallow shoved the chewed hunk of wax back into Poe’s mouth before he could say more, then tugged the gag around his face, and all the while Poe’s eyes glistened with a look of great injustice and fury and fear, and he struggled and kicked harder than ever.
Tanel spoke. “There were no Glinnel with them.”
Poe froze.
Tanel’s gaze stayed on him with the unblinking calm of a man who’d watched systems eat children like Poe. “He can’t track Brighthand,” Tanel continued. “Trackers are only given Glinnel blood.”
Poe nodded furiously.
Tanel met Mallow’s eye. “He wasn’t leading us to them, Mallow.”
Poe lay very still under Harka’s arm, the cord biting his wrists, his eyes flicking toward the ridge as if he could still hear the Brighthand through the wind if he just listened hard enough. When Mallow loosened the cloth a finger width so Poe could breath, Poe did not waste the mercy on gratitude. He dragged air through his nose and glared at all three of them. His mouth moved behind the strip of cloth, jaw working around the chewed wax, his expression so offended it could have been comical in a different life.
Mallow kept his gaze on the ridge. He had the egg pressed against his ribs beneath the wrap, its weight a private insistence. Somewhere in the dark part of him that kept score, he noted how quickly Poe had been willing to shout for help that would have become a noose the moment it tightened.
They stayed in the trough longer than any of them liked. Mallow counted the silence until it felt deep enough that a shout would have to travel too far to matter, and even then he made himself wait, because the world had trained him into caution the same way it trained river stones into smoothness.
“I’ll take your gag out,” Mallow offered. “But you’ll keep your mouth shut if you do.”
Poe glared at him, then gave one quick nod.
Mallow tugged the cloth free. “You saw mail and forgot you were supposed to be clever,” he mused.
Poe’s eyes snapped to him. “You saw mail and decided to crawl around in the dirt with an egg like a lunatic. We all have our ways.”
Harka’s hand tightened on Poe’s arm and Poe shut his mouth.
When they finally moved, it was in pieces: first Harka, checking the line above them with the quick grace of someone with better senses than the others; then Tanel with his staff, and then Mallow last, dragging Poe along by the cord like a reluctant dog on a leash.
Poe made a show of stumbling as soon as they climbed out, trying to pull Mallow off balance. But Mallow had been spending so many days compensation that he let Poe’s tug take his belt a hand’s breadth, then shifted his stance, planted his good foot, and tugged back with a short jerk that toppled Poe to his knees.
“Keep doing that,” Mallow said, “and you’ll arrive at your destination with more bruises than skin.”
Tanel exhaled, long-suffering. “We’re burning time.”
They took the lower lines after that, keeping to the scraggy folds of land where brush gathered and stone broke sightlines. The sky had been threatening since morning, a gray ceiling that pressed down and made the world feel narrower than it was. Mallow watched the edge of it while they walked, the way the air changed when a storm began to form. He’d grown up with weather that had rules, weather that you could predict if you paid attention. This felt like something else. It came with the wrong timing, the wrong urgency, the wrong speed.
He noticed it first as damp on his tongue.
Then he noticed Harka’s breath, a little faster, the way his ears angled forward and held there. Harka glanced at Mallow, a brief look that asked without asking. Mallow gave him a slight nod. He felt it too.
Poe did, as well. He lifted his head, sniffed, and his expression changed in a way Mallow had not seen on him yet, interest sliding in over the contempt. “Fog,” Poe said, almost pleased.
“Quiet,” Harka replied.
“I’m only naming the weather,” Poe returned.
They rounded a bend of stone and the world opened into a stretch of pale ground. Grass clung low, and rock showed through like bone. It was the sort of place where a patrol didn’t even have to look for them in order to find them. Mallow tensed, shoulders drawing in, the egg secure at his chest, his spear held close along his thigh.
The fog spilled over the ridge in a slow sheets, then thickened, turning the distance into a blank wall that moved toward them with quiet determination. It caught the stunted brush and threaded through it, swallowing the far rocks. It made the world small enough that Mallow could no longer see the next turn in the ground.
He had seen fog before; everyone had. This one had an intention to it that made his skin prickle.
Poe paused, startled. He turned his head, trying to map the direction of it. “That’s fast,” he said, and there was a thin edge under the remark, a dislike of being surprised.
Tanel stopped beside them. His eyes went to the ridge, then to the lower line they’d been taking, then back again, taking stock of what was left to see before it vanished. “We should move,” he said.
Mallow’s scales ached under his shirt in answer. It began as a warmth across his ribs, the same sensation he got when the egg responded to him in the night, the same unwanted reminder that his body had been altered into an instrument. The ache brightened, then spread.
Poe’s gaze cut to Mallow’s throat, then back up, suspicion sharpening into something closer to alarm.
“You’re glowing,” Poe said.
Mallow kept walking. “All the better to guide you with, I suppose,” he replied, and hated the attempt at humor because he knew that was exactly the Underserpent’s intent.
The fog reached them fully and the sound went strange. Their own steps grew close. Mallow could taste salt he hadn’t tasted moments before, as if the sea had leaned in to watch them.
He lifted a hand, palm out, and the others halted. Tanel leaned forward slightly, trying to see through the white that refused to be seen through.
Voices drifted somewhere above them.
It was hard to tell if they were far or close; fog made distance a liar. Mallow heard the scrape of boot on stone, then the clink of mail, a laugh that fell apart halfway through into a complaint. There was a patrol moving along the ridge that had been visible only minutes before.
Poe’s eyes widened. His chest rose with a breath that wanted to be a shout.
Harka clamped his hand over Poe’s mouth and hauled him down, forcing him to crouch. Poe jerked under the grip, a spasm of outrage, then went still when Harka’s fingers tightened and his eyes said, without any softness at all, that if he shouted he died.
Mallow lowered his body in the thin grass. There was no hollow to drag them into this time. The land had given them nothing. The fog had given them everything.
Mallow listened hard, trying to tell from sound alone whether the patrol had seen their shapes, whether they were pausing. He heard the clink of mail and the shifting of bodies. He heard one man swear about damp. He heard another complain about being sent north for nothing. Then the voices drifted sideways, then away, dissolving into the white.
The fog held around them, thickest where they crouched, thinner above, as if it had draped itself between the ridge and the ground intentionally.
When Mallow finally let himself breathe again, his lungs burned as if he’d been running.
Harka’s hand remained over Poe’s mouth long after the last voice faded. Poe’s eyes were wet with fury or fear; Mallow couldn’t tell which, and maybe it was both. When Harka lifted his hand at last, Poe said nothing.
“You were going to get all of us killed,” Harka replied, and his voice did something unexpected; it softened at the end. “You don’t like being powerless. Neither do I. We can discuss it later.”
Poe stared at him, unsure what to make of that.
Mallow took in Poe’s face in the fog. He’d been trained to be feared. He’d been trained to be useful. But he hadn’t been trained for a situation where the ground and weather might choose sides.
“Move,” Mallow said. “Stay low.”
They slipped through the white like thieves. Mallow couldn’t see more than a few paces ahead, which should have been terrifying, and yet the fog kept giving them what they needed: concealment when the ridge threatened sight, silence when the wind might have carried sound. The egg seemed to shift against his ribs as if the little weight were rebalancing itself, and the ache in his scales eased in strange satisfaction.
Poe’s eyes flicked to Mallow’s exposed scales again, then away, then back again as if he couldn't help himself. Wonder fought with calculation in his eyes, and for a moment, the calculation lost.
“What is it,” Poe said finally, voice low, almost resentful. “The thing you’re carrying. What does it want with you?”
Mallow didn’t answer. He didn’t have an answer he trusted. He only tightened his arm around the egg and kept walking, letting the fog take them onward while the world above the ridge moved past without ever truly seeing them.
