Chương 21: Split Paths

The morning market in the Outer City was loud again. Team Zero moved through it with the efficiency of people working from a list, which they were. Miho had drawn one up the previous evening, dividing necessities by category and then by pair, with the kind of organizational precision that Zero suspected came from years of preparing for journeys with far less margin for error than this one offered. Clothing came first.

The merchant who sold them traveling cloaks, lined and weather-treated, eyed Zero's pale, unusual features for slightly longer than was polite before deciding, visibly, that the coin in his hand mattered more than his curiosity. Viria haggled the price down with the cheerful relentlessness of someone who enjoyed the process more than the savings, while Miho stood slightly apart, arms crossed, radiating the patience of someone who had delegated this task to her on purpose. Food and water followed.

They took the form of dense, nutrient-rich traveling rations and sealed water skins, purchased from a nearby stall with considerably less negotiation.

"Word really does travel," Viria said, accepting the discount with visible surprise.

"You're famous," Yukito said.

"I could get used to that."

"Don't," said Miho, flatly.

"We're leaving today." Information came last, purchased not with coin, but with the residual goodwill the city now held for them.

A retired caravan guide, found through Fen's son and his network of acquaintances, sat with them for the better part of an hour, helping them fill in details that the journal's map had only sketched: which stretches of the northern road held bandit activity, which river crossings ran high this time of year, what Seol-Ainu was like as a settlement, and what its people tended to be wary of.

"Outsiders, mostly," the guide had said.

"It's a small place. Cold most of the year, colder higher up. They don't get many visitors who aren't already cultivators with business in the mountains."

"We have business in the mountains," Miho had replied. The guide looked at her for a long moment, but did not ask further.

By the afternoon, the preparations were complete, and the four of them stood at the western edge of the Outer City, where the road split: one branch continuing north toward the iron mines and, beyond them, the high pass and Seol-Ainu; the other curving west, toward the river crossing and the open country where the journal had marked the boar's territory.

"We should be split for five days," Miho said.

"Maybe six, depending on the horse. If either pair finishes early, wait at Seol-Ainu rather than pushing ahead alone."

"Understood," Zero said. Viria looked at the western road, then at Zero, with an expression that was trying, not entirely successfully, to be casual.

"Don't let him do anything stupid," she said to Yukito.

"I make no promises," Yukito said.

"That's not reassuring." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Yukito smiled instead of responding. Miho's tail flicked, the closest thing to a laugh she allowed herself in public. She looked at Zero last, and her expression did something complicated and brief that he did not have time to fully read before she turned and started down the northern road. Using the particular quick stride she used when she had decided a conversation was finished.

Viria lingered a moment longer.

"Be careful," she said, to both of them, though her eyes had settled on Zero specifically.

"We will," Zero said, confused as to the deliberate attention placed on him.

"I mean it."

"I know." She looked like she might say something else, then apparently decided against it, and jogged to catch up with Miho instead, throwing one last glance back over her shoulder before the road's curve took her out of sight. Zero and Yukito stood at the fork for a moment longer.

"West, then," Yukito said after a moment. They started walking.

The road west ran through open country, low hills covered in pale grass that bent and rippled with every pass of wind, the Cloud Sea visible as a distant white line along the southern horizon when the terrain rose high enough to show it. The journal's map placed the boar's territory two days out, along a stretch where the road crossed a wide, slow river before continuing toward villages further west.

They walked in the comfortable silence that had become familiar to both of them, the kind that did not require filling. After an hour, Yukito broke the silence, "You were quiet in the library."

"I was reading."" After that. When the journal ended." Zero considered this. He had not realized the silence had been noticeable from the outside; he had assumed it was contained, the way most of his internal processing had once been, back when containment was a skill rather than a habit he was actively trying to unlearn.

"The author did not finish," he said.

"He spent eleven years on something, and the last page is blank. I don't know what happened to him."

"You're thinking about whether that could happen to us?" Yukito inferred.

"No." Zero turned this over as he said it, and found it was true.

"I was thinking about him specifically, as a person who wanted something for eleven years and ran out of time before he got it." Yukito was quiet for a few steps.

"That's different from how you used to think about things."

"I know."

"Is it… strange?" Zero thought about the question seriously, the way he thought about most questions Yukito asked, because they tended to have real weight under them even when the words were simple.

"No," he said.

"The opposite, actually. Like… thinking about something the obvious way for the first time." They walked another stretch in silence, the grass hissing softly against itself in the wind, the road unspooling ahead of them toward a river they had not yet seen. Yukito spoke up after a while.

"Do you think the boar will be more like the Abaasy? Or like the monkeys?" Zero ran through what little the journal had offered. Mire-Tusk Blood Boar, the margin notes had called it, with a brief, hurried sketch beside the name that suggested heavy tusks and a low, dense build. The journal's author had not elaborated, beyond a single underlined word: aggressive.

"I don't know yet," Zero said.

"We'll learn when we find it."

"That's not very reassuring."

"It was not intended to be interpreted that way." Yukito made a small sound that was not quite a laugh, in the same register he had used since the early days in the sect, when amusement was still something he allowed himself only in careful doses.

"Fair enough," he said. As the road continued west, the grass continued bending in the wind, and somewhere ahead of them, unseen, something with heavy tusks and a temperament the journal had thought worth underlining was waiting in territory it had claimed for itself a very long time before either of them had been born. They kept walking.