The young guard looks at me with what I think might be relief — another outsider in the general chaos, someone to share the bewilderment with — and I offer him a brief, sympathetic look and he gives me a weak smile back.
Then Drogath steps up onto the flat rock he uses as a speaking platform and the crowd settles by degrees, the way a fire settles when you stop adding to it.
He is, as always, extremely committed.
"The Long-Ear Bringer," he announces, with the gravity of a man delivering difficult news, "has seeded this territory with tokens ofprosperity." He pauses. Lets it land. "To find them isto receive the blessing of the great renewal — tomissthem is to invite stagnation into your household for the full turn of the season."
Ursik leans down, near enough that I can feel the warmth of him through my coat.
"He made that last part up," he says quietly.
"All of it or just the stagnation bit?"
"Honest answer? Unclear."
"—pairs will each take a different route," Drogath continues, "and those routes are sacred, determined by the stars, and not to be traded for convenience or personal preference?—"
A woman near the front tries to trade her route for convenience. Drogath's expression suggests she has personally offended the stars.
Our route takes us east, toward the river, which is the one piece of this I've been quietly interested in despite everything. The base's eastern edge is where the treeline thickens, the ground dropping down to the water. I haven't been there. I've marked it on the internal map I keep, the one I update every time I learn something new about where the exits are, but I've never walked it.
Ursik holds the small drawn map they gave us at the start and studies it with the focused expression he sometimes gets — the one that turns up in sparring when a problem needs solving, all the humor temporarily filed away. He doesn't have it out long before he folds it back and tucks it away and we start moving.
"You know where we're going?" I ask.
"I've been a captain for six years. I can read a trail map."
"That wasn't an answer."
"East path, down past the two silver birches, follow the stones to the river bend. Simple."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Then we find the river by finding the river." He holds a low branch out of the path and waits for me to pass. "It runs downhill. We're capable of walking downhill."
The trees open up as we move east, the dense frost-tipped growth of the outer treeline giving way to older growth, the spacing wider, light coming through at better angles. It smells different out here — green and damp and cold in a way that isn't unpleasant. Spring doing its work.
I find the first egg fifteen minutes in, tucked into the knotted base of a tree that would be invisible if you weren't moving at roughly eye-level with the knot in question. Which I am. Ursik is not.
"I've got one."
He turns. "Already?"
"You were looking at the wrong height." I pick it up — smooth painted wood, deep blue, lighter than it looks. It rattles faintly when I shake it. "Something's in it."
"Open it."
The egg splits at the seam, two halves coming apart cleanly. Inside, nested in a scrap of cloth, there's a small folded piece of paper.
I unfold it.
"'The renewal demands bold living,'" I read. "'Before the next egg, one truth.'"
I look up.
Ursik looks back at me with an expression I can't immediately classify.
"That's a…demand," I say.
