His eye narrows. "You know them."
"I lived off them."
I expect an argument out of habit. Then his jaw sets and he steps aside.
"Go." It is not permission. Not quite. It is a calculation. I go first because for the next few miles, his war roads matter less than my hiding places. Before we leave the cave mouth, Leoric takes a strip of dark cloth from his sleeve and ties it low around a dead branch beside the trail.
"Theren will know that?" I ask.
"Theren knows my field marks."
"And if the mercenaries find it first?"
"They'll think it means we went east."
I turn to the knot again. It tells me nothing, which I suppose is the point.
"You leave secret messages in trees."
"I leave instructions where useful people can read them."
"Comforting."
"It was not meant to be."
The sky is dark, the kind that has an hour left in it at most. I set the pace remembering how I've run medicine through these lower valleys for years and I know it the way you know things that have cost you — memorized through bad weather, darkness and the price of getting it wrong. South is mine, it has been since I started hiding. Leoric keeps up without complaint. I don't look back to check on him because looking back means thinking about the cave, and I'm not doing that yet.
The ruined bathhouse sits three kilometers away, folded into a hillside where rock broke through the earth at a sharp incline and the debris above it makes it seem natural, almost normal. I found it during my second winter using this route. The lower entrance is hidden behind a slab of fallen stone that only looks sealed. I wedged it badly on purpose back when I needed places patrols would ignore. My fingers find the old notch along the underside. I press, shift my weight, and the slab gives just enough for me to pull it open.
Inside is cold before it's warm. The roof is mostly open, stone floor covered in grit and ash, the main pools cracked and dry. But heat vents run through below, pushing warm air up through the floor, and after a few minutes the chill starts losing ground. Eventually making it feel survivable.
Near the service tunnel, something pale has been pinned beneath a broken tile. At first I think it is old plaster. Then I see it. The official seal. I crouch and pull it free. The paper is damp at one edge but newly printed, the ink too fresh to belong to this ruin. Official dark elf council stock. Leoric's face stares up from the page in a close enough likeness to make my skin tighten.
Traitor. Corrupted by human insurgent influence. The reward beneath it is not an amount that makes people hesitate.
"Leoric."
He is beside me before I look up. I hand him the notice and check the tile again because one paper hidden badly usually means someone was carrying more than one.
The second is caught farther under the broken edge, folded hard enough to crease the seal. Human authority this time. No name, but the description is specific enough that my hands go cold. Height. Hair. Known routes. Associates. Former rebel courier. Working in active coordination with a known dark elf war criminal to destabilize the border region. Me.
I set both notices on the stone between us.
"Both sides."
Leoric reads them without changing expression. That is worse than surprise.
"Someone passed through here before us," I say. "Or someone using the lower routes dropped them when they ran."
"How fresh?"
I touch the edge of the ink. "Fresh enough that the road already knows before we do."
That lands badly. It means the ambush was not only an attack. It was cover for a story already prepared.
He settles himself near the main entrance wall. His left arm is carried slightly off. The same adjustment I've been tracking since the cave, and it is the most irritating thing that's happened to me in a week.
Theren finds us before full daylight, two escorts with him. One is favoring a leg. The other is pale from blood loss that has been handled but not sorted. Theren himself is unmarked, which I have taught myself to distrust on principle. His eyes drop to the notices on the stone.
