Toward morning, rain came, soft and insistent. They packed wet. The yellow fletching in Serenya's quiver darkened to gold. She left the bow unstrung. Torven's hand brushed the hilt of his sword and then left it alone, practicing a smaller violence of restraint. Callen's parchment stayed dry against his chest, a fragile bureaucracy carrying a dragon's deferred freedom and two humans' unfinished trust.
They walked.
On the fourth day the shared lattice tested them with something smaller than a dragon and meaner than a horn.
They came upon a border shrine where travelers left coins and sprigs of mint for safe crossing. Someone had hung a dead hawk from the lintel with yellow thread—mock-fletching, cheap and cruel—and scratched a dragonfly into the wood beneath it. The message was not subtle: bow-line, we see you; sure hit, we want one.
Serenya stopped walking.
Torven's hand moved toward his sword and then, visibly, away. Callen swore under his breath.
"Do not touch the hawk," Serenya said. "It is bait for the song."
She could feel it already: the lattice leaning toward simplicity, toward the clean line between problem and arrow. Torven's face said he felt it too. His throat worked as if swallowing an order he had not quite formed.
"Who did this?" Callen asked the empty trail.
"Someone who liked Maera's old stories better than Maera's new parchment," Torven said. "Or someone from the valley watch who thinks holiness needs a corpse to prove it."
Serenya took out her knife and cut the yellow thread, not the bird. She lowered the hawk to the grass and covered it with needles until it was only a shape under the forest's ordinary death. Then she scraped the dragonfly scratch until it was a meaningless scar in the wood. Her palm ached. The geas sulked.
"That will not stop the next shrine," Torven said.
"No," she said. "It will stop this one from teaching the lattice that we answer decorations with rituals."
They walked on in a silence that was not peace. Competence, Orlaeth had said. Competence sometimes looked like refusing to make a symbol mean what frightened people wanted it to mean.
Near dusk they found a shepherd's lean-to abandoned for the season, still holding a dry corner and a shelf with a cracked clay bowl. Callen repaired a hinge with cord. Torven fetched water from a seep. Serenya inventoried their mint and found they had enough for three more nights of ritual refusal if the lattice grew loud, and not enough if it grew clever.