Kael waited beyond the last garden wall, pack already settled, horns beaded with mist. In daylight he looked impossible and somehow correct, as if the valley had been missing a shape and only now noticed the absence filled. Elias crowed at him. A dog barked once and then sniffed Kael's offered knuckles and decided, with canine pragmatism, that monsters who smelled of patience were acceptable.
"Ready?" Kael asked.
"No," Mara said. "But we're going anyway."
That, she thought as they stepped into the Reach, was the whole of courage: not readiness, but motion.
Mara carried Elias in a sling across her chest. Kael carried the heavier pack—grain, dried meat, a water skin the size of a small barrel, her late husband's cloak that still smelled faintly of pine pitch. She had left the pitchfork by the door. On the road she carried a knife and the knowledge that a knife was mostly a comfort.
Blackthorn Reach closed around them like a held breath. The trees were older here, their bark scored with marks Mara did not recognize—spirals, paired horns, lines that might have been writing. Kael touched some of them as they passed, a greeting or a mourning.
"You lived here," she said.
"I lived everywhere the seams needed watching. Here more than most. Briarholt's soft winters were not an accident."
"And we repaid you by turning you into a story to frighten children."
"You repaid us by surviving," Kael said. "Stories are what people make when they are afraid and still need to sleep. I do not hate your stories. I hate the king who made them necessary."
They walked. Elias dozed and woke and nursed and stared at leaf-shadow. When he fussed, Kael hummed—a low, resonant sound that vibrated in Mara's ribs and settled the baby as surely as a lullaby. She did not thank him aloud. She walked a little closer.