9. Corrine
CORRINE
He doesn't ask where I'm going when I move toward the cave entrance. He pulls his coat on and follows, and that's the entirety of the conversation. Outside, he starts to lean left, toward the higher ground.
"Not that way," I quickly tell him.
He stops. Not because he trusts me. Because the slope catches the wound and he has enough sense not to waste blood proving a point.
"North is where Theren wants them looking," I repeat what was decided. "East and west are where the ambush closed around us. South is ugly, but it has old service routes."
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.
"You found them," he says.
"Near the service tunnel."
His mouth tightens. "They are posted on the north road as well. Fresh paste. Same wording."
"Both authorities?"
"Yes," Theren answers. "Someone distributed them before dawn. That is not standard warrant procedure."
It isn't. Standard ones take days. This was pre-prepared, released the moment the ambush gave them cover.
They're not just hunting us. They're constructing something around us — a story that holds from both directions, so that wherever we surface, one side or the other sees exactly what they've been told to see.
Leoric folds both of them and puts them inside his coat. Then, without raising his voice: "Give us a few minutes."
Theren's eyes cross between us. He takes the escorts out of the chamber without comment.
"You still won't tell me where we're going," I declare.
"Not yet."
"But you'll use my route."
"Yes."
"That's not trust."
His gaze holds mine. "No. It's need." The answer lands worse because it is honest.
"You want my roads, my hiding places, my memory of every ugly hole people used to survive your war. But not my judgment."
"Your judgment burned Blackwater." There it is. The old wound, opened without ceremony.
"Tell me about the outpost." Leoric's voice is level. "Not the version from the estate. The one before that."
"We've had this conversation."
"We had a version of it. You gave me the frame. I want what was inside it."
The warm air hits my boots. "There were documents.
Seven of them over three months. Names, dates, testimony from people who claimed proximity to the outpost. Officers named by rank.
Specific methods described in enough detail that I could picture the rooms." I stop.
"I'd spent two years watching dark elf soldiers do exactly what those pages described, in places I grew up.
The pattern fit. The sources looked independent.
I had no reason to think the entire thing was fake. "
He says nothing.
"I believed it because I wanted evidence for what I already knew was happening," I continue. "The war had given me enough real examples that a false one could sit inside them and I wouldn't notice the edges."
"And when it started."
"When the fire went past what I planned for." I say it flat, because flat is the only way it comes out. "I heard it before I could see what was happening. Not soldiers. Not—" I pause. "I understood within the first hour what I had actually done. Not what I intended. What I did."
His expression is blank, and no words leave his mouth. That's worse.
"The cell celebrated for three days," I lower my head. "I sat two floors above the singing and tried to find the version where what I'd done was still right, but I couldn't. I left on the fourth morning without saying anything to anyone."
My voice stays flat until it doesn't. The last word catches, small and ugly, and I hate him for hearing it. I hate myself more because there is no way to take it back.
"They were singing," I whisper. "And all I could hear was—"
I don't finish it. I've never been able to.
Somewhere above us, a piece of loose stone shifting in the wind.
Leoric doesn't offer anything soft. He shifts, not dramatically, just enough to put himself beside me on the same broken tile.
Close so I'm aware of his shoulder near mine.
He looks at the opposite wall like he resents it for witnessing him move at all.
He hates this. I can see it in the locked line of his jaw, in the way his hand curls once before going still. He hates that he came closer. He stays anyway. Every word of that confession was something he could have picked up and turned into leverage, but he leaves it on the floor between us.
Theren reappears. "Patrol signal from the north marker. Moving faster than I estimated."
Leoric rises before the sentence ends. The commander reassembles in the space of a breath — orders quiet and immediate, everyone moving. "We take the service tunnel. Corrine leads."
I get up, check the northwest latch, and open the hatch. I look back once. Then I go first, because this part of the world is still mine, and going first is the only kind of trust I know how to give.