"What?"
"Nothing," she said. "Not one word. Just looked at me like I was a bill he'd forgotten he owed, and went back to his cup." She poked the fire harder than it strictly needed. "I'm not telling you that to talk you out of Highhollow. I'm telling you so that whatever you find there doesn't get to surprise you the way mine surprised me. Go in with your eyes already open to the worst version of it, and anything better than that is a gift instead of a wound."
I didn't have anything to say back to that for a while, and she didn't seem to expect me to. We let the fire do the talking instead, popping and settling, throwing long orange light up against the underside of the ridge, and somewhere out past the reach of it Aki shifted in his sleep and let out a low, contented rumble that made both of us glance over at him at the same time, and something in the shared look eased the mood back into something almost gentle before we finally banked the fire low and slept.
Corvane announced itself long before we reached it, first as a smudge of pale stone against the horizon that could have been anything, then as a genuine skyline, walls thick enough to march four men abreast along their top, towers at even intervals with banners hanging limp in the still afternoon heat. It was the largest thing I'd seen built by human hands since I'd left Hallowmere, bigger even than Vorn had been, and something in my chest tightened at the sheer scale of it, the number of lives packed inside those walls that had never once heard my grandfather's name or cared whether Hallowmere still existed at all.
The gate guards waved us through without more than a glance at our travel-stained clothes, which told me plainly enough that adventurers passing through in worse condition than ours was simply the ordinary weather of the place. Inside, the noise hit me before anything else did: hawkers shouting prices over each other, a smith's hammer ringing somewhere close, a street performer working a small crowd with a trained ferret that kept climbing his sleeve and diving back down into his collar to general delight. The smell was a wall of its own, roasting meat and hot metal and too many unwashed bodies packed too close together under a sun that hadn't let up all day, cut through here and there with something sweeter, cheap perfume from a dye-seller's stall we passed close enough to.
"Clothing market's south end, near the river gate," Savage said, already moving through the crowd with the loose, easy confidence of someone who'd walked cities like this a hundred times before and had stopped being impressed by any of them a long time ago. "Keep your coin pouch where you can feel it. Corvane's got the best pickpockets on this whole continent, and half of them look about nine years old."
We found the clothing market right where she'd said it would be, a long covered row of stalls hung thick with dyed cloth in every color a person could ask for, silk from somewhere east that caught the light strangely, rough traveler's wool piled in stacks taller than Savage. I scanned every stall we passed for a woman matching Inari's description, dark hair, gold and red, and found nothing, which wasn't surprising given she'd have had every reason in the world to change her clothes the moment she reached anywhere with a mirror in it.
We asked around anyway, working the row stall by stall, and most of it went nowhere. A cloth merchant with ink-stained fingers hadn't seen anyone matching her description and made no secret of resenting the interruption to his ledger work. A boy selling ribbons off a hand cart lit up at the mention of a woman traveling alone and gold coin, only to describe someone twice Inari's age with a limp, which told us plainly enough he'd have described anyone at all for the coin Savage was dangling in front of him. An old woman minding a stall of secondhand boots squinted at us for a while before admitting, grudgingly, that she'd seen a dark-haired woman come through that morning buying a plain traveler's cloak two sizes too large for her, paying in coin that still had the shine of having never once left a merchant's private strongbox before that morning.
"That's not stolen goods coin," Savage muttered, once we'd moved on out of the old woman's earshot. "That's coin somebody handed her fresh. Somebody local."
"Or someone she hired," I said, and the thought sat uneasy in my chest even before we found anything to confirm it.
It was Savage who spotted the wagon first, tucked into a side alley off the main row, its canvas cover a familiar shade of faded gold that didn't quite match anything sold openly at the stalls around it.
"That's Adachi's cart," she said, low. "I'd know those wheels anywhere. He complained about the left one squeaking the whole ride out from Corvane originally."
A man stood near it, arms crossed, watching the alley mouth with the particular stillness of someone paid to notice things rather than someone simply passing time. He was built broad through the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with farm work, a short curved blade at his hip that had clearly seen more use than decoration, and his eyes tracked us the second we slowed our own pace to look at the wagon, faster than an ordinary bystander's would have.
"Hired muscle," Savage muttered. "She's got protection now. That's not cheap, and it's not something a girl running for her life on a mercenary's stolen coin usually thinks to arrange this fast, unless she planned further ahead than she let on back at the cave."
"Or she was scared enough to spend everything she had on it," I said.