"No," I said. "I don't believe that at all."
Aki lifted his head off my boots, ears pricked toward the dark beyond the fountain's lantern light, and let out a low, wary sound I'd never once heard him make before, not once in every mile we'd flown together since he was small enough to fit inside my shirt.
Somewhere north of us, past roads I hadn't walked yet and a name I'd been carrying folded up and unexamined since the second hour out of Daenia, Highhollow was waiting, and for the first time since I'd watched the sky over Hallowmere catch fire and go dark, I understood, with a clarity that settled cold and certain somewhere behind my ribs, that whatever came next wasn't going to wait for me to feel ready for it first.
We left Corvane before the lamplighters had finished their morning rounds, which meant the streets still belonged to bakers hauling flour and the handful of drunks who hadn't yet found their way home from the night before, and nobody in that thin early crowd so much as glanced at four travelers and a small winged shape riding low over the rooftops behind them. Namey had wanted to leave in full dark, actually, arguing for it at some length the night before, and it was Luxy who'd talked him down from it, pointing out, gently but without much room for argument, that four people moving through a city at midnight drew the same kind of attention four people moving through it at dawn didn't.
"I don't like leaving anything to daylight that doesn't have to be," Namey said, for what had to be the third time since we'd cleared the gate, his pack riding high and tight on his shoulders in the particular overprepared way of a man who'd spent the whole night sorting and re-sorting what he was willing to carry into a place he already didn't trust.
"You don't like leaving anything to anything," Savage said. "It's not a character flaw specific to Highhollow. It's just you."
"It's a survival trait," Namey said. "I've simply had more reason than most people to keep it sharp."
I didn't say much of anything for the first hour, walking with the note folded small and tucked inside my coat next to my grandfather's letter and Abigail's, three pieces of paper that had no business sitting that close together and yet somehow ended up there anyway, all of them a version of the same weight against my chest. I kept catching myself running my thumb along the edge of the pocket where they sat, checking without meaning to that they hadn't somehow slipped loose in the walking, the way you'd check a wound you already knew was there.
Aki flew low circuits above the road for most of the first morning, restless in a way I recognized from before, the specific restlessness he got whenever the ground below us changed character faster than his own instincts liked. Yoshi rode inside my collar with his small clawed feet tucked against my collarbone, quiet, watchful, the way he got whenever I was quiet and watchful myself.
"You've gone somewhere," Luxy said, falling into step beside me once the road widened out enough for four of us to walk it comfortably instead of single file. "I can always tell. Your shoulders do a thing."
"What thing."
"They go up around your ears about half an inch, like you're bracing for a blow that hasn't landed yet." She said it without any teasing in it, just plain observation, the same way she'd have told me my bootlace had come loose. "You've been doing it since the note. I'd have thought you'd have shaken it out of your body by now, given we've been walking most of a morning."
"I keep thinking about the name," I admitted. "Jon Marrow. He didn't write Jon. He didn't write the bowman, or the Hallowmere boy, or any of the things people who don't actually know me tend to call me instead. He wrote my whole name, the family part included, like he'd had it sitting ready in a drawer for years, waiting for the correct moment to use it."
"That's meant to unsettle you," Luxy said. "I'd say it's working."
"It's working," I agreed.
Savage had drifted back to walk close enough to catch the tail end of that, and something in her face had gone careful in the particular way it did whenever the conversation drifted anywhere near her own rumor, the one she'd handed me weeks back now like a coin she wasn't sure was counterfeit or not.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I've been chewing on the same thing since last night and I still can't get it to sit right in my stomach. I heard the name Marrow near Highhollow from a man in a border tavern who traded in rumors the way other men trade in horses, and I brought it to you because it fit the shape of what you'd told me about your father, not because I had any particular reason to trust the source. If somebody wanted a rumor planted where I'd find it and hand it straight to you, that tavern's exactly where they'd have planted it. I've turned that over more times than I want to admit to you."
"You think you were used," I said.
"I think it's possible I was used," she said. "I also think it's possible the rumor's just true, the way most rumors that survive a border tavern's gossip mill usually are, at least in their bones if not their details. I don't love either answer. I especially don't love that I can't currently tell you which one we're walking toward."
"Namey said the same thing back in the hall," I said. "About the coincidence being too clean."
"Namey's right more often than any of us like admitting," Savage said, "which is a separate problem entirely, but yes. He's right about this one too, probably. Doesn't change where we're headed, though. Only changes how carefully we ought to be looking at the ground under our own feet once we get there."