Nobody slept well, and nobody pretended otherwise once the grey light finally came up over the ridge line, thin and cold and about as much comfort as the mountain seemed willing to offer anybody this close to Highhollow.
Merit had gone quiet again sometime in the small hours, not the wrong kind of quiet, Luxy assured me after checking on her twice, just sleep, real sleep, the kind a body finally allows itself once it's decided the immediate danger has actually passed. The second man, the one none of us had a name for yet, hadn't managed sleep at all as far as I could tell, sitting propped against the lean-to's far wall with his wrenched wrist cradled against his chest and his eyes fixed on nothing in particular, the specific stillness of someone whose mind hadn't caught up yet to the fact that his body was free.
"We can't keep them out here," Savage said, crouched by the cold fire pit, turning last night's ash over with a stick more from habit than any real hope of finding a live coal in it. "Merit needs a real bed and someone who knows how to treat whatever this is properly. I don't know what this is. None of us do."
"Ilse might," Namey said. He'd been up before any of the rest of us, going through the papers he'd grabbed off the worktable by the thin grey light, and something in the set of his shoulders told me he hadn't found anything in them yet worth reading aloud. "She's lived in that valley her whole life. If anyone up here has ever seen someone come back from whatever this is, or seen someone try to help one and fail, it's the woman who's been burying half her neighbors for the better part of two decades."
"Going back into Highhollow is the exact thing Ashe told us not to bother rushing," Savage said. "He said we had time. I don't trust a single word out of that man's mouth, but I also don't think he was lying about that specifically. Patient men don't lie about being patient. It's the one thing they're actually proud of."
I looked at Merit, curled small under a blanket that had been Namey's a day ago, breathing slow and even for the first time since we'd found her, and thought about the boy she must have been someone's daughter once, ordinary, complaining about a horse's temperament on the Corvane run, and I thought about how little any of us actually knew about getting a person back from wherever this sickness had taken her.
"We go in quiet," I said. "Just me and Savage. Namey and Luxy stay here with Merit and, " I nodded toward the man against the wall, "with him. We find Ilse before the town's properly awake, tell her what we need, and we're back out before anyone up at the mine's finished counting how many cages came up empty."
"You want to walk back into the one town on this continent that currently has an active manhunt out for your face," Savage said, "quietly."
"I want to walk back into the one town where somebody already told us the truth once, for free, before we'd earned it," I said. "That has to count for something. She didn't have to tell us about Ashwright Concern. She didn't have to tell us any of it."
Savage held my eyes a moment, and something in her expression shifted from argument to the particular resignation of someone who'd already decided to come along and was only spending the last few seconds pretending otherwise for form's sake.
"Fine," she said. "But we go in before the lamplighters, not after, and if there's so much as one extra guard standing somewhere he wasn't standing three days ago, we turn straight back around and find another way to keep Merit alive that doesn't involve you personally handing Ashe a second chance at whatever he actually wants from you."
"Agreed."
Namey didn't look up from his papers, but his voice carried the particular flatness of a man who hated the plan and had already run out of better ones to offer instead. "Take the north path along the tree line, not the switchback road. It adds forty minutes, and I want those forty minutes between you and anyone with a clear sightline down from the mine's gatehouse."
We left before the sky had fully finished deciding what color it wanted to be that morning, Aki staying behind at Luxy's insistence, too large and too memorable a shape to risk over a town that had every reason now to be looking up as hard as it looked out, and Yoshi tucked warm and silent inside my collar the whole walk down, his small weight the one steady thing against the cold working its way up through my boots.
Highhollow looked smaller from ground level than it had from the ridge, and meaner too, every shuttered window along the main street feeling less like caution now and more like complicity, though I tried to hold onto what Ilse had told me instead, that most of these people hadn't chosen any of this any more than my father had, that a town this hungry for coin didn't get to be blamed the same way the men writing the paychecks did.
The boarding house sat dark and quiet, no smoke yet from its chimney, and Savage knocked soft and fast against the side door rather than the front, three taps, a pause, two more, a pattern she said she'd learned from a courier years back and had never once had reason to use until this exact morning.
It took a long minute before the door cracked open, Ilse's face pale and drawn in the grey light, a kitchen knife held low and ready in one hand until she recognized who was standing on her step.
"Lord above," she breathed, and pulled the door wider, glancing past us both ways down the street before waving us in fast. "You're either very brave or very stupid coming back here, and I've met enough of both kinds to know it's usually both at once in the same person."