Adam woke at dawn with his neck ruined from sleeping upright against a wall, and knew before he opened his eyes.
The blanket had been pulled over him. That was the part he couldn't get past, later not the empty cot, not the missing pack, not the knife gone from the shelf by the door. The blanket. Elliot had stopped on his way out to cover him up, and had done it carefully enough not to wake him, and had then walked out of the valley alone.
Adam sat there for a while with the blanket in his fists.
Then he got up and went and looked at the east road, which was empty in both directions the way it always was, and stood there long enough that the widow came out and asked if he was ill.
"No," Adam said. "Yes." He rubbed his face. "He's gone."
The widow said something kind. He didn't hear it.
Hollowmere spent the next three days deciding how to feel about it, and settled, in the end, on relieved.
Nobody said so. That would have been ugly, and they weren't ugly people; they were tired people in a small place who had just watched a pillar of light come out of the sky and a boy they'd known since he was in swaddling walk out of a burning marsh with two black handprints on his shirt. They said things like poor lad and he'll do well out there, he was always bright, and their shoulders came down half an inch every time they said it.
It made Adam want to break something, which was not a thing he'd ever wanted before and startled him considerably.
"He saved them," he said, in the bakery, on the second day. "Perrin's sitting up. Mattie Fenn's walking. Five people who'd be dead in that reed bed and every one of them is home, and you're all standing around like he did something to be sorry for."
Nobody looked at him. The baker kept scoring loaves.
It was Maya who finally answered, and she did it without stopping her work, in a flat voice with flour on her forearms.
"They're not sorry for what he did," she said. "They're sorry he could do it."
Perrin wouldn't sleep with the shutter closed.
Adam sat with him most evenings that week, because Maya had a bakery to run and a mother who'd taken to bed and no one else, and because sitting in a room with a nine-year-old who wouldn't stop asking questions was better than lying awake in his own.
"Does it hurt him?" Perrin asked. "The fire. Does it hurt Elliot when it comes out?"
"I don't know."
"Is he a monster now?"
"No."
"Da says"
"Your da's frightened," Adam said. "Frightened people say a lot of things. It doesn't make them true, it just makes them loud." He pulled the blanket up. "Elliot walked into a marsh with nothing but a stick because you were in it. Remember that one instead."
Perrin thought about this with great seriousness.
"He didn't have a stick," he said. "He had hands."
"He had a stick when he started," said Adam.
On the fourth day he went to see Old Hesk, because he'd run out of other ideas.
The old man's door opened on the one suspicious eye and didn't open any further.
"He's gone," Hesk said.
"I know he's gone."
"Then what are you standing on my step for?"
"Because you knew his mother," Adam said, "and you're the only one in this town who's said her name out loud in ten years, and I want to know what you know."
The eye considered him for a long moment.
The door opened.
Inside it smelled like old man and woodsmoke and, faintly, of pie. Hesk lowered himself into a chair with the enormous care of a body that had stopped being reliable, and pointed Adam at the other one, and for a while said nothing at all.
"She weren't from here," he said at last.
"I know that much."
"You don't know it the way I know it." Hesk's hands worked slowly on the head of his stick. "She come in on the winter road when I still had a back on me. No cart, no coat worth the name, boots gone through. Belly out to here." He made a shape in the air. "Middle of the coldest month I ever lived through, and a woman walks into this valley on foot from a direction there's nothing in."
Adam sat very still.
"Wouldn't say where from. Not once, not in six years. She'd talk about anything else till your ears fell off, she were like the boy that way, couldn't stop giving, but you'd ask her where she come from and she'd go somewhere behind her own face." He sniffed. "And she watched that road. Every day of her life. Sit at that window there sometimes of an evening and just watch it, with the boy asleep on her, and she weren't watching it hopeful."
"Watching for what?"
"Never said." Hesk's jaw worked. "But twice, twice, mind, in six years, there was men come through here asking after a woman travelled alone. Nobody Hollowmere ever seen before nor since. Well spoken. Good horses." His eye came up. "Both times she was three days gone into the hills before they got here. Both times."
"Someone warned her."
"No one warned her," said Hesk. "She just knew. Went white one morning at her washing and packed the child and went."
Adam felt the hair come up on his arms.
"And the third time?" he said.
Old Hesk looked at the fire.
"Weren't no third time," he said. "There was a fever come through the valley that spring and it took eleven of us, and she nursed nine of them and took it herself and died of it in her own bed with half the town in the doorway." He was quiet. "That's what I tell folk. That's what happened. I were there."
"But," said Adam.
"But she weren't sick that morning," said Hesk. "And a man come to the door in the afternoon. And I never got a look at him, and nobody else in this town remembers him at all, and I've asked. Forty year I've asked." He turned the stick in his hands. "And by nightfall she were burning up."
The fire popped. Neither of them said anything for a while.
"Does Elliot know?" Adam asked.
"What, that I'm an old man with a story?" Hesk shook his head slowly. "No. And you won't be the one to tell him, neither, not out of nowhere and not by letter. Some things you say to a man's face or you don't say them." He fixed Adam with the eye. "Which brings us to what you actually come here for."
Adam opened his mouth.
"You're going after him," Hesk said. "You've been going after him since the morning he left. You just been waiting for somebody to tell you it weren't stupid."
"It is stupid," Adam said. "I've got no coin, I've never been past Ashe Ford, and I can't fight."
"No," Hesk agreed. "You can't."
"So"
"So don't go as a fighter," said Old Hesk. "Go as the one what remembers his mother's name." He jabbed the stick at the door. "That boy's about to meet a great many people who want something off him. He'll not have one soul in the world who wants nothing. You be that. That's a job, lad, and it don't want muscles."
The guild hunter came on the sixth day, and she was nothing like Adam had imagined.
He'd pictured a giant. What rode into the square was a wiry woman in her forties on a mud-spattered horse, with grey coming in at the temples, a short spear cased along the saddle, and the sourest expression Adam had ever seen on a human face. She wore a plain coat with a hammered bronze token at the collar. She dismounted, read the notice board, and swore at it comprehensively for about fifteen seconds.
"Six days," she said, to nobody. "Six days to route one B-tag off a reed marsh. I'll have somebody's ledger for this." She turned. "Right. Who's headman? Where's the marsh, how many taken, and has anyone been fool enough to go out there?"
The square looked at its feet.
"It's dead," Adam said.
The woman turned her head.
"Say that again."
"It's dead. Six days ago." Adam's ears were burning; half the village was watching him. "It had five people alive in a nest back in the reeds. They're all home. Two of the children are still not right, but they're home."
The hunter's sourness didn't lift. It sharpened into something a great deal more focused.
"Show me," she said.
She walked the burn ring twice without saying a word.
Adam stood on the stones and watched her do it, crouching at the water's edge, turning a blackened reed stalk over in her fingers, standing in the middle of the scorched circle and looking up at nothing for a long moment. She found the nest. She went into it and came out with her mouth in a hard line and didn't comment.
Then she came back to him and said: "Who killed it?"
"A boy from the village."
"What rank?"
"He's not, he doesn't have a rank. He's sixteen."
The hunter looked at him.
"Lad," she said, "what do you think a rank is?"
Adam had no answer for that.
"They're not levels on a monster," she said. "They're a promise. That tag says B, which means my guild has promised whoever posted it that a B-tag is what's out here, and a B-tag is a thing that can be handled by two hunters who've been doing it eight years, working together, on ground they've scouted, with the right shards, and it will still put one of them in a bed for a month." She jerked her chin at the burn. "That, out there, is not two hunters on scouted ground. That's a hole punched in a marsh. That is somebody hitting an eight-year problem with a hammer once."
"He's not " Adam floundered. "He's just Elliot."
"Then Just Elliot did something I'd like explained." She stripped off a glove. "Sit down. You're going to tell me all of it, and I'm going to ask you the same question four different ways, and you're going to stop being clever."
Her name was Vessa Turl, and Adam learned more from her in one hour than Hollowmere had taught him in seventeen years.
That the letters were a contract, not a bestiary. That the guilds had run them for three hundred years across every kingdom and free city, and that a tag written in Serenia meant the same thing in the ice country, which was the only reason a hunter could take work in a place she'd never been. That most of the world's monsters, she called them Calamities, and used the word the way a farrier says horse, never got tagged at all, because nobody survived to file it.
That the green light he described her, hanging over the kill, had a name.
"Essence," Vessa said. "The thing sheds it when it dies. Most of it goes into the air inside a minute and you've lost it. Catch it in a shard and you've got something you can sell, or use, or trade for a year's living." She was watching him very carefully now. "Take it into yourself and it's yours forever, and nobody can ever get it back out of you. That's what the whole trade is for. Every hunter you'll ever meet is climbing that ladder one dead thing at a time, and it is slow, lad. It is desperately slow. Twenty years to be worth talking about."
Adam thought about a boy walking out of a marsh with a shoe in his belt.
He must have shown it, because Vessa sat back.
"He took it," she said.
"I don't know what he took."
"That's not a no." She looked at him for a long moment, and something in her face changed, not softer. More careful. "How old did you say he was?"
"Sixteen."
"And where's he gone?"
Adam hesitated. He thought about he'll do well out there and shoulders coming down half an inch, and about men with good horses asking after a woman travelling alone.
"East," he said. "That's all I know."
It wasn't quite a lie. It was near enough to one that he felt it in his chest, and he found he didn't mind.
Vessa Turl looked at him a while longer, and then let it go, in the manner of a woman who has decided to let a thing go for now.
"Right," she said, and stood, and slapped the mud off her knees. "I'm filing it, because I have to file it, a B-tag came off the board and I have to write down how. That goes to the hall at Ostbridge and from there to Serenia, and it'll sit in a ledger with nine hundred other pages and no one will ever read it."
"But," said Adam.
Vessa smiled for the first time, which did not improve her face.
"But," she agreed. "Sharp lad." She swung up into the saddle. "Sometimes somebody does. Every hall has a few standing requests pinned in the back office, pay a bounty for any report with certain words in it. Most are old and stupid. Anything with the word 'coin' in it, that sort of thing. Been there twenty years, nobody's ever collected." She gathered the reins. "I'll write it plain. But I'll not write it small, because five people came home and somebody ought to know that."
She looked down at him.
"You want to come as far as Ostbridge?"
Adam stared up at her. "What?"
"I'm short a hand, my last one quit at Ashe Ford because he's a coward, and the road east is four days of nothing." She was already turning the horse. "You can hold a rope, you can cook, and you're the only person in this village who's said anything true to me all morning. It's not an apprenticeship and it's not glory. It's four days of walking and you'll be paid in food."
"Yes," said Adam, before his mouth had consulted anybody.
"Then go and get your boots."
He said goodbye to Maya at the bakery door with the light going.
"You'll find him," she said.
"I might not."
"You will. You're the most stubborn cautious person I've ever met, which is a horrible combination and exactly right for this." She was trying to smile and it kept sliding off. "Tell him "
She stopped.
"Tell him Perrin sleeps with the shutter open," she said, "and it's not because he's frightened. It's so he can see the road."
Adam couldn't say anything to that at all.
He went. Old Hesk was on his step as they passed, and lifted his stick an inch, and Adam lifted a hand, and that was all either of them wanted.
The valley fell away behind them by full dark. Adam looked back once, at the lamps going out one by one, and turned east and kept walking, and it did not once occur to him to be proud of himself, which was, in its way, the whole of his character.
Four days later, at the guild hall in Ostbridge, a clerk copied a field report into the eastern ledger in a fair hand.
B-tag, eastern reeds, valley of Hollowmere. Resolved before arrival. Subject deceased, method unrecorded, extensive thermal damage, no shard recovered, essence assumed absorbed. Five survivors extracted from a larder nest. Hunter's note appended, unusually long, ending: unranked local, approx. 16 yrs, whereabouts unknown, recommend follow-up.
It went into the eastern ledger with nine hundred other pages, and no one read it.
In the back office, where the standing requests had hung so long the paper had gone the color of weak tea, one of them had four words on it and no name at the bottom, and it had been waiting there for a very long time.