They moved north with the light, skirting fields as farmers rose, crossing paths with milk sellers and boys driving goats. To anyone else, they looked like what they pretended to be: a small caravan of nothing special. The prayer beads absorbed the worst of Arya's glow; he kept his hands shoved in his pockets anyway.
By midday, the valley had softened into terraced hills. They cut into a pine break where wind threaded through needles like a gossiping aunt. Rudra found a spring and refilled their bottles, then sat, back against a trunk. "Eat."
Mira produced flatbread and dried yak meat from the depths of her pack. Arya didn't ask how she'd gotten them; he knew the answer: the same way he'd learned to survive. She handed him a piece, then tilted her head. "You okay?"
"Define okay," he said around a mouthful, then sighed. "I keep thinking about what he said. About price."
Mira's expression softened, then sharpened. "Price is cheap if we get to live long enough to argue about it."
Rudra didn't open his eyes. "Listen to your friend."
"Since when do you listen to anyone?" Mira shot back.
Rudra's mouth twitched. He rolled a bead between his fingers, not the ones he'd given Arya—another strand, darker, strung with bits of bone. "Since the last storm bearer," he said.
Arya stilled. "There was another."
"There have been a few," Rudra said. "But the last one carried the mark longer than most."
"What happened?" Mira asked, quiet.
Rudra didn't answer. After a moment, he stood. "We need to move. The King's men will start closing gates. They still think they're hunting a thief." His gaze cut to Arya. "They'll learn soon they're not."
They aimed for a ridge road that would let them cross toward Changu Narayan and, beyond it, the old pilgrim paths. The sky that afternoon had that brittle brightness it gets before a change. Clouds stacked on the peaks like someone was building a wall.
They reached a shrine at a crossroads—whitewashed, with a flutter of red cloth and a brass bell greened with age. Someone had left marigolds; someone had taken most of them. Mira touched the bell once, gently, and its sound rang pure.
"Offer theft?" Arya teased, trying for lightness neither felt.
Mira smirked and left a coin. "Balance," she said. "My mother always said nothing taken without something given, even if the something is small."
Arya's chest pinched. He'd learned different laws, but he liked the shape of hers.
They were twenty steps past the shrine when the road ahead sighed, soft as a sleeping breath, and the air turned heavy as wet wool. A stencil of light—runes, geometric, exact—dropped into existence around them, a lattice like a fisherman's net. Arya's hair lifted. The beads on his wrist went hot.
Rudra swore, real and ugly. "Trap."
Uniformed shapes stepped out from the brush above and below—King's guards in layered armor, tridents etched with the same runes that hummed in the air. At their center, a man in deep blue and silver walked as if the ground simply moved out of respect for his feet. He had a captain's bearing and an astrologer's calm.
"Good afternoon," the man said pleasantly. "I am Captain Sagar of His Majesty's Trident Guard. You have something that belongs to the crown."
"Bread?" Mira said, deadpan. "Because we're short."
Sagar's smile was almost kind. His eyes were not. They fixed on Arya. "You felt very dramatic last night. Lightning. Bells. The priests are still recovering from their terror."
Rudra shifted half a step, placing himself between Arya and the captain. "Turn your men around, Sagar."
Sagar's gaze flicked to Rudra's hood, to the shadowed red eye. "Ah. The apostate." His voice dimmed with contempt. "How far the monastery lets its dogs wander."
"You know him," Mira said under her breath.
"Everyone who stands where they shouldn't knows him," Sagar murmured back, not bothering to lower his voice. He lifted his trident. The runes on the road brightened. "Boy. Lift your hand."
Arya's skin crawled. The net was too tidy to break with guesswork. He licked his lips. "If I do, what happens?"
"You come with me," Sagar said. "You learn which boxes to fit inside. You live." He let that hang a heartbeat. "If you make me earn my pay, you will still come. But parts of you will be left here."
Mira's fingers brushed Arya's. A pulse of fear and stubbornness traveled skin to skin. Arya squeezed once. "I'm not yours," he said, to Sagar, to the net, to the world that had always tried to define him before he could define himself.
"Shame," Sagar said, and made a small motion with his trident.
The lattice tightened. It dragged at Arya like syrup, sucking heat from his limbs. His breath frosted.
Rudra moved. His staff cracked against the lattice, setting off a scatter of witchlight sparks. "Tap," he hissed at Arya. "Now, storm-boy. Find the seams."
Arya closed his eyes. The net's light pressed behind his lids. Not storm. Coil. Not rage. Thread. He peeled his focus away from fear and into feel: where the lines of the net met, where they didn't sing in perfect chorus. There—the faintest wobble, like a machine one screw shy of exact.
He touched the mark, quick as a pickpocket's fingers, and flicked a filament of current at the wobble.
The lattice shivered. Sagar's brows knit, just enough to prove he felt it. "Again," Rudra said. Sweat beaded his temples. He held the staff like a man holding up a ceiling by stubbornness.
Arya sent another filament. The wobble deepened. The net dimmed a shade.
Sagar sighed, raised the trident higher, and spoke a word that didn't fit in a human mouth.
Pain hit like water gone solid—everywhere at once. Arya clamped his teeth so he wouldn't scream. Mira made a low sound between fury and fear. The pack of guards shifted, hunger plain in their faces now that the game had become sport.
Arya's vision tunneled. He could either fall or try. He chose try. He emptied the coil into that off-beat seam in one reckless pour.
Something broke.
Light snapped, rope cut through with a clean slice. The lattice blew apart in a gust that knocked guards back on their heels and sent Sagar's cloak snapping. Arya dropped to a knee, lungs hauling at air that felt suddenly too thin.
"Run," Rudra said calmly, as if suggesting tea.
They ran.
Bells rang in Sagar's trident. He recovered fast, fury tightening his mouth. "After them!"
The road tilted into a slope that became a scramble, dirt under fingers, roots under boots. The forest swallowed sound in gulps—then spat it back as shouts and the thunk of arrows in trees. A bolt kissed Arya's sleeve and left heat where it grazed skin.
They burst out on a shoulder of the ridge. The world opened—river boiling in a gorge far below, a rope-and-plank bridge—another—thrashing in the wind, its far side lost in mist rolling off a waterfall.
"Not again," Mira groaned.
"Again," Rudra said, and they pelted for it.
An arrow smashed through a plank at Mira's heel; she didn't look back. Arya grabbed the side rope and anchored while she found footing. Rudra stepped backward onto the first plank, staff raised. Light gathered at its end like frost catching dawn.
Sagar's men reached the clearing's edge and checked, not eager to die on a bridge for pay. Sagar's lip curled. He raised his trident, drew a line in the air, and the mist over the far bank flexed as if a hand had pressed against it from inside.
Shapes moved within it. Not hounds. Not men. Tall. Thin. Wrong.
"Go," Rudra repeated, softer now, and Arya understood the softness for what it was: calculation. Rudra would cut the bridge again if he had to. He'd be the one left with Sagar and whatever stood in the mist, buying time.
"No," Arya said, surprising himself. He set his feet, lifted his hands, and called for a thread of light—
—small, he told the coil, but the coil had felt the net's bite and wanted to answer with its own teeth.
The spark leapt larger than he intended. It slammed into the mist. The shapes within shrieked in voices like metal being bent. The mist recoiled and thinned.
Rudra didn't waste it. He shepherded them across, then split the ropes with a practiced cut and sent the bridge howling down the gorge. Sagar watched them go with a look that promised patience. He lowered his trident and smiled like a man putting a pin in a map.
They didn't stop running until the forest changed around them—the pines giving way to something older, darker, patient in a way that made human urgency feel small. When they finally sagged against a lichen-scarred boulder, Arya's hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Mira caught them in hers. "Still with me?"
He nodded.
Rudra's gaze flicked to the mark. "You pulled too hard."
"I know," Arya said. He did. The tremble wasn't only body; it was something in the mark spinning too fast. "I'll do better."
Rudra's answer was not unkind. "You'll do different." He lifted his chin toward the north. "There's a shepherd's shelter another hour on. We sleep there. Then we leave the roads behind."
"Where do the roads end?" Mira asked.
"Where maps start lying," Rudra said.