The outer market was louder than Aldvorne's and less organized — stalls carved out through years of persistence rather than assignment, the smells coming in layers. Spice and char from the southern vendors, something cooler and more metallic from the north, and underneath both the smell Magnar associated with waterfront cities regardless of world: salt, old rope, air that had crossed open water.
He slowed at a stall where a woman was cooling a rack of goods with a technique he hadn't encountered before. Not displacing heat with water — working with the heat directly, drawing it out, her hands moving in short precise gestures that bore no resemblance to anything in the academy's curriculum.
"Southwestern elemental theory," Orvyn said, without being asked. "They don't separate the affinities the way we do. A fire practitioner there might work with heat as its own property — not flame, just heat itself." He watched her for a moment. "It looks wrong to Northwestern eyes. Too fluid. The academies have been arguing about which approach is more efficient since before either empire had a name."
"Which is more efficient?"
"Depends entirely on what you're trying to do." They moved on. "Stonemark spent three years in the south learning their methods. He's one of the only Northwestern practitioners who can use both without the seams showing."
They found lodging two streets off the main avenue — clean, run by a man who took their coin and gave them keys without once looking up from his book.
Orvyn dropped his pack and sat. "We should eat before anything else. The delegation guesthouse won't receive visitors until tomorrow morning."
"You know where he is."
"I sent ahead from Aldvorne." He pulled off his boots. "I also told him you were coming."
Magnar looked at him.
"He asked who was traveling with me," Orvyn said, unbothered. "I said a traveler from the west with an unusual method who'd been using the academy's resources and wanted to speak with him. I said you were worth his time." He set his boots aside. "He said he'd make room in the morning."
"What else did you tell him?"
"That you weren't from the empire." A pause. "He said he'd assumed as much."
Magnar was quiet. Then: "What's he like. In person."
Orvyn thought about it properly before answering. "He asks better questions than he answers. You get the impression he's already a step beyond whatever conversation you're having — not dismissive, just fast, and careful not to show it. He'll let you say what you came to say without interrupting. But by the time you're finished you'll realize he understood what you meant before you'd finished meaning it."
"What does he want from the people who come to see him?"
"Honesty, mostly. He's good at telling the difference between someone being careful with the truth and someone hiding it. He tolerates the first." A beat. "He doesn't have much patience for the second."
"Why do you want to see him?" Orvyn asked then. Not an accusation — the question of someone who had carried it for three days on the road and was simply ready to put it down. "The real reason."
Magnar looked at the window. Outside, Drevane moved through its evening — voices from the avenue, something being cooked somewhere below, the city lowering its voice without going quiet.
"He's traveled further than almost anyone alive and had the discipline to actually understand what he found instead of just collecting it," he said. "I've been trying to understand something for a long time. I need someone who can hear an unusual thing and sit with it." He paused. "Everything I've gathered about him suggests he's that person."
"The thing in the forest," Orvyn said. "Whatever sent those beasts onto the road."
"I don't know what it was. I intend to find out."
"And Caltherion. That you keep asking about."
"I don't know if they're connected. But I intend to find that out too."
Orvyn nodded slowly and stood. "There's a place on the southern side of the avenue that does a flatbread with two sauces you won't find north of Drevane. You should eat it at least once before we leave."
Magnar stood. "Lead the way."
The flatbread was, as described, exceptional. They ate on a low bench outside the stall while the avenue thinned into evening. Orvyn pointed out which buildings had changed hands since his last visit, which stretch of the avenue was currently contested between two rival textile merchants, which fountain near the northern quarter was maintained by a water technique so old nobody at the academy could identify who had originally cast it. He had the kind of knowledge that only came from returning to a place rather than just passing through — the knowledge of someone who had paid attention on each visit and compared notes with himself.
Magnar ate and listened and let the city settle.
The ambient field here moved differently than in Aldvorne — warmer, less structured, two different magical traditions in close proximity without quite merging. He could feel the seam between them as he walked back, the place where Northwestern precision met Southwestern fluidity and neither fully gave way. It reminded him of something he couldn't name yet. He set it aside beside the warmth he'd felt that morning, the two things sitting together in the part of his mind that collected things not yet understood.
The streets had quieted without going dark. Cooler air from the east, carrying the faint salt smell of the waterfront.
Tomorrow, Stonemark.
The delegation guesthouse sat three streets off the avenue's eastern end — plain-fronted, Northwestern in its bones, with Southwestern decorative stonework around the entrance that nobody had gotten around to removing. A woman took their names at the door, disappeared for two minutes, returned. Sage Stonemark would see the traveler at the second hour.
They waited in a small courtyard. A fountain ran in the corner, its water technique old enough that it had stopped feeling like active magic and started feeling like the building simply behaving that way. Orvyn sat on the fountain's edge. Magnar stood.
He asks better questions than he answers.
The door opened at the second hour exactly.
"He'll see you alone," the woman said.
Orvyn looked at him once and said nothing. Magnar followed her inside.
The room was plain. A table, two chairs, a window facing east laying a long clean rectangle of morning light across the floor. Stonemark was already there — seated, a cup at his elbow, a letter open in front of him that he folded and set aside as Magnar entered.
Smaller than expected. Compact, unhurried, with the economy of someone who had spent decades on the road and long since stopped carrying anything unnecessary. His robes were travel-worn in a way that looked permanent rather than current. His hands resting on the table were a working person's hands.
He looked up.
The eyes were the thing. Not sharp — present. Completely, specifically present, as if everything that attention could be directed at was currently on Magnar and nothing whatsoever held back.
"Close the door," Stonemark said.
Magnar closed it and sat.
The silence between them had a particular quality — not empty, not waiting, just the specific quiet of two people deciding how much to give away before the other one moved.
"Orvyn tells me almost nothing about you," Stonemark said. "He's not a man who withholds things without reason — which means he decided to, without being asked." He set the letter aside. "That carries weight with me."
"I know," Magnar said.
"Good." Stonemark folded his hands on the table. "Ferren's letter said your method reads internal. Precise in a way that isn't learned here. He said you accepted his critique without argument."
"It was accurate."
"Most people don't find that sufficient." He tilted his head. "Where did you develop it?"
"Over a long time. In conditions where ambient mana wasn't reliable."
"Where would ambient mana not be reliable?"
"Far from here."
Stonemark was quiet — not pressing, just marking it, a door to return to. "How long have you been practicing?"
"Most of my life."
"And how long is that."
Not a casual question.
"Longer than it looks," Magnar said.
Something in Stonemark's expression shifted. Small, precise — the adjustment of a man whose hypothesis had just been confirmed rather than formed. He had already been asking himself this before today.
"Show me something," he said.