Bram was waiting at the village gate with a pack.
Calder looked at the pack, then at Bram, then at the pack again. It was a good pack. Leather, worn in, sized for several days of travel. Not something assembled this morning.
"Your mother," Calder said.
"Agreed to it." Bram shifted the pack on his shoulder. "Eventually."
"How eventually."
"An hour ago." He met Calder's eyes. "She's known I was going to leave for two years. She just wanted it to be her idea."
Calder considered this. He had no grounds to refuse the company, and the honest answer was that he didn't want to. Bram knew the road, knew what Calder had been working on before the tower, and knew Anshem in the secondhand way of someone who had been told about a place by a person who knew it well. That was useful. The fact that Bram was fifteen and had just argued his mother into letting him go to a city three days away because a man with no memory needed the company was a separate consideration, and not his to make.
"Can you keep up?" Calder asked.
Bram looked at him flatly. "I grew up walking these roads."
"Then let's go."
The road east was better than the forest path had been, wide enough for two carts side by side and worn down to pale clay by years of use. The forest pressed close on both sides for the first half-day, then began to thin as the land opened into low hills and the occasional farmstead set back from the road, visible as a smear of smoke above the treeline.
They walked without much talking, which suited Calder. He was still taking inventory of the road, of the land, of the way Bram moved through it. The boy had been right about knowing these roads. He walked with the ease of someone who had covered ground this way many times, and he read the landscape the same way Calder read rooms, in quick assessments that he didn't narrate but that shaped where he put his feet and when he glanced at the sky.
At midday they stopped at a stone marker by a stream crossing and ate what Sera had packed without being asked. Bram handed over bread and hard sausage with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who had already decided how this was going to work and wasn't going to make a production of it.
"Tell me about Anshem," Calder said.
"What do you want to know."
"The Conclave first. What I told you about it."
Bram chewed for a moment. "The Conclave has a hall in the upper quarter. It's the biggest building up there apart from the governor's residence. You said the Readers who work out of it patrol the city in pairs, always a senior and a junior, and they wear gray with a blue cord at the left shoulder." He paused. "You said the cord color changes based on their rank, though you didn't tell me what the colors meant. You said to treat them politely and give them no reason to be interested in you."
"What makes them interested in someone."
"Unlicensed workings. Anything pre-Interdict. Old texts about old methods." He looked sideways at Calder. "You."
Calder acknowledged this. "What else."
"The archive where Veth works is in the lower quarter, not in the Conclave hall. It's technically a civic archive, not a Conclave one, though the Conclave has access to it and sends people there regularly. You said that was why Veth was useful. She's not Conclave, so she can find things without the request going through Conclave channels." He paused again. "You said the archive is open to anyone with a legitimate research purpose, and that the Valdenen land dispute gave you a standing reason to be there."
The Valdenen papers were in Calder's pack. He'd brought them, partly because they were legitimately his to carry, partly because they were the most plausible account of why a traveling document-man might be going to Anshem.
"The city itself," he said.
"Old. Big. I don't know, you described it but I've never been." Bram looked at the road ahead. "You said the lower quarter is where most people live and work. The upper quarter is the Conclave, the governor, the guild halls. The river runs through the middle and the market is on the south bank." He hesitated. "You seemed to like it there."
Calder filed that. A person who had spent a year in a small village had liked a city. That said something about where he'd come from before the village.
"What did I say about the people I trusted there?"
"Just Veth by name. You said there were two others but you didn't tell me who." He said it without accusation. By now he understood why.
They sat for a while in silence, the stream running over stones below the crossing, a pair of birds arguing in the branches above.
"Why did you really come?" Calder asked.
Bram was quiet for a moment. "Because you don't know who you are yet. And I know more about who you were than anyone except maybe Sera." He looked at the stream. "And because I want to see Anshem. Both things are true."
Calder nodded. Both things being true was good enough.
On the second day the weather came in from the north, low cloud cover that turned the light gray and flat and brought a persistent thin rain that was not heavy enough to shelter from but heavy enough to be unpleasant. They walked in it. Calder's ribs had settled from sharp complaint to a dull background pressure that he could work around, and the shoulder had begun to feel more like stiffness than injury, which meant it was healing correctly.
By midafternoon the road had widened further and begun to show heavier use. The ruts were deeper, more recent, and twice they passed slow-moving carts heading west, drivers who looked them over with the mild appraisal of road-experienced people and moved on without incident.
The patrol appeared from the east, around a bend, four people on horseback moving at a pace that meant they were covering ground rather than watching it.
Calder saw them before Bram did. He catalogued in the time it took them to close half the distance: four horses, four riders, one cart-horse following on a lead. Two riders in front wore gray, blue cords at the left shoulder, different shades. One cord darker, one lighter. The other two were in plain traveling clothes and rode slightly behind. The two in gray were the ones who mattered. Everything else about the formation was secondary to them.
He kept walking at the same pace and said quietly, "Conclave patrol. Keep walking, don't change your stride."
Bram nodded once, barely.
The patrol slowed as it approached and the lead rider in gray raised one hand. A signal to stop, unhurried, more habit than demand.
Calder stopped. Bram stopped beside him.
The lead rider was a woman, forty years or thereabouts, with close-cropped gray hair and the windburned look of someone who spent most of her time outdoors. The blue cord at her shoulder was dark, almost indigo. She looked at them with the particular quality of attention that Calder had started to recognize. Not the surveillance of someone looking for a threat, but the focused assessment of someone reading a situation for specific information.
"Travelers," she said. Not a question.
"Yes," Calder said. "Anshem, on business. Document work."
She looked at him for a moment longer than was strictly conversational. Her eyes moved to his empty scabbard, paused, moved on. "You've come from the west."
"From Edworth." He used the village name Bram had given him the day before. "I've been doing contract work for a family there."
"The Valdenen dispute," she said.
Something about that arrival of the name was interesting. The way she said it carried a slight weight, like a name that had come up recently in a different context.
"That's right," Calder said.
She held his gaze for another moment, then turned to look at Bram in the same way. Bram met her eyes without flinching, which Calder noted as a point in his favor.
"The road clears two hours east," she said. "There was a tree down at the Harren crossing. My people cleared it this morning." She said it to both of them, a piece of useful information delivered without warmth but also without hostility. Then she touched her horse forward and the patrol moved past them on the road.
Calder didn't turn to watch them go. He waited until the sound of hooves had faded to nothing, then kept walking.
"She knew the Valdenen name," Bram said, low.
"Yes."
"Is that bad."
"I don't know yet." He thought about the weight in her voice when she said it. "It's information."
Four riders for a country road. And she'd known the name of a land dispute eleven years old and not in active litigation.
He had a candidate for what had made this road interesting.
He noticed the flat light again an hour later.
They were passing a farmstead set close to the road, a working farm with animals in the yard and a woman hanging laundry on a line strung between two posts. An older man stood near the barn with his hands pressed flat against the wall, eyes closed. The posture was familiar. Calder watched him as they passed.
The light went flat. Three seconds, maybe four. Then the man stepped back, opened his eyes, and the light came back.
The barn wall was dry. Whatever had been coming through it, moisture, rot, something Calder couldn't name, had apparently been addressed. The man rolled his shoulders and went inside. The woman at the laundry line hadn't looked up.
Bram had glanced at the farmstead and looked away. He hadn't noticed anything.
Two observations. Not a pattern yet. He filed them and kept walking.
"You're looking at things again," Bram said.
"I'm always looking at things."
"You go quiet in a different way when something's caught you." He paused. "You used to do it in the village too. People learned not to interrupt it."
Calder glanced at him. "Did it bother them."
"Some of them. Revik thought you were strange. Most people just got used to it." Bram shrugged. "I liked it. It meant you were actually thinking about the thing, not just answering."
Calder thought about a man who had spent a year in a small village where people had learned not to interrupt him when he went quiet. Who had found a boy quick enough to appreciate the silence. Who had paid three months of rent ahead and then walked into a tower that had been waiting for something, and come out different.
He still didn't know who that man had been. But he was beginning to understand the shape of him.
They camped that night off the road, far enough into the trees that the firelight wouldn't be visible from the road, which was Calder's instinct rather than a reasoned decision. He didn't examine it. His instincts had been consistently more informed than his conscious reasoning so far and he had learned to act on them and ask questions later.
Bram built the fire with the efficiency of a boy who had done it often enough that he didn't think about it. Calder sat with his notes open on his knee and looked at the calculations he'd made before the tower. He understood most of them now that he'd had time to sit with them. The dating methodology was sound. He'd been careful, had cross-referenced multiple documents, had accounted for changes in legal language over time. The tower predated the Interdict. He was confident in that.
What he wasn't confident in was the Warden.
Three references, all in passing. He'd copied them out in his notes and underlined the surrounding context, looking for anything that would tell him more. The first: the Warden's halls, of which none remain in the eastern provinces. The second: such workings as were sanctioned by the Warden's office. The third, briefest: before the Warden's end.
The Warden's end.
Not the Warden's dissolution or retirement or replacement. End.
He sat with that.
"What are you thinking about," Bram said. He'd finished with the fire and was eating from his pack, watching Calder with the frank curiosity that seemed to be his default when he'd decided someone was worth watching.
"The Warden," Calder said. "Whatever that was. I found three references in the documents I was working through before the tower and I can't tell if it's a person, an institution, or something else."
Bram was quiet for a moment. "You said something about it once. Before. You said you thought it was older than the Conclave and that the Conclave's records about it were thin on purpose."
Calder looked at him. "I said thin on purpose."
"That's what you said. I remember because you said it the way you said things when you were more sure than you wanted to be." He poked at the fire with a stick. "You said there was a difference between records that didn't exist and records that had been made to not exist."
Calder sat with that for a while. The fire settled. Somewhere in the dark above them the rain had stopped and the cloud cover was beginning to break, stars appearing in gaps.
Made to not exist.
The Conclave had access to the archive where Veth worked. The Conclave had been operating since before the Interdict, or had come into existence during it. He wasn't clear on the timing yet. The Conclave had reasons to prefer that pre-Interdict history stayed inaccessible.
And Veth had found something he'd asked about, and wouldn't put it in a letter.
He wrote in the notes: Warden's end. Not dissolution. Removal? What does the Conclave know about this that isn't in the records.
Then, below that: Thin on purpose.
He closed the notes and looked at the fire for a while. Bram had fallen asleep against his pack with the ease of someone who could sleep anywhere, which Calder found quietly enviable.
He stayed up a while longer. The road to Anshem ran east, visible as a pale stripe through the gap in the trees. In two days it would deliver him to a city he apparently knew and didn't remember, to a woman who had found something and been waiting, to a Conclave that had recently found the road between a village and the city worth patrolling with four riders.
He had incomplete information. He had a direction.
He put out the fire and lay down and went to sleep.
End of Chapter Three