The glacier passes held them in Frostpeak's traditional territory for three days, which was the last span in which the landscape was entirely familiar and the landmarks were entirely legible, the world organized according to the logic he had spent fourteen years learning to read. Luc used those three days to do something that might have looked, from the outside, like simply walking — he was aware that the way he engaged with environments was not externally visible, that the running accumulation of vibration data through his Tremor Sense and the continuous structural analysis his Adapted Awareness applied to terrain and distance and sight lines was internal and without observable expression. But the information was real and he was adding to it steadily, building the new map that would replace the familiar one as they moved further south.

  Sven talked.

  This was not a surprise, because Sven's approach to most things that were large and required accommodation was to engage with them vocally, narrating his observations and opinions and the connections his mind was making between what he saw and what he had been told to expect. He offered assessments of the terrain — some accurate, some based on optimistic extrapolation from things he had read about the southern lowlands — and he debated the probable population and cultivation level of the first settlements they would encounter, and he periodically said something about the philosophical meaning of the Walk that was entirely his own and clearly the product of actual thought, which Luc found genuinely interesting even when the conclusions were ones he would not have reached himself.

  What Luc valued about this, and had always valued about it, was not the content of Sven's narration but its effect on the quality of the space between them. Silence between people who are comfortable with each other is a kind of presence; silence between people who are moving into uncertainty together can become something else, something that draws in anxiety and amplifies it. Sven's voice kept the silence from becoming that second thing, not by filling it exactly but by giving it a different character — a sound that said we are here together and this is normal and the strangeness of it is interesting rather than frightening.

  On the first night, camped in the wind-shadow of a granite shelf at the glacier's last edge where the ice gave way to the cold stone of the foothills, Luc opened Sigrid's packet. He had waited until they were settled and the fire was established and Sven had sorted his own food, and he unwrapped it in the firelight with the care of someone who has been told to save something specific for the correct moment and has identified this as that moment.

  Hard biscuits, spiced the way she made them for feast celebrations, the particular combination she had worked out over years that was not the tribe's standard recipe but hers, identifiable by smell before taste. Three parcels of preserved meat wrapped individually with the precision that meant she had been thinking about how they would be used when she packed them. And at the bottom, folded twice, a note in her round and generous handwriting.

  You were always ours. That doesn't change with distance. I was worried for a long time, when you were small, about whether you would feel it — whether you could feel something was real when the beginning of it was complicated. I don't worry about that anymore. Come back hungry. I'll have something waiting.

  He read it twice. Then he folded it carefully and put it in the interior pocket of his jacket, where it would be accessible without being in the way, and he ate the biscuits in the firelight and was quiet for a while.

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  Sven ate his own food and did not comment on what Luc was doing, which was considerate, and then undid some of the considerateness by asking, with genuine interest rather than social maneuvering, whether Sigrid had packed biscuits, because Sigrid's biscuits were a known quantity that he had firm feelings about. Luc gave him one. Sven ate it with the appreciation of someone who has been looking forward to a thing and found the thing to be what they expected.

  "The world," Sven said, after a while, looking out from their camp at the dark south below the glacier line. The sky was clear and cold and the stars were the extraordinary density that only high altitudes and complete absence of settlement light produced, and below the stars, where the foothills began to give way to the deeper darkness of valley floors, there were points of warm yellow-orange light that were fire and lamplight and the presence of people living lives they had not been invited into yet. "It's bigger than I thought it would be."

  "You thought about it a lot?"

  "Of course. I thought about it every day for three years." He looked at the lights with the open-faced engagement that was his characteristic relationship to new things — not wary, not cautious, genuinely curious, as though the world was an extension of the interesting territory he had been exploring for years and this was simply more of it. "I imagined it would feel bigger when I was in it, but I thought I'd feel bigger too. Like I'd grown into the size of it." He paused. "I just feel like me. Just in a bigger place."

  "That's the correct relationship to have with it," Luc said. "Feeling like you've grown to match the place suggests you've made assumptions about what you're walking into. Feeling like yourself suggests you're ready to find out what it actually is."

  Sven thought about this. "That's very you," he said, which was not a criticism.

  "I know."

  "I'm going to interpret it charitably and assume you're right." He settled back against his pack. "What's the plan? Once we're past the foothills."

  Luc had been building the plan for several months, with the systematic approach he brought to projects that had many interdependent variables. "Move south until we reach a settlement large enough to have a guild office. Establish basic orientation — local power structures, what the current political situation looks like between the Noble Houses and the Artifact Coalition, who the relevant Worldbearers are in this region and what factions they're aligned with." He paused. "And watch for anyone watching for us."

  Sven turned to look at him. "Specifically watching for you."

  "Probably. Yes." He touched the pendant briefly, through the jacket. Warm, as it had been for months, but with a quality that was different from the previous night — more present, as though the distance from Frostpeak had somehow increased the crystal's sensitivity rather than decreased it, as though the thing it was tracking cared not about where it had been but where it was going. "Something south paid attention when I moved. I don't think we'll have much time before that attention becomes specific."

  "How much time?"

  "Enough to establish ourselves if we move deliberately. Not enough to be careless." He looked at the distant lights. "The Walk gives us a reason to be moving and a reason to be in multiple places without a fixed address, which is useful cover. A Walker in motion is harder to pin down than a Walker who has settled somewhere."

  Sven was quiet for a moment, processing this with the thorough attention he brought to things that mattered. "You've been thinking about this as a strategic situation," he said. "Not just a cultivation journey."

  "It's both. It needs to be both."

  "Right." He nodded in the way that meant he had arrived at a conclusion and was done deliberating. "Then I'm your forward element. I go first in situations where going first is what's needed, I handle things that need handling when the handling is physical, and I don't ask questions when the answer would take too long to explain."

  "That's an accurate job description."

  "I know. I've been working on it." He grinned. "We're going to be fine, Luc."

  "Most of the time," Luc agreed.

  "All of the time," Sven said, the way he said things he had decided were true, and Luc looked at him and thought about the five-year-old who had crossed a training ground and decided to stand somewhere without being asked, and about all the distance between then and now and about how the essential thing had not changed at all.

  They slept, and in the morning they descended into the foothills, and the glacier was behind them and the south was ahead and the world extended in every direction with the patient, enormous quality of something that has been waiting for you to arrive and has opinions about who you'll be when you do.