Torven's Bridge was larger than its name suggested, having grown from a single-structure crossing point into a proper small town over the three generations since the bridge's construction, accumulating the particular character of settlements that exist primarily because something necessary — in this case, the only reliable crossing of the Torven River for thirty miles in either direction — forces travelers to stop. It had two inns, a smithy, a relay station for the messenger bird network, a market that operated three days a week, and the permanent population of approximately two hundred people whose livelihoods were built entirely on the reliable flow of everyone else through and past them. It was, in the assessment of every traveler who had ever stayed there, not a place anyone would choose to live and not a place anyone could reasonably avoid.

  They ate dinner at the better of the two inns, which was called the Span, at a corner table that gave Luc sight lines to both the entrance and the kitchen door, a habit he had adopted so naturally since Karveth's Post that he no longer registered the choosing of such seats as deliberate. Vayne had noted it immediately when they sat down, with the brief glance of someone adding a data point to a profile she was building, and had taken the chair that left her sight line to the stairs, which was the position an Arcane practitioner would want — exits for movement in every direction and enough distance from the main crowd to have a reaction window if something began.

  She talked during dinner in the efficient, front-loaded way she had introduced herself with, providing information about the road ahead that was useful enough to justify the pace of its delivery. She had traveled this route twice before — once in her first year at Dawnspire Academy, when a field materials expedition had taken her through the Step Lands, and once in the partial segment between Westholm and here, during the current eight months of independent leave. She knew the relay network's schedule, the weather patterns of the lower plateau region, the specific section of road three days south where bandit activity had been reported as recently as her departure from Westholm, and the names of the Artifact Guild sub-agents who operated in the three settlements between here and the geological formation she was heading for.

  "The bandit activity," Luc said. "What's its nature? Opportunistic or organized?"

  She looked at him with a slight adjustment in her expression, the kind that happened when someone upgraded their assessment of a question being asked. "The relay post agent in Westholm said organized," she said. "Not just travelers — they've hit two merchant convoys in the last month with the kind of coordination that suggests pre-scouted positions and communication between groups. Possibly five or six people, possibly more. The local enforcement has identified one route they use for approach but hasn't been able to catch the timing right."

  "Pre-scouted positions," Sven said. He had been eating through most of this with the focused attention of someone who separates physical maintenance from information processing but applies genuine interest to both. "That means they know the road and they pick the spots. Which means they're local or have been local long enough to do the scouting."

  "That's the relay agent's inference, yes."

  "The section of road they use," Luc said. "Is it the hill passage before the bridge at Coldrun, or the forest section between the second and third waypoints?"

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  Vayne looked at him with the specific expression of someone recalibrating a category. "The forest section," she said. "How did you identify those as the likely positions without having traveled the road?"

  "Terrain analysis. The relay network maps show the elevation profile and the vegetation density for this section, and I asked to review them this afternoon at the relay station here. The forest section between waypoints two and three has the same characteristics as the position you were using this morning — reduced visibility, multiple approach angles, controllable choke point at the path's narrowest segment." He paused. "Which means we have a decision to make about how we approach it in three days."

  Vayne was quiet for a moment, in the way of someone who has been operating alone long enough that the experience of someone else engaging with a problem at her preferred level of precision is slightly unexpected. "You mapped the road ahead from a relay network chart this afternoon," she said.

  "And from the waypoint markers, and from the geological notes in the guild office here, and from the information you just provided about the timing of the recent incidents." He looked at her. "The information fits together differently when you have multiple sources."

  She looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at Sven. "Is he always like this?"

  "Since he was four," Sven said, with the tone of someone who has made his peace with this being true and finds it largely positive. "You get used to it."

  "I don't think you get used to it," she said, thoughtfully. "I think you learn to bring more information."

  Luc found this to be a reasonable response.

  ?

  The relay station's bird post had a message waiting for Vayne when they checked in the morning — a coded strip of paper, the Dawnspire Academy's institutional shorthand, which she read with a speed that suggested she had been working in this notation system for years. Her expression while she read it was the expression of someone receiving information that changes a calculation. She folded it into the interior pocket of her repaired coat and looked at them.

  "My research contact in the southern settlements has moved up his available window," she said. "I have three weeks less time than I expected to reach him before he leaves for the eastern coast survey."

  "Which means you need to move faster," Sven said.

  "Which means the bandit situation in the forest section becomes less negotiable in terms of route alternatives." She said this with the directness of someone naming a problem rather than complaining about it. "I had planned to take the eastern bypass around the forest section if the timing suggested the organized group was active. That bypass adds four days."

  "We don't take the bypass," Luc said.

  She looked at him.

  "We go through the forest section and we don't have a problem with the bandits," he said, which sounded simple and was not, but which he had already planned for in the morning while she was at the relay station, having identified the night before that this was the likely shape of the decision they would need to make. "The organized groups use pre-scouted positions because pre-scouted positions guarantee approach angles that they control. What changes the calculation is having someone in the group who can feel them before they commit to the approach, which changes who controls what."

  Vayne absorbed this. "You can feel people in forest cover from what range?"

  "Thirty yards reliably in this terrain. Fifty if the substrate is consistently layered."

  She looked at the relay post message in her hand, and then at him, and he could see her running the variables — his Tremor Sense range against the forest section's dimensions, the organized group's probable approach timing, the cost of four days lost against the risk of the through route. She was fast with variables. She had her answer in approximately the time it took him to finish his tea.

  "Through the forest section," she said. "But I want to know your contingency if the range is shorter than thirty yards."

  "Sven," Luc said simply.

  Sven looked up from his own tea with the expression of someone who has heard his name used as a contingency plan before and considers it a reasonable use of his name. "I'll be fine," he said.

  "That's not the same as a contingency," she said.

  "It really kind of is," Sven told her, with complete sincerity, and Vayne looked at him for a moment and appeared to decide that this was true in a way she hadn't initially processed, and accepted it.

  They left Torven's Bridge at dawn.