The merchant’s name was Doran, and he looked exactly like the kind of man who expected the world to cheat him if he blinked too long.

  He stood beside a two-wheeled supply wagon in the trading yard, arms folded, watching laborers finish loading crates beneath a patched canvas cover. Nails, tools, sacks of grain, lamp oil, rope. Nothing glamorous. Just the kind of cargo people only noticed when it failed to arrive.

  When Aelius stepped up to him, Doran’s eyes went first to the bronze tablet hanging at his chest.

  Then to Lucius.

  Then back to Aelius.

  “So you’re the one who pulled my posting.”

  Aelius nodded.

  Doran studied him a moment longer, as if deciding whether to be disappointed now or later.

  “You don’t look like much.”

  “That’s usually when people make mistakes,” Aelius said.

  Doran stared at him, then gave a short breath through his nose that might have been the beginning of a laugh.

  “Good,” he said. “I prefer confidence to begging.”

  He hooked a thumb toward the wagon.

  “Small run. Half a day east to a settlement called Red Creek. Tools, grain, a few other things people start shouting about when they don’t arrive on time.”

  He lowered his voice slightly.

  “Road’s been ugly this week. Two merchants came back missing mules. One came back missing a driver.”

  “Bandits?” Aelius asked.

  Doran shrugged.

  “Bandits, beasts, desperate idiots, same difference when you’re the one getting robbed.”

  Aelius looked once at the wagon, once at the road beyond the yard, then back to Doran.

  “You want the wagon delivered intact.”

  “I’d settle for delivered.”

  “We’ll get it there.”

  Doran’s eyes narrowed slightly, weighing him again.

  “You talk like someone older.”

  Aelius said nothing.

  Doran snorted.

  “Fine. If you’re fast enough to take the posting and good enough to earn that tablet, I’ll trust the guild before I trust my instincts.”

  He slapped the wagon rail.

  “We leave now.”

  Lucius walked beside Aelius as they moved into position. Doran climbed onto the driver’s bench, gathered the reins, and flicked them lightly. The wagon creaked forward.

  The town thinned behind them faster than Lucius expected.

  Workshops gave way to scattered sheds, then fenced plots of hard ground, then long stretches of open road broken by scrub and old stone. The farther they went, the less the land looked claimed. Not empty. Just uninterested in who owned it.

  Aelius took the left side of the wagon.

  Lucius walked near the rear wheel.

  At first the road felt simple enough. Just walking. Just watching.

  Then Aelius spoke without looking at him.

  “You keep checking behind us.”

  Lucius glanced up.

  “I know.”

  “Stop doing it.”

  Lucius frowned.

  “That seems stupid.”

  “It is if you stop paying attention. It isn’t if you stop wasting attention.”

  Aelius pointed with two fingers, not turning his head.

  “Watch the road edges. Watch where the ground changes color. Watch places something could wait without being seen.”

  Lucius followed the gesture.

  The road ran between low hills and broken stone outcrops, with dry grass gathered in clumps where the wind hadn’t stripped it flat.

  “There,” Aelius said quietly. “And there.”

  Lucius narrowed his eyes.

  At first he saw nothing.

  Then he understood what Aelius meant.

  Places where the earth dipped.

  A patch of brush just thick enough to hide a crouched body.

  A cracked stretch of old wall half swallowed by dirt.

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  He swallowed and kept walking.

  After a while Aelius spoke again.

  “When you walk with a weapon, don’t carry it like luggage.”

  Lucius adjusted the staff in his hands.

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  Aelius reached over, shifted Lucius’s grip by two finger widths, then let go.

  “If you need it, the difference between ready and not ready is small enough to miss until you’re bleeding.”

  Lucius looked down at his hands.

  The new grip felt awkward.

  Then, after a few steps, it didn’t.

  Doran glanced down from the bench.

  “You train him on the road?”

  Aelius kept walking.

  “The road is where he’ll need it.”

  Doran considered that and nodded once.

  “Fair.”

  The first hour passed without trouble.

  The second did not.

  Aelius noticed the change before anything showed itself.

  The mules’ ears twitched.

  One of them snorted and pulled slightly against the harness.

  The breeze shifted, carrying a smell that didn’t belong to dry grass and wagon oil.

  Something rank.

  Musky. Wet. Animal.

  He lifted a hand.

  “Stop.”

  Doran pulled the reins immediately.

  The wagon shuddered to a halt.

  Lucius tightened his grip on the staff.

  “What is it?”

  Aelius didn’t answer right away.

  He stepped toward the right edge of the road and looked down the slope where scrub and stones ran into a narrow patch of shadow beneath a broken rise.

  Then he saw it.

  A lean creature, low to the ground and too long through the body, slipping between brush with the cautious patience of something that had learned roads meant easy food. Grey hide. Long jaw. Front claws built for pulling rather than running.

  Not large.

  Large enough.

  Doran muttered a curse under his breath.

  “Road scavenger.”

  The creature’s head lifted. Its nostrils flared.

  It had already picked the mules.

  Aelius took another step forward.

  “Stay with the wagon,” he said.

  Lucius bristled immediately.

  “I can help.”

  “You can listen.”

  That shut him up just long enough.

  The creature moved first.

  It came up the slope fast, not with the wild charge of something mindless but with ugly, practiced speed, angling toward the nearest mule.

  Aelius met it halfway.

  The wooden staff snapped out in a straight line and cracked against the side of its jaw. The beast twisted with the hit but didn’t fall. It whipped a clawed forelimb toward his midsection.

  Aelius pivoted.

  The claws cut air.

  He drove the butt of the staff down into its shoulder joint. The creature staggered, snarled, and came around low, trying to get inside the weapon’s reach.

  Lucius saw the shift too late.

  “Aelius!”

  The creature lunged again.

  This time Lucius moved.

  Not well.

  Not cleanly.

  But he moved.

  He darted in from the side and slammed the end of his staff against the beast’s flank hard enough to pull its attention for half a heartbeat.

  That was enough.

  Aelius stepped in and brought the staff down in a sharp diagonal strike across the back of the creature’s neck.

  Bone cracked.

  The scavenger hit the dirt and writhed once.

  Then stopped.

  The road went still.

  Doran let out the breath he’d been holding.

  “Well,” he said from the bench, voice tighter than before, “I’m glad I paid for the tablet and not the face.”

  Aelius nudged the carcass once with his foot, making sure it was finished.

  Lucius stared at it.

  His pulse was hammering. His hands shook, though only a little.

  Aelius turned and looked at him.

  “You stepped in too early.”

  Lucius blinked.

  “What?”

  “You moved before it committed.”

  Lucius looked offended.

  “It was about to get past you.”

  “No,” Aelius said. “It was about to try.”

  He walked over and took Lucius’s staff gently but firmly.

  “Show me how you stood.”

  Lucius shifted into place, still breathing too hard.

  Aelius shook his head.

  “Too square. If it had turned on you, you would’ve been stuck where you were.”

  He adjusted Lucius’s forward foot with the end of the staff.

  “Angle yourself. Not much. Just enough to move either way.”

  Lucius reset.

  Aelius handed the weapon back.

  “Again.”

  Lucius did it again.

  “Better.”

  Doran climbed down from the wagon and stared at the dead scavenger.

  “You saying the boy shouldn’t have helped?”

  “I’m saying he should help correctly.”

  Lucius’s mouth tightened.

  Aelius looked at him.

  “You distracted it. That was pretty good. Your feet weren’t.”

  Lucius absorbed that for a second, then nodded once.

  “Fine.”

  Aelius started walking again.

  “Good. Then remember it.”

  Doran dragged the carcass off the road with some effort, muttering under his breath the entire time. When he climbed back onto the wagon bench, he looked at Lucius differently than before. Not with warmth. With revised expectations.

  The road continued.

  The air felt sharper after the fight, like everything had edges now.

  Lucius kept replaying the moment in his head.

  The rush of movement.

  The sound when Aelius’s staff struck bone.

  How little hesitation there had been.

  He looked down at his own hands.

  Not shaking anymore.

  By late afternoon they reached Red Creek, which turned out to be less a settlement than a cluster of buildings stubbornly refusing to die. A mill, two storage sheds, a smithy no bigger than a stable, and a scattering of homes gathered around a creek that had probably once justified the name more than it did now.

  Doran delivered the supplies.

  The settlement master counted the crates twice and still looked unhappy, which seemed to reassure Doran rather than offend him.

  By the time the wagon was unloaded, the sun had already begun to sink.

  They camped just outside the settlement wall, if a waist-high ring of rough timber deserved the title.

  Doran ate in silence for a while before finally speaking.

  “That beast wasn’t the first thing on the road this week.”

  “It won’t be the last either,” Aelius said.

  Doran looked at him across the firelight.

  “You always sound like you already know what people are about to say.”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  At that he almost had let out a smirk

  Doran stared at him, then laughed once and shook his head.

  “Right. Well. As long as you also know how to get me back to town in one piece tomorrow, we’ll call that a useful talent.”

  Later, when Doran had rolled himself in a blanket and the fire had burned low, Aelius sat a short distance from the wagon with Lucius.

  The night air was colder than the day had been.

  Lucius held the staff across his knees.

  Aelius watched him for a while before speaking.

  “Breathe.”

  Lucius frowned.

  “I am breathing.”

  “Not well.”

  That earned him a quiet glare.

  Aelius ignored it.

  “Again. Slow. In through the nose. Hold it. Let it settle before you let it go.”

  Lucius did as he was told.

  The first breath was rough.

  The second steadier.

  Aelius placed two fingers lightly against the center of Lucius’s back.

  “Feel where the breath stops.”

  Lucius stayed still.

  Aelius’s voice lowered.

  “Don’t force anything. Just pay attention.”

  The night stayed quiet around them. No shouting, no chains, no furnaces.

  Just wind, the creek, and a few distant insects.

  Lucius followed the breathing pattern again.

  This time something caught.

  A sensation he didn’t have a word for.

  Heat, but not outside him.

  Inside.

  His eyes opened.

  “I felt something.”

  “I know.”

  Lucius’s breathing sharpened again.

  “What was that?”

  “Try again.”

  Lucius exhaled hard, annoyed, but did it.

  Breath in.

  Hold.

  Settle.

  Release.

  The heat gathered faster this time, moving down his arm almost by instinct.

  Then a tiny spark jumped at the edge of his palm.

  Lucius jerked and the spark vanished instantly.

  He stared at his own hand.

  For a moment he said nothing at all.

  Then, very quietly:

  “Did you see that?”

  Aelius looked at his palm.

  “Yes.”

  Lucius swallowed.

  “Was that me?”

  “Yes.”

  The answer landed harder than Lucius expected.

  He looked back down at his hand as if it belonged to someone else.

  He tried again.

  Another breath.

  Another slow gathering.

  This time the spark came cleaner. Small. Weak. Barely more than a bright point of orange light.

  But it stayed.

  Only for a second.

  Then it died.

  Lucius sat there, staring into the dark where it had been.

  Aelius watched him without speaking.

  He had seen enough.

  Fire.

  Just as he thought.

  Not random heat, not friction, not a wandering response to stress.

  A real affinity.

  And if the structure beneath it matured the way he believed it could, ordinary fire would only be the beginning.

  Lucius finally looked up.

  “What does that mean?”

  Aelius’s gaze returned to the fading embers of the campfire.

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