The last scribe left late that evening. The groceries she'd gone to collect sat untouched on the kitchen counter. Bertha had been in a state since the window — cleaning clean surfaces, muttering at the walls.

"Does demons not eat? Can they take any form like that? Your honorable name, my lady." She aimed this at Hathora's back. "Sullied once more by your brother's deeds. A disgrace."

Once Bertha had stormed to her room, it was the first time Hjordis had been alone with her aunt since arriving. Hathora, in simpler garments now, gray hair loose, produced a soup of beets and potatoes. Hjordis looked down at the yellow thick liquid. Poked a beet with her spoon.

Hathora cleared her throat. "You'll return home to your mother. First thing by morning."

"Aye." Hjordis shrugged. "I'll find me way."

"Nonsense. I've arranged a cart. The woods aren't safe with that lunatic on the loose."

"Thank you, Aunt."

Hathora slurped loudly from her own ladle, dark eyes fixed on Hjordis — on her slouch, her face that spoke neither of sadness nor anger. Or anything, really.

What was there to return to. Farm work. Watching her mother drink herself to sleep. Then what.

The fruition ritual.

Had it worked.

Was she going to—

No. She winced. Barren. Always barren, that's what they said. The moving sunflowers had been his magic. Not Trinny's. Trig-wee Beardaughter. A man with a woman's name. A man who'd known forbidden magic and known her father and had wanted her to kill him.

And she couldn't give him that. Not out of mercy. Out of pure spite.

She sat with that a moment.

Hjordis looked up and met Hathora's searching stare.

"Me da." She turned the spoon in the bowl. "What did he really set out to do in Zyrellia, all those years. All those trips back and forth." A pause. "What was so important he'd rather live there than with me and Mam."

Hathora's answer was calm. Expected. "Your father was sent to find the Seer Magistrate Oakenshield and bring him safely to Cora. He died ensuring the Seer's gifts didn't fall into enemy hands."

"Not that." Hjordis set the spoon down. "The paper magic. Why did he learn it, and why did Trinny — the Zyrellian — ken the same?"

Hathora swallowed. Looked at her. Then slurped more soup, tore a piece of two-day-old bread, cleaned her bowl with it.

"I don't know." She chewed, jaw working slowly. Swallowed. "However. There was a story Oskar kept returning to. Held great significance, he said. Of an acorn, a bear and an oak. A prophecy from the former Soothsayer of Cora — searching for her successor. Coranor remains powerful because of its Seers. Oskar died in service of that." She set the bread down. "Nothing more."

Hjordis looked back at her soup. The beet sat at the bottom, dark and stubborn. She didn't press. Hathora's nothing more was a door closing, and Hjordis had spent enough of her life on the wrong side of closed doors to know when pushing was worth it.

She ate the beet. It tasted of earth and old water.

Outside, Greenlake went on without them.

She slept that night in the sunflower room despite the shattered window letting in cold air and sounds from the dark town below. Sudden wails in the night, a crying babe, the occasional scuffle of cats and wild dogs barking. A late cart rolling over cobblestone.

The melody reached her ears when she was just about to fade into worried dreams. Then she was fully awake.

She lay in the dark staring up at the faint sunflowers and listened to it drift up from the street below. A minor key thing, familiar, old, the kind of tune that predated the words that had been put to it.

She was at the broken window before she'd decided to go back to sleep or not.

The mist sat low over Greenlake's cobblestones, the city not quite begun for the day, two lanterns casting more shadow than light. Below, a dark figure moved along the opposite wall — tall, taller and thinner than any figure Hjordis had seen pass through Arable, the loose-limbed amble of someone who'd been sitting on their legs the whole day and was just up and about. Magistracy colours on the knee-long buffcoat, long cape trailing behind them. Tricorn hat, standard issue of the night guards. A dense stack of yellowing papers under one arm.

The figure pressed a sheet to the wall. Stepped back.

Two faces stared out at the empty street. Mads's dark familiar face beside a stranger's — blond, lean, the nose that turned up. Hjordis pulled on her dress, secured the belt. Took the sword.

The mist was dense, swallowing the sound of her boots on the cobblestone. The figure had its back to her, collar tucked up, pressing another poster further down the wall with a long pale hand, humming to itself, the melody floating back to her, eerily familiar and haunting.

She stopped six feet away. The sword warmed in her grip. It glowed, becoming a beacon in the mist. She gripped it tighter.

"Ye came back," she said. "Didn't ye."

The figure went still. Not startled — it had known she was there. The feet stopped precisely, the way a clock stops between ticks. The tricorn hat swayed to the side, a sharp heeled boot flung out and it turned in a sharp swirl of fabric.

The face was wrong in a way Hjordis couldn't immediately assemble into words. The eyes sat at an angle that was slightly off, tilted and sharp, the irises a pale gold, reflecting strangely in the lantern light, the whites bloodshot. The nose ran straight as a blade, narrow-nostrilled, centred in a face that was both youthful and feminine and wrinkled and dry at the same time.

White hair fell loose beneath the tricorn, some of it gathered into thick braids weighted with small rings — brass and bone and something of dark stone, each one carved with letters found on the blade at her hip.

Ungdo, Tomsun had called it.

The figure lifted the poster it was holding. Held it at arm's length beside its own strange face, white eyebrows raised, as if offering a comparison.

"Come back, miss?" The voice was low but feminine in its measured register, lilting in a lisping accent she couldn't place. Like Coraneese was her second language. "I believe you may have mistaken me for someone else."

The sword pulsed. Warm, then warmer, the heat climbing steadily up through the grip and into her palm and up her wrist.

Hjordis didn't lower it. Didn't raise it either. She just stood there with the heavy weapon at her side and watched the strange tall woman watch her with those tilted unblinking eyes.

"Who are ye," Hjordis said finally.

"Let's just say I'm someone who finds it useful to know which way the wind is moving before the storm arrives." The woman tucked the remaining posters under her arm, unhurried, and turned to look at the two faces on the wall. Just shadows in the dusky light. "You are becoming paranoid, Miss Helmbane. An understandable development, given the week."

Then a slight tilt of the head, the motion too fluid, like a cat tracking a mildly interesting bird. "I have no interest in wearing anyone's face. It is a vulgar business."

Hjordis swallowed. If the woman wasn't the Changeling, then who was she? She stepped closer, mist curling around her red worn dress.

"The sword doesn't agree with ye."

"The sword has opinions about a great many things." The stranger looked at it with frozen attention. Not at Hjordis but the blade itself. "Like people, mithril always does. It's not just metal, but a fusion of blood and soul. Admirable quality, depending on which soul." The gold eyes came back to her face — not blinking, never blinking. Then she smiled, revealing a dark patchwork of missing teeth, or they were simply rotten, Hjordis couldn't discern which in the faint light. The few that remained white and healthy were sharp. Canine. Hjordis couldn't look straight at that face.

"I wish to see him caught and freed. Preferably freed before caught. I find his fate most—" a pause, slight, deliberate, "—interesting."

The mist was the only thing that moved between the lanterns. Hjordis's pulse kicked hard in her throat. "Ye know him."

"I know of him." She took one halting step forward, her slim boots struggling to find purchase on the rough cobblestone. "As you do now. As several others are beginning to. The dead stir in their graves. The earth itself grows weary of this impostor." She looked back at the poster — at Tryggve's blond face rendered in a perpetual smug expression, Mads's rough likeness beside him. "I met the Zyrellian once and I underestimated his power. I got to pay for it in full." A small sound that might have been amusement. "A full cast of impenetrable moonstone." 

With no more explanation she tucked the tricorn lower against the mist, turned and walked away down the cobblestones in the same loose-limbed amble, unhurried, the melody resuming beneath her breath as though she had never been interrupted.

With the heart in her throat, Hjordis moved to the new wanted notice.

500 gold galleons. Alive and whole.

Hjordis read it twice. The bounty sat below Tryggve's upturned nose in the same flat print as the instructions. Alive and whole. She couldn't look at Mads's face.

Had to be hundreds before Mads, maybe. The Changeling didn't begin in Arable. It had been moving through the world for god knew how many years and the Magistracy wanted it back in one piece to study the mechanism, the way a collector wants a broken clock — not to fix it, to understand how it was made.

She called after the woman before she'd decided to.

"D'ye know how to end him." The words carried in the mist. "Actually end him. He was bluffing before — asking me to stab him. Wanting me to release somethin'."

The footsteps stopped.

The tall figure turned. Stepped back toward her, the long frame folding slightly at the middle as it bent down to her eye level, the gold eyes level with hers now.

"He wasn't bluffing." Not unkind. Simply factual. "He wants to die. Has wanted it for a long time. The Magistracy wants him whole because someone made him this way and everyone wants to understand how." A pause. "Most of all the one who did it."

Hjordis held the stare. "Who made him."

"That's the question everyone is circling." The figure straightened slowly back to its full height. Then one long pale finger extended toward the sword at Hjordis's hip.

"Rumenor."

The sword warmed at the sound of its own name.

"Only way to kill the boy is with that blade." The finger retracted. The face arranged itself into something stern, the gold eyes direct. "And only you may hold it. You know this already."

Hjordis looked down at the sword. At the grip worn to Oskar's hand and then adjusted. Her hand now.

"He is waiting for you in Graywell," the woman said. "And you're waiting for fate to choose for you." The tricorn tilted. "Fate has limited patience, Miss Helmbane. Less than you might think."

The woman turned. The mist swirled around the long Magistracy cape and the stack of faces tucked under one arm and the melody resumed, drifting back through the grey air, unhurried, already half-dissolved.

Hjordis stood in the street with a glowing sword and no explanation and thought: I am still in bed. The window is broken. The cold air came in all night. This is what happens.

She turned back toward Hathora's door.

The sword pulsed once in her hand. Warm. Not the warmth of the mist or the morning or her own blood moving. Something older. Something that knew her palm.

She stopped.

Turned back.

"Which direction is Graywell?"

The footsteps stopped. The tall figure paused without turning, the cape settling around it.

A bored shrug, one shoulder lifting and dropping. "Whichever way the wind blows." A beat. "Which I mean quite literally. Follow the wind." The head tilted, almost imperceptibly. "Or ask the way. The latter works considerably better for you than for me."

A click of the tongue.

Behind Hjordis, hooves.

She spun. A black steed materialised from the blue-grey mist at the market end of the street, moving at a slow purposeful walk, breath clouding, saddle and reins strapped and empty. The Magistracy seal pressed into the leather of the saddle caught the lantern light as it stopped beside her. The horse turned its enormous head and looked down at her with calm patience.

Hjordis looked at the horse. The horse looked back. Its nostrils flared. One hoof struck cobblestone once, a single sharp report in the quiet street.

Had it been there the whole time.

She turned back to the woman.

The woman had removed her tricorn.

Beneath it, pressing out through the thick white hair on both sides of the strange tilted face, ears rose — not the small rounded ears of any living person Hjordis had seen in her twenty-two years in Arable and Greenlake and everywhere between. Long. Tapered to a point. Pressed flat by the hat and now straightening slowly, until they stood at their full height above the white braids and the hair rings and the face that was both ancient and ageless.

Hjordis stumbled back. Her shoulder hit the horse's warm flank and she barely felt it.

An elf.

A genuine, living, standing-in-the-street-before-her elf.

In Greenlake. In the mist. Handing out wanted posters and urging her to use her father's sword to kill a man.

"Safe travels, dear sprite." The wave that followed was stiff, the elbow barely bending, the long fingers extended in a gesture that hadn't been fashionable in any century Hjordis could name. The tricorn went back on, and the woman winced visibly as the brim pressed the ears down again, and then she walked into the mist at the same loose-limbed amble as before, and the melody went with her, and the mist closed, and she was gone.

The street was empty.

Hjordis stood beside a horse that wasn't hers, with a sword that glowed and a name of a town she'd never been to.

She looked at the horse. The horse looked back down its nose at her with white showing in its big eyes, tossed its mane once, and stamped.

Ready, it seemed, to go kill the unkillable.

Hjordis pressed her palm flat against the sword's grip. The warmth held steady.

"Right," she said, to no one. Or perhaps to him.

She put her foot in the stirrup.