He came out of the forest at the edge of a wide rolling field of wheat.

The wheat was *gold*. Tall as his shoulder. It moved in the late afternoon breeze in long slow waves, an entire ocean of grain in motion at once, and the smell of it — warm earth and ripe grain and human work — hit him like a physical thing.

He stood at the edge of the wheat for a long time.

He stood there because he couldn't believe it. Because for two days he had let himself, in the very back of his mind, accept the possibility that the cat had been wrong, that the village had been gone for years, that he was going to walk and walk and walk and find nothing. He had built up a small dark apparatus of *what to do if there is no village* and he had not realized how much weight that apparatus had been carrying until the wheat was *here* in front of him and the apparatus could be set down.

The sky above the wheat was turning the pale gold of late afternoon, with two hours of light still in it. The sun was low but not low enough. And on the far side of the field, at the top of a low rise, was a *wall*.

Not a city wall. A village wall — heavy timbers driven into the ground in a tight palisade, with sharpened tops and a crude wooden gatehouse and two squat watchtowers at the corners. Inside the wall, just visible above the timber, the thatched roofs of small buildings. A single tall stone spire — a chapel, maybe — rising up into the pale gold sky like a finger.

His eyes filled.

They filled and overflowed before he could stop them. The tears ran down his face — different tears than the ones in the tree, different tears than the ones during the laziness scolding, different than any tears he had cried in his life. These were not bitter. These were the relief of a body that had finally, after days of carrying the possibility of dying alone, set the possibility down.

(*I made it.*)

(*Grace, I made it.*)

(*Mom, I made it.*)

He wiped his face with the inside of his sleeve and started walking through the wheat.

The grain whispered against his arms as he walked. The smell of warm earth and harvest filled his head and pushed out, for a long blessed minute, every other thing that had happened to him since the cave.

He was halfway across the field when the thought caught up with him.

He stopped.

(*Wait.*)

[Yes,] ALICE said, before he finished thinking it. [I was going to say.]

(*They're not going to open the gate for me.*)

[No. They are not.]

He looked down at himself.

He looked like a horror.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The dark robe the cat had given him was streaked with dried blood — goblin's, his own — along the left side where the claws had opened him. The hem of it was mud and forest sap to the knee. His face, he was fairly sure, had blood on it too; he had been wiping at it without thinking with hands that had not been clean in days. His hands themselves were filthy. The bandage under the robe had bled through a few hours ago and the stain was *visible*, dark through the fabric even now.

A stranger. Armed. Bloody. Walking out of the forest at dusk.

(*If I were the man on that watchtower I would shoot me.*)

[Yes.]

(*I can't walk up to that gate like this. Not tonight. Even if they didn't shoot me, they'd never let me in. They'd think I brought whatever did this to me along behind me.*)

[Agreed.]

He stood in the middle of the wheat, half a kilometer from a village that was the first human thing he had seen in days, and understood that he was going to sleep outside its walls.

He almost laughed at the unfairness of it. It came out sounding more like a sigh.

(*Okay. Okay. Tomorrow. At dawn. When they can see me clearly and I can see them clearly.*)

[Yes. Look for shelter. There will be outbuildings on farmland like this. A tool shed. A lean-to. Somewhere with four walls and a roof would be best, but even three walls would do.]

He looked.

To the south of the village, where the wheat field gave way to what looked like a kitchen garden and a couple of smaller cultivated plots, he could see — barely, against the far treeline — the low shape of something built. Not a house. Too small. Too plain. A shed.

He changed direction and started walking toward it.

---

It took him half an hour to reach it. The light was fading by the time he did — not to darkness yet, but to the long soft gold of true evening, the kind of light that made every shadow in a field long and gentle. By the time the shed resolved into something he could see properly, his side was aching again and his legs were unsteady and he was beginning to understand just how much of his earlier walking had been powered by the sight of the village itself.

The shed was a tool shed. He knew it the moment he came up on the door. Farmer's shed. Ten feet by ten feet, rough timber walls gone silver with age, a single slatted door on leather hinges, a mossy shingled roof. He put his palm against the door. It opened under his hand with a small protesting groan.

Inside, the smell of old wood and iron and hay. A workbench along one wall, empty now, the scars of a thousand small jobs cut into its surface. A scythe leaned in one corner. A rake. A bundle of sacking. Two barrels. A loft above the workbench with hay in it — last year's, maybe, musty but dry.

(*Oh thank God.*)

[The sacking would make a pallet. The hay is a thicker one. Take both.]

He took both.

He made himself a nest on the floor under the workbench, where the wood of the bench made a kind of roof over him and the wall of the shed made the second wall and the barrels made the third. He piled the sacking under himself for softness. He pulled the hay up over himself for warmth. He set both daggers within arm's reach, unsheathed, on the packed earth floor.

He drank the last of the water in the skin.

He took one careful breath.

(*ALICE. How long until dawn.*)

[Eight hours, give or take. The sky has another forty minutes of light. Sleep will take most of what remains.]

(*Wake me at first light.*)

[I will.]

(*Is anything going to find me in here.*)

[I am watching. The Sixth Sense is active. I will wake you if anything approaches.]

He let his eyes close.

He slept.

He slept the way a body sleeps when the body has been asking to sleep for four days and has finally been allowed to. He did not dream. He did not wake when the temperature dropped overnight. He did not wake when a fox, far off, called once and went silent. He did not wake when, sometime in the middle of the night, a villager's dog two fields over barked at something and got tired of barking and went back to wherever dogs went when they got tired.

He woke when ALICE woke him.

---

The light coming in through the slats of the shed door was pale and thin.

First light. The blue-gray hour before the sun cleared the treeline. The wheat field outside would still be mostly silver and shadow. The village walls would be dark against a lightening sky. Somewhere a rooster was considering what to do with its morning.

[Good morning.]

(*Morning.*)

He sat up slowly. Every part of him complained. He had slept without moving for eight hours and his body was retaliating for the privilege. He stretched very carefully. His side hurt in the cauterization but not worse than yesterday — the bandage was still in place, the bleeding long since stopped, the dried blood on the robe flaking a little at the edges.

He stood up.

He shook the hay out of the robe as best he could. He swept off the sacking. He tried, with a handful of hay dipped in what was left of the dew he shook out of the thatching, to clean the worst of the dirt from his face and his hands. He could not do much. He still looked like a boy who had come out of a forest, which was what he was, and he was not going to be able to look like anything else until he had a bucket and soap and clothes that were not these clothes.

But he was *standing*. He was *fed*. His wound was *stable*. The sun was *rising*. He was about to walk up to the gate of a human settlement in full daylight, alone, with no monsters behind him and nothing in his hands that wasn't a dagger at his belt. That was the best he was going to get.

He settled the hood of the robe back so his face would be visible. He patted the inner pocket where the note from his mother had ridden, somehow, through all of it.

Still there.

He stepped out of the shed and shut the door behind him.

The wheat field in the dawn was a different field. The gold of the grain was muted and silver-tipped with dew. Mist lay in long low ribbons along the rows. The sky above was pale pink at the east and still that deep pre-dawn blue at the west.

And at the top of the rise, against the pale pink, the palisade of the village. The two watchtowers. The closed gate. A single thin column of smoke rising from somewhere inside — the first fire of the morning, a baker maybe, or a blacksmith lighting his forge.

Dante drew in one long breath. Let it out slowly.

He started walking toward the gate.

The first edge of the sun cleared the trees as he walked. The wheat around him began to brighten. The stone spire inside the walls caught the first true light of the morning and went gold at the top.

The gate waited.

[Name: Dante] [Age: 16] [Height: 175 cm] [Weight: 70 kg]
[Class: THIEF (Utility)] [Lv. 2]
[Blessing: SHADOW] [Rank: I]

[Competences:]
[ — Animals → Lv.1]
[ — Athletics → Lv.1]
[ — Botany → Lv.1]
[ — Combat → Lv.1]
[ — Daggers → Lv.1]
[ — Monsters → Lv.2]
[ — Survival → Lv.1]

[Skills:]
[ — Shadow Step]
[ — Conceal Presence]
[ — Stab (0/5)]

[Attribute:]
[ — Sixth Sense]