The first thing through the wheat was the gate.
The night in the tool shed had given him back a working clarity he hadn't had in four days. He had slept. He had eaten the last of what he carried. He had patted the hay out of the robe as best he could. Now the sun was clearing the treeline behind him and the wheat was turning gold one row at a time as the light reached it, and at the top of the rise, against a sky gone from pink to pale blue, the palisade of the village stood up sharp.
Two figures on the watchtower. One on each side of the gate below.
He came on slow. Not because he was tired, though he was, but so the men on the tower could watch him the whole way and decide, while he was still far off, what kind of thing he was. He kept his hands visible. He kept the hood of the robe back so his face was clear. Not once did he let his hand drift toward the daggers at his belt.
Thirty meters from the gate, one of the guards moved.
Both did, actually. They stepped out from under the overhang of the gatehouse and into the light, and the light picked up the armor: boiled leather plated with dark iron, mantles of dyed wool, two long spears with heads that were not for show. They moved with the flat economy of men who had done this many times. They planted themselves shoulder-to-shoulder across the path, spears crossed at chest height.
The spear butts came down on the packed earth in perfect unison. Two sharp cracks.
"Halt! Tko ste i odakle dolazite?"
The voice came from the older of the two. Broad shoulders, brown beard going gray at the edges, eyes in the shadow of the helmet that Dante couldn't read.
The words hit him like a door closing. They weren't any language he recognized. The rhythm was wrong for everything he'd ever heard: hard consonants grinding against soft vowels, syllables colliding in ways no language he'd studied in school had prepared him for.
His throat closed around the word he was about to say.
(ALICE.)
[On it. Give me a moment.]
The older guard's hand tightened on his spear. He had mistaken Dante's silence for defiance.
"Govori, momče."
That one was sharper.
[I have rough meaning from tone and context. He's asking who you are and where you're from. The second one was "Speak, boy." I do not have the full grammar yet. I need more of the language before I can give you precise sentences. For now, I'll feed you root words and you'll have to improvise the rest. It will sound broken. That may work in your favor.]
(Understood.)
Dante raised both hands, palms out.
"Virgil," he said carefully. The word came out of his own mouth without any help. A name. That worked in any language.
He tried a full sentence. The words came slow. ALICE was working them into his head one at a time, rough and stitched, and he could feel the gaps where the grammar should have been.
"Ja... Virgil. Šuma." He gestured behind him, toward the forest. "Bježim. Mjesto spavati. Molim."
I — Virgil. Forest. Running. Place to sleep. Please.
It was the speech of a child. It was also the exact right speech for a boy who had walked out of a hostile forest at dawn covered in dried blood, and he watched the two guards' shoulders shift: a small, involuntary softening that said this one is not going to kill us today.
The younger guard spoke first. Up close, he was Dante's age, maybe a little older. Blond hair sticking out from under the helmet in uneven tufts. Voice that hadn't settled yet.
"He's a foreigner, Tomás."
"I heard him."
"Look at him. He's alone."
"I see him, boy. Shut up."
Tomás, the older one, took a step closer. His eyes went from Dante's face to the robe to the daggers and back to the face. Not a friendly inspection. A professional one.
"Where are you from?"
ALICE fed the words a half-second ahead of Dante's need for them.
"Daleko," he said, slowly. Far. "Druga... druga strana."
The other side.
Tomás narrowed his eyes. "Other side of what."
Dante did not have the words for the world. He picked the honest gesture instead and just turned and pointed, behind him, at the line of the deep forest on the horizon.
"Šuma. Četiri noći."
Forest. Four nights.
The two guards looked at each other.
Whatever passed between them was unambiguous. Nobody walked out of the deep forest after four nights. Nobody did that on their own. Not at his age. Not in the shape he was in.
Tomás grunted. Not sympathy. Just a man revising his estimate of the boy in front of him.
"You have papers?"
Dante shook his head.
"Ne."
"Money?"
"Ne."
The older guard spat on the ground. Not at Dante. Just sideways, in the direction of anything he held in contempt, which seemed to be a category that included most things.
"Another stray dog out of the trees. Boy, I'll tell you how it works here, and I'll tell you once. Oakhaven walls keep the monsters out. They don't keep the monsters in. You want to eat? You work. You want to sleep under a roof? You pay. You want a name on paper in this town? You go to the Guild and you earn it. Nobody here is giving you anything for being young and looking sad. You understand?"
Dante understood the tone. ALICE filled in the nouns.
He nodded.
Tomás held the look a little longer, then softened by one single degree.
"And where, exactly, is this mother of yours, that you're out here on your own?"
Dante understood that if he didn't lie to them, the gate to civilization would not open for him.
He chose to lie a bit.
"Mrtva." Dead. He made the word flat on purpose. Then, because it wasn't true the way the word was, he added: "Daleko."
Far.
A word that could mean dead or unreachable or both. It was close enough to honest that his mouth didn't taste wrong in it.
The younger guard's face did something complicated. The older one's did not, but his spear dropped a few inches.
A small notification in the corner of Dante's eye, quiet this time.
[Competence acquired: Deception → Lv.1.]
Then almost at once, a second one.
[Competence acquired: Language (Dort) → Lv.1.]
(ALICE.)
[You said just enough to be read as a runaway without lying badly. It will hold for now. The language is starting to take shape. Give it another hour of exposure and you will not need to sound like a child.]
Tomás stepped sideways, shifting the angle of his spear.
"Try the Guild. If they won't take you, try the almshouse. It's behind the church; they give bread if you sing for it. If the almshouse is full, find a farmer's stoop to sleep on and hope the dogs don't like your face. Do not — do not — sleep in the square. The watch picks up vagrants there every night and the old Sergeant likes a kicking."
He paused, then added, less for Dante than for himself: "And wash that blood off you as soon as you're inside. You're scaring my apprentice."
The younger guard went red.
Tomás thumped the butt of his spear once on the gate timbers. Inside, a chain started to ratchet. The heavy doors split down the middle and began to open.
"Go on, boy."
Dante bowed his head, not deeply, not performed, just enough, and walked through.
He didn't look back, but he knew the younger one was watching the whole way through the gate. Not hostile. Not friendly. Just noting.
Behind him the gate groaned closed.
Oakhaven was not a city.
Oakhaven was barely a town. Three hundred souls, maybe four, pressed together behind a palisade against a forest that would eat them if it could. The streets were packed earth and mud. The houses leaned into each other. The roofs were thatch going black with moss and soot, and what rose from the chimneys was the thin grey smoke of kitchen fires being built back up after the night.
The smell hit him first, not as bad as he'd feared (the cold took the edge off it), but layered. Animals. Old straw. The ferrous smell of a forge somewhere. Bread, faintly, from a direction he couldn't pin down.
He walked down the main lane. The town was waking up. A woman in a gray shawl was opening shutters on a ground-floor window and glanced at him once and looked away. An old man leading a donkey laden with firewood paused as he passed and watched him with unreadable eyes. A child of maybe six, half-dressed, stared openly from a doorway until her mother's hand appeared from inside and pulled her back.
(They know I'm new.)
[Your body language is announcing it. You keep checking corners. You keep adjusting your weight on the balls of your feet, the way you did in the forest. People who belong here don't walk like they're expecting the ground to attack them.]
(Fair enough.)
He did not know how to fix that. He kept walking.
The lane opened into a square. Three buildings around it, four if you counted the well in the middle.
A chapel of gray stone, larger than it had any right to be in a town this size, with two squat towers and a single tall spire. A long timber building with iron-shuttered windows and an ironwork sign overhead: a sword crossed with a drinking horn. The Hunters' Guild. And a squat stone-and-timber tavern with a sign showing a howling red wolf. The Red Wolf.
(Chapel, Guild, tavern. Spirit, law, vice. The three founding forces of every civilization from the dawn of time. I used to study this in history class.)
He was intending to go to the Guild first. That was where money came from, eventually, and money was what he needed. But as he crossed the square, the Sixth Sense tugged at him. Not the sharp dodge it threw when something meant him harm. Softer than that. A patient pressure, low and certain. Over here.
Toward the chapel.
He hesitated. Then he followed it.
The Sixth Sense had carried him through four days of forest and never once led him wrong.
Now it was pulling him toward the chapel. And it only ever pulled him toward something that mattered.
