They come at midnight.

As they always have. As their fathers did before them — the same torches, the same prayers, the same procession through the forest the oldest among them still call the Dead Road, because nothing that walks it willingly returns unchanged.

They believe in him the way they believe in God.

Completely. Tremblingly. Without having seen his face.

Draven watches from the battlements as they emerge from the tree line. Forty, perhaps more. He can smell them from here. Fear has a scent. After seven centuries he finds it neither appetizing nor repellent — simply information.

They have someone with them.

At the procession's center — surrounded, bound, held upright by two men gripping her like she might detonate. She is not struggling. The stillness of someone who has exhausted every other option and arrived, finally, at the far shore of it.

He descends.

The gate opens as he approaches. He steps through into the torchlight and the crowd goes quiet — not silent, he can still hear all forty-three heartbeats hammering in sudden unison, the ancient chorus of not me, please not me —

He stops. Looks at them.

The elder opens his mouth.

"My lord Thorn. We come in the old way. With an offering—"

"I know why you come."

The elder closes his mouth.

Draven looks at her.

Kneeling in the mud, wrists bound, chin up. Her eyes find his without flinching — and she does not look away. He reads her the way he reads everything: completely, without mercy. The mud on her knees. The rope at her wrists. The bruise along her jaw, recent, still darkening.

He looks back at the elder.

"Who struck her."

Silence.

"My — my lord?"

"The bruise. Someone struck her. Who."

Nobody speaks. Nobody moves. A man near the right side of the procession looks at the ground.

Draven looks at him.

The man looks up.

Then Draven moves.

It is not theatrical. Seven centuries have burned away any interest in performance. It is simply fast, and final, and when it is over there are considerably fewer torches and the remaining procession has discovered a previously unknown capacity for speed.

The forest swallows their screaming.

Then the silence after.

Draven straightens. Looks at his hands. Looks at her.

Still kneeling. Still bound. Still here — not blank with shock, but present, watching him with an expression he cannot immediately classify.

It has been a very long time since he encountered something he could not classify.

He crosses to her. Crouches down. Studies her face from two feet away with the same cold attention he gives everything, and finds — beneath the hostility and the hunger and the centuries of hatred for everything her kind represents —

Something.

Unnamed. Unwelcome.

He reaches out and breaks the rope at her wrists without ceremony.

"Get up," he says.

Not cruel. Not kind. The distinction is fine but it exists.

He does not offer his hand.

He does not examine why, when she rises, he looks away.