The carriage Sera had arranged was unremarkable in every way that mattered — a merchant transport vehicle, the kind that moved goods and occasional passengers between regional estates and the capital, with a driver who had been paid well enough to ask no questions and not well enough to remember faces afterward.
Kai sat with a leather case containing two changes of clothes appropriate to a traveling scholar, a collection of genuine academic texts on pre-systematization essence-script that Sera had sourced from somewhere in under two days, and a folder of correspondence establishing "Magister Hale Corren" as a research fellow affiliated with a small but real academic institute in the eastern provinces.
The name had made him pause when Sera first presented it.
"Hale," he'd said.
