The road north was longer and considerably more boring than Ragna had prepared himself for.
He'd expected danger, in the vague, half-formed way a fifteen-year-old expects danger when he's spent five years training for it — bandits, perhaps, or wild beasts, something worth the sword riding at his hip.
What he got instead, for the better part of his first two days on the road, was dust, blisters he hadn't properly accounted for despite years of conditioning his legs for entirely different kinds of exertion, and a slowly dawning respect for exactly how far two hundred miles actually was when measured one tired footstep at a time.
He was seriously considering the merits of simply sitting down in the dirt and reconsidering his entire life's trajectory when the cart came rattling up the road behind him, drawn by a single sturdy mule and driven by a broad-shouldered man with a weathered, sun-browned face and the kind of easy, unhurried manner that suggested he'd long since stopped being surprised by anything the road put in front of him.
"You're walking like a man who's regretting a decision," the driver called out, drawing the cart level with Ragna's pace and slowing to match it. "North road doesn't forgive that particular mistake gently. Where you headed, son?"
"North," Ragna said, which wasn't much of an answer, and he knew it even as he said it.
The man laughed, a genuine, easy sound. "Bold direction to pick without a destination attached to it. I'm headed to the countryside past Herinhon myself — just finished trading at Manachy's markets, cart's half-empty now and my mule could use the company complaining about something other than me." He gestured toward the bench beside him with a broad, sun-spotted hand.
"Climb up. I won't charge you for it, and you look considerably more likely to survive the trip if you're not walking the whole way on legs that clearly weren't built for two hundred miles of dirt road."
Ragna hesitated only as long as pride demanded before climbing up beside him, his tired legs offering no argument whatsoever against the decision.
"Matan," the man said, offering a hand once Ragna had settled. "Farmer, trader, occasional philosopher when the road gets long enough to bore me into it."
"Ragna."
"Just Ragna?"
"Just Ragna," he agreed, and Matan, to his credit, didn't press further, simply nodded and flicked the reins to get the mule moving again at a pace considerably more generous than Ragna's own tired feet had managed.
They rode in comfortable, dust-worn silence for a while before Ragna's curiosity got the better of him, the same restless curiosity that had once pulled two forgotten books off a neglected library shelf and refused to let him put either of them down.
"You said you're headed past Herinhon. What's it like, in Hizosshu right now?"
Matan considered the question with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who'd clearly answered plenty of similar questions from plenty of similar strangers over the years. "Busy, is what it is. Busier than I've seen it in a good long while, if you want the honest answer." He adjusted the reins absently.
"They're recruiting hard. Every garrison town I passed through on my way south had banners up, criers in the market square, the whole show. Good pay, they're promising, and a fast path to rank if you've got any real skill with a blade."
"Recruiting for what?"
"The border, mostly. Word from my sources — and I do keep a few, farmer or not, you learn things moving goods across enough provinces — is that Hizosshu's shoring up its coastline against Dekeron. Nation across the ocean, powerful navy, been making noises about the eastern shipping lanes for the better part of a decade now. Hizosshu's not eager to find out what those noises turn into if left unanswered."
"And the Migardians? ... I heard they've become slaves. Obviously, Hizzoshu will put them to use" Ragna asked, careful to keep his voice level, though something in his chest had gone tight the moment the word left Matan's mouth.
Matan glanced sideways at him, a flicker of something assessing in the look — not suspicion exactly, just the quiet recalculation of a man who'd noticed a question land with more weight than the asking should have carried. "You've heard of them, then."
"I've heard the word. Not much more than that."
"Captives, mostly. Have been for longer than I've been alive, and my father before me, from what he used to tell it." Matan's easy tone didn't change, though something underneath it went a shade more careful.
"Hizosshu's using them as a buffer along the southern coast — first line against anything Dekeron tries to land there. Doesn't take much imagination to guess how that arrangement tends to go for the people standing in the buffer, if I'm being plain about it." He shrugged, the gesture of a man who'd made peace, however uneasily, with truths he didn't have the power to change.
"Not my politics to fix. I just move grain and cloth and try not to ask questions that get me in trouble with whoever's currently in charge of asking them back."
Ragna said nothing for a while, turning that over, some old unformed anger stirring in his chest that he didn't yet have a name for, though it sat uncomfortably close to the same place the two library books had left something raw and unresolved months earlier.
"What about the Temple of Eyes?" he asked eventually, steering the conversation somewhere he could actually think clearly about. "Do you know anything about it?"
"Only rumors, same as everyone outside its walls." Matan's tone lightened again, some of the earlier weight easing off it. "The Watchers keep to themselves, mostly. Don't recruit the way the army does — no banners, no criers. If they want you, from what I hear, they already know where to find you, and if they don't, no amount of showing up at the gate uninvited does much good." He glanced sideways again, curious now rather than merely careful. "You headed there?"
"I am."
"Then you'll find out what's necessary once you arrive, same as everyone else who's ever walked through those doors. Not much use in me guessing at it secondhand." Matan considered him a moment longer, something calculating and not unkind in the look.
"If it doesn't work out the way you're hoping, though — the recruiting stations aren't a bad fallback. A young man your age, decent with a blade by the look of that sword you're carrying — you could make a name for yourself out there. Same way the hero of the Battle of the Sixty Thousand did, once. Started as just another soldier, from what the stories tell it, before that battle turned him into something the whole continent still talks about."
Something in Ragna went very still.
"The Battle of the Sixty Thousand," he repeated slowly. "Who was he? The hero, I mean."
Matan raised an eyebrow at the sudden, sharp interest, but answered readily enough. "General Laiman Kuri, though these days most folks 'round Herinhon just call him Duke, more often than not. Duke of Herinhon now — magnificent city, sits right on the southern border, one of the finer holdings in all of Hizosshu, from what I've seen passing through it. Man survived a battle that killed sixty thousand others outright, alone, and Hizosshu's crown rewarded him with a dukedom for it. Can't say I blame them. Hard to argue with a man who walks out the sole survivor of something like that."
Kuri. The name sat strangely in Ragna's chest, familiar in a way he couldn't immediately place, before the memory surfaced — the old book in the library, the divine spear that answered to lightning, the ancient friend whose bloodline had carried a war for seven centuries.
"Kuri," Ragna said carefully. "That's an old name."
"Older than the dukedom, certainly. Whole clans still trace themselves back to some ancient bloodline or another out that way — half of Hizosshu's noble houses will tell you their family tree if you give them half a reason to. I couldn't tell you which stories are true and which ones got embellished somewhere around the fourth retelling." Matan shrugged again, easy and unconcerned. "Not really my business to know, either way."
"You seem to know quite a bit for someone who insists it isn't your business."
Matan laughed at that, genuine and unbothered. "Fair point, and fairly made. But I'm just a peasant farmer, son, whatever I happen to pick up moving grain between provinces. A man like the Duke of Herinhon — General Laiman Kuri, hero of the Sixty Thousand, whatever title you want to hang on him — that's a man whose actual business is conducted considerably above where the likes of me are ever invited to stand and listen. I know the shape of the story everyone tells. I couldn't tell you a single thing about the man himself that you couldn't hear from any tavern keeper between here and Herinhon."
Ragna sat with that for a long moment, the cart rattling steadily northward beneath them, the name settling into some quiet corner of his mind that he suspected, without quite knowing why, he wasn't finished turning over yet.
"Why do you ask," Matan said finally, glancing sideways again, curiosity plain on his weathered face now, "with that particular kind of interest? Not every young man traveling to the Temple of Eyes stops cold over the name of a border duke he's never met."
Ragna considered his answer carefully, and found, when it came, that it was entirely, uncomfortably honest.
"I don't know," he admitted. "It just felt like a name I was supposed to already know."
Matan studied him a moment longer, something unreadable passing behind his eyes, before he simply shrugged once more and flicked the reins, the mule picking up its pace as the road stretched on ahead of them, north toward a temple, and a duke, and a war that had apparently never quite finished choosing its participants.
"Strange road you're walking, Ragna," he said, mostly to himself. "Strange road indeed."