Word came from the north on a grey morning two weeks after the battle. The same trader who'd brought the first reports of the empire's chaos — more rattled than usual, and traders were always rattled when they passed through the Barrens. He wouldn't come inside the village walls. Stood at the edge of the thorn vine perimeter and talked to Mira through a gap in the growth, his eyes never leaving the tree behind her.
Mira listened without her face moving. When the trader finished, she thanked him, paid for the information, and walked back through the village to find Korr. He was on the eastern wall, checking the positions the Ents had replanted themselves in.
"News from the north. About the heroes who left."
Korr put down the stone he'd been using to mark a gap. There was only one group that mattered.
"Tell me."
The six who'd ridden for the Solarian capital had been captured within a week. Mira's voice stayed flat as she relayed the trader's information, but her hand had drifted to the sword at her hip, resting there the way you rest your hand on a railing when the stairs are steep and you're not sure of your footing.
Naive. The trader had used the word and it fit. The six had ridden north believing their status as summoned heroes would protect them — valuable political assets, living symbols of divine favor. The empire wouldn't harm them. The empire needed them. That was what they'd told each other, and anyone who'd listen.
The empire's internal security had been preparing for exactly this. Handlers killed during Elara's breakout had been replaced within hours. New handlers, trained for the scenario of heroes going off-protocol. The six had been intercepted at a checkpoint fifty miles south of the capital, disarmed, bound, and transported to a holding facility the trader described as "the kind of place where people go in and don't come out."
Two were executed publicly. Beheadings in the capital's central square, proclamations read aloud about the consequences of treason and desertion. The trader had seen the aftermath — heads mounted on spikes above the city gate, soldiers standing watch with blank expressions, the crowd dispersing the way crowds do after that kind of thing.
The other four were imprisoned alongside the heroes they'd tried to free. The remaining imprisoned heroes — the ones who'd refused to join the assault — were reportedly being kept in a specialized facility somewhere in the capital's undercity. The empire couldn't kill them. Too valuable as political symbols, proof that the holy empire had the divine mandate to summon champions from beyond the veil. But they couldn't let them go either. Everyone sat in their cells, the six who'd tried to free them sat in adjacent cells, and they all sat in the dark.
"They didn't," Sera said. She'd materialized at the edge of the conversation without either of them registering her, which was her way. "I told them not to go."
Wind moved through the tree's branches, shadows rippling across the wall beneath their feet. The thorn vine mat below was dense and green and utterly still, purple berries gleaming among the thorns.
"They made their choice," Korr said. "Same as the ones who stayed."
The five who'd fled to other empires had better luck. Sort of.
Two had made it to Equion, taken in as curiosities. Refugees from a failed war, useful for propaganda — Equion's government had a habit of collecting interesting people and displaying them in ways that served the state. Summoned heroes who'd broken free from the Solarian empire were exactly the kind of interesting they were looking for. The trader confirmed they'd been given housing in the capital and interviewed by Equion's intelligence apparatus. Whether they were comfortable, free, or anything other than well-maintained trophies — no way to say.
One had gone to Torben. Last anyone had word. Torben was isolationist on a good day and actively hostile to outsiders on a bad one, and a stranger showing up at their border claiming to be a summoned hero from another empire was not the kind of thing Torben welcomed. The trader shrugged. "Probably dead. Probably didn't suffer. Torben is efficient about that sort of thing."
Two had vanished entirely. No reports, no sightings, no rumors. They'd left the battle and ridden south and east and then stopped being anyone's problem. Alive or dead, free or captive — impossible to say. People disappeared in the spaces between empires. These two had just happened to be heroes first and disappeared people second.
Sera delivered the news to the centaur elder that afternoon. She didn't soften it. The elder listened with his arms crossed, one good hand gripping his bicep, his face arranged in the expression of someone who'd survived worse.
"Stupid does not mean evil," the elder said when she finished. "Brave does not mean wise. They tried to do something and it failed. That's the whole story."
"Six of them rode to their deaths and dragged four more into prison with them." Sera's jaw tightened.
"That's what happens when people act without thinking." The elder cut her off, not unkindly. "I've seen it in my own herd. Young stallions who charge at things they can't beat because charging is what stallions do. They die. We mourn them. We don't pretend they were right." He paused. "You told them not to go."
"Yes."
"Then your conscience is clean. Theirs is their own problem now." He turned away, hooves loud on the packed earth. Sera stayed where she stood.
Elara took it hard. Sera told her directly — letting her hear it through village gossip would have been worse. The young fire mage listened without interrupting, her face going pale, then grey, then settling on something empty. When Sera finished, Elara nodded once.
"Thank you for telling me."
She went back to picking at the raw skin around her burn scar. Fingers moving with a methodical precision, like she was working on something that belonged to someone else.
Underneath, she was cracking. Korr saw it in the way she moved over the next few days — slower, more careful, as if too much motion would shake something loose. She'd known some of the ones who'd gone. The two executed, she'd trained with them, eaten with them, fought beside them during the battle. One of the four imprisoned had been close to a friend — as close as anyone could be when you were wearing collars and being marched toward a wall you were supposed to break.
None of the heroes who'd stayed talked about it. Except Tomas, who hadn't talked about anything since the battle. After hearing the news he went quiet in a different way — deeper, more deliberate. Hands on his thighs, staring at the ground, not responding when Brenna checked on him, not eating, not moving when the evening wind turned cold. For two days he sat like that. On the third day he got up, walked to the supply cache, and started organizing the medical supplies. Nobody asked what had changed. It was enough that he was moving.
Gerd didn't seem affected, but Korr caught the details. He started sleeping with the hammer closer to his hand. Flinched when anyone approached from behind. The easy confidence he'd carried during the battle had tightened into something more watchful — not weakness, just the understanding that walls were the only thing between you and the next bad thing.
Through the tree, Chris absorbed every word.
Sera told him anyway. Late at night, when the village was quiet and the stars were out and the only sound was the wind moving through branches that were, in a sense, his fingers. She sat against his roots and talked to him the way she'd been doing every night since the battle — about the village, the repairs, the idiots she had to deal with, how Korr snored and she was this close to smothering him with a pillow. Small things. The kind of talk that wasn't meant to convey information so much as maintain a connection.
Tonight she told him about the heroes. The six who'd gone to the capital. The two executed. The four in prison. The ones who'd vanished. Her voice was low and steady, and she didn't cry. Korr, walking the perimeter, caught her words through an open window — heard the control in every syllable, the way she was holding herself together by sheer habit.
"I don't know what I would have done." Her voice came out smaller than it had since the battle. "If I'd been in their position. If someone had put a collar on me and told me to fight for an empire I didn't choose." A pause. "I like to think I would have been smart enough to stay. But smart and brave aren't the same thing, and sometimes brave is just stupid wearing a different shirt."
Chris was aware of every word, the warmth of her body against his root, the rhythm of her pulse through the bark. He wanted to tell her he was listening, that she didn't have to keep talking to a tree. The connection dissolved before it formed. All he could send was a pulse — warmth through the root nearest her back, faint and gone before she could be sure it was real.
Her hand went to the root. Pressed flat against the bark.
She didn't say anything else.