Wren stands. The cup goes back on the stone — she has directions, she doesn't need it. She nods once to Old Maret, which she hopes counts as manners, and walks east. She does not look behind her. She walks with the very particular deliberate pace of someone who is absolutely not hurrying, because hurrying would mean she was afraid. The white-barked trees are unmistakable. They rise among the black-barked thorns like a sentence written in a different language — pale, evenly spaced, impossibly straight, a corridor the wood didn't intend to have. The mist thins between them. Her boots find the line almost on their own. She listens. Behind her: the familiar complaint of too-large armor, her own breathing, the distant diminishing of Old Maret's fire. And under all of that, something else. Not quite footsteps. But where footsteps would be. She keeps walking.