Wren picks her way down the root-tangled slope, one gauntleted hand braced against bark that does not lean helpfully. The water-sound grows — not a roar, not a whisper, but a stream in a hurry to be elsewhere. Mist pools deep in the dip, swallowing her greaves, her knees, everything below the waist, so that she is briefly a floating torso in borrowed armour, which seems about right. The path delivers her to a stony bank. The stream is narrow and quick, black water muttering over pale stones in what sounds worryingly like an argument. Crouched at the water's edge — clay jar in hand, quite absorbed in the filling of it — is a small, wiry figure in a patched cloak the colour of river-weeds. Balanced on a flat rock at the current's edge sits a wooden box, its lid clasped with a fitting shaped like a sun. Old. Deliberate. Very like the faded sigil on her borrowed breastplate. Wren's heart does something inadvisable. The figure turns.