Wren opens her mouth to answer — and closes it again. The armor is borrowed. The crest is borrowed. The question has the feel of a latch, and she has learned enough about latches today. "The last armored traveller," she says instead, choosing each word the way you choose stones to cross a brook. "Who was he?" The brook_woman goes very still. The water does not — it keeps its own counsel over stones. Then the old woman's expression does something complicated, and her gaze drops to the sun-clasped box, and for one breath the careful arrangement of jar and box feels less like a ritual and more like a marker. "Came through three days ago," she says, quietly. "Sick already, though he wouldn't name it. Took the river path all the same." Her creek-pale eyes return to the breastplate. "And here is his armor. Without him." She waits, patient as the brook, to see what Wren will do with being found out.