The right track turns out to be a very good idea right up until it isn't. Wren keeps her visor down and her stride purposeful for the first mile — purposeful stride, head up, don't clank louder than necessary — and she passes a hay cart without incident, and a woman driving geese without incident, and briefly allows herself the small, private luxury of feeling competent. Then she reaches the tollgate at Millford Crossing. The guard there has the practiced eye of a man who has spent twenty years watching travelers with professional suspicion; he looks at her armor, at the sun-sigil faded on her breastplate, and then — with the unhurried certainty of someone who has just noticed something — at her boots. They are not, by any reasonable measure, the boots of a knight. "That's a Veldham sigil," he says. "Haven't seen one of those in a while." He leans on his pike. "Where's Sir Aldric?" The question settles between them like a stone dropped into still water.