Wren doesn't answer right away. Instead her eyes drift — just slightly, just naturally — past the guard's left shoulder, as if something caught her attention. The guard is twenty years a professional. He knows every feint in the book. And yet he glances back, reflexive as a dog's ear at a sound. It's half a heartbeat's gap, but Wren has already filled her lungs. "Sir Aldric is resting at the miller's barn," she says, with the flat certainty of someone stating the obvious. "Half a mile back. His horse threw a shoe this morning, and he sent me ahead to register our passage." She watches the guard's eyebrow. It does not lower, exactly. But it pauses — a deliberating sort of pause, the kind that means the man is filing information rather than dismissing it. "Sent you ahead," he repeats. "Alone." "I am a knight," Wren says, which is the truest-sounding lie she has ever told.