Wren makes herself very still — no small achievement in plate armour that rings like a dropped pot at the slightest breath. "What does it want?" she asks, keeping her voice low, her eyes on the pale oval between the trees. The brook_woman does not look at the Watcher. She looks at the sun-sigil pressed into the borrowed breastplate. "It wants what it always wants," she says, in the tone of someone explaining that rain falls down. "To see where the sigil goes." The Watcher does not move. Twenty paces. The mist curls around its coat hem. "The mark belongs to an old order — older than the name Aldermere. The Watcher keeps a kind of census: who carries it, and whether they mean to carry it faithfully. It has been following you since the first fork." Wren thinks about the first fork. That is longer than she would like. "And if I mean to carry it faithfully?" she asks. "Then," says the brook_woman, her river-weed eyes going to the box on the flat rock, "it may have something to give you."