Cresswick was exactly the kind of market town where nobody looks at you twice, which was exactly why I'd been selling pelts there for three years without a problem. Everyone was too busy watching their own stalls.

  The Bent Nail inn was on the back side of the market square — stuffed between a tanner's workshop and a herb shop that smelled like someone had mixed a pharmacy with a bad decision. The taproom was half-full with market workers eating breakfast.

  I spotted Dren before Lyra pointed him out.

  He was impossible to miss. The kind of man who took up space like he'd negotiated for it in advance. Mid-forties, heavyset, grey-haired, with a face that had been through several things it wasn't going to discuss. His hands were wrapped around a mug and they looked like they'd been broken and re-set at least twice. A sword leaned against the wall next to him, plain and practical.

  His left eye was clouded — pale, like old ice. The right one was sharp as a nail.

  That eye found me the second we walked through the door.

  "Found him?" he said to Lyra.

  "He found me, technically. I fell on his camp."

  Dren looked at me like he was running a calculation. "You Ashborn?"

  I held up my wrist. He studied the mark for a moment. Something shifted in his expression — not softened, exactly. More like a door that's been locked for years giving a little.

  "Sit," he said.

  We sat. Lyra ordered food. Dren poured himself more of whatever he was drinking (definitely not tea). Nobody said anything for a while.

  I'd expected awkwardness. What I got instead was — comfortable silence. Dren clearly had no interest in small talk, and I'd spent three years becoming the same way. We understood each other immediately.

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  "You know about Seraphine," he said finally.

  "Lyra told me."

  "I'll tell you what she didn't."

  He talked the way he did everything — slow, quiet, no drama. He'd been twenty-three and stationed at a garrison town called Wellmarch, two days south of Ash-Mordhen. Two hundred soldiers. They'd heard rumors about strange lights to the north. Their captain thought it was a weather event.

  It was not a weather event.

  The wave came down from the mountains like a slow tide. Grey, he said. Not fire — the opposite of fire. It ate warmth. Ate light. Every living thing it touched just... stopped. Settled into ash in the shape of what it had been.

  "I survived in a grain pit," he said. "Face down in the dirt. Pulled the cover on and didn't move for four hours." He looked at his hands. "When I came up, there was nothing. Buildings still standing. Roads intact. But every person, every horse, every crow on every fence post — ash. In the shapes of what they'd been."

  The taproom kept going around us. Someone argued about wool prices. A kid spilled his juice.

  "She was re-bound a week later," Dren said. "Coalition of mages. I led the soldiers that protected their retreat while they worked. Lost half of them." He picked up his mug. "I've spent twenty years knowing the binding wouldn't hold forever. And here we are."

  He set the mug down and looked at me.

  "You've been running from yourself," he said. Not an accusation. Just a fact.

  I didn't argue.

  "Wild magic is what happens to people who never use it at all," he said. "You've been using it every morning for three years, whether you knew it or not. That little fire you keep — that's training. The muscle is there." He reached into his pack and set a flat stone on the table between us. "I'm going to teach you to use it right. It'll take time we don't really have, but it's still better than nothing."

  I looked at the stone. Such a small, ordinary thing.

  "And if I can actually do this?" I said. "The binding? What happens to me?"

  "It'll hurt," he said. "You'll survive." A pause. "Probably."

  "Wow. Great pep talk."

  Something moved in the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. But close.

  "We leave tomorrow," he said. "Dawn. Don't cause trouble tonight."

  He stood and walked out. Just like that. Decision made, conversation over.

  I stared at the flat stone on the table.

  "He's always like this," Lyra said apologetically.

  "I kind of like it," I said.

  And I meant it. After three years of only talking to myself, a man who said exactly what he meant and nothing else was refreshing as cold water.