The cold draft leaking through the doorframe smelled of freezing river mud, wet creosote, and the sharp, bitter-salt sting of the copper lantern burning above the wooden wall.
Len didn’t flinch from the watching crack. His Road Sense kept his weight anchored across the balls of his feet, his shoulder barely touching the pine door post. He knew the double didn’t possess supernatural vision through solid wood. It knew he was inside because Halden Pell’s clerks had logged his travel pass at Boundary Toll. That was because Sergeant Kray had stamped the check slip on the footbridge thirty minutes ago, and because the scent of unwashed wool, sulfur grease, and dried blood clung to a courier’s clothing like smoke to a tavern chimney.
The creature’s knowledge was procedural. It was an inventory of office records cross-referenced against the physical reality of a nine-day country manhunt.
Behind Len, in the chalk-white silence of the kitchen, something moved.
It wasn’t the heavy, deliberate tread of Bram Ash, and it wasn’t the swift, agile step of Ivara Quill. It was the wild, uneven stumble of a nine-year-old child whose legs had lost their coordination.
Clatter.
The three-tined farm pitchfork slipped from Avel’s grip, the iron tines striking the whitewashed floorboards with a sharp, ringing crash that sounded like an alarm bell in the enclosed room. The boy didn’t look down at the fallen tool. He didn’t look at his mother kneeling by the peat embers.
