The soup tasted of boiled root, old bone, and an herb that should have been kept on a shorter leash.

  Marcus drank it anyway.

  The bowl sat hot against his palms. He held it there between swallows, stealing what warmth he could through the clay. The broth was thin enough to show the bottom when he tipped it. A thread of grease wandered over the surface. Something stringy caught between his teeth. He worked it loose with his tongue and swallowed that too.

  Across the fire, Calla watched with her chin on her knees.

  "You said it was bad," Marcus said.

  "It is."

  "You're not wrong."

  That pleased her. The herb pouch on its cord rested against her chest, half hidden under the neck of her tunic. Her mother had cut the tunic down from an adult's. The hem still sat crooked where it had been resewn. Marcus had noticed that the first night. His mind kept making room for details like that while it refused to go quiet about anything useful.

  Calla tipped her head at the emptying bowl. "You finished it."

  "I was hungry."

  "Mama said you would be."

  The last swallow was worst. Bitter. Green. It tasted the way wet wool smelled. Marcus got it down before his face could betray him.

  Camp moved around them while dusk came in. Somebody dragged brush toward the goat pen. Somebody else split kindling in short, tidy blows. A child laughed near the southern fire and got hushed. Smoke clung low in the cold and worked itself into cloth, hair, skin. Marcus smelled like smoke all the time now. Smoke, river mud, and the sharp resin Silena rubbed into his wrists when she thought he was sleeping.

  He had been here long enough for routine to harden around him.

  He woke in Silena's tent on a folded hide that had begun to remember his shape. He ate what was set in front of him. He carried what needed carrying. Water most often. Brush. Wood too small to be worth wasting a stronger back on. If Decimus found him standing idle, some piece of work appeared nearby. Not as an order. Just a sentence: "Those need moving." "The pen's loose on the north side." Marcus would be halfway through the task before he noticed he'd accepted it.

  A body in a camp worked or it explained itself. Work was simpler.

  The water runs had become the shape of his days.

  The river cut along the southern edge of the basin where the land fell toward the gap in the hills. The bank there was soft clay. Frost held it at dawn, noon loosened it, evening locked it hard again. Twelve minutes down if he watched his footing. A little less to fill the hide buckets. Longer coming back, always longer, with water dragging at his arms and half the path slanting wrong under his feet. By the time he reached camp, a third of each load had slopped cold across his boots and down his shins.

  By the third run his palms burned. By the fourth the straps found the new blisters opening at the base of his fingers. Water got into the cracks and stayed there. The Grave sons made two runs in the time it took him to finish one. Nobody mocked him for that. They did not have the spare energy for mockery.

  His mind did the counting anyway. Distance. Rise. Volume lost on the climb. Thirty people now. More coming. A spring flood would make the bank worse. The larger column would make the labor impossible.

  He knew the answer. He knew it the way he knew his own childhood street.

  A well. Higher ground inland. Shallow water table near what would one day become the center of the city.

  He knew one of Aeterna's first wells had been sunk somewhere on this ground. In his own time it was ceremonial more than useful, a stone-ringed relic where people gathered on founding days and lifted cups of its water to the city's beginning.

  As he carried another bucket, he let the thought turn in the back of his mind and did nothing with it.

  He stacked brush by the goat pen. Held a post steady while one of the Grave boys redid the knot Marcus had tied badly the first time. Scraped mud from the bottom of a cooking pot because somebody handed it to him and there was no graceful way to refuse.

  His body was better than it had been. Not good. Better.

  The tremor in his thighs no longer started the instant he stood. He could walk the camp without feeling his knees threaten treachery. Behind his ribs, where the emptiness had lived since the displacement, there was now the faintest suggestion of warmth. Nothing he could spend. Nothing he could trust. Just enough to prove the vessel had not cracked apart.

  Silena checked him every morning. Fingers to wrist. The low hum, more vibration than sound, reaching inward to judge what his own senses could barely find. On the third morning she held it there a little longer.

  "A little," she said. "Not enough. But a little."

  He had not asked for the ritual. He knew how little was in him.

  The camp moved around him, stubborn and unspectacular. Nerva and the Thane hunters left before dawn and came back with what the valley would spare. Rabbits most days. Sometimes a bird. Once a deer that fed everyone for two evenings and put something close to relief on faces grown too used to counting. The Grave sons split wood from dawn to dark, the axe a dull metronome. Maren Sulla sat by her family's fire stitching hides, speaking low to her husband, both of them looking as though they had learned long ago not to waste movement.

  Marcus measured it all against the old accounts.

  The family names were familiar. He had known them from books and lectures, and now they had faces, voices, children, tempers. His mind struggled to accept it. The shock never quite dissipated.

  That was the worst part. Not the cold. Not the labor. The way history kept turning into people.

  "Cassius."

  He turned before he meant to.

  Decimus stood near the fire with a bundle of stripped branches in his arms.

  "Pen needs another tie on the north side," he said. "Wind's shifting."

  Marcus took the branches and only noticed halfway to the goat pen what had happened. No pause. No inward recoil first. He had turned at the name the way a dog turns at a whistle it has learned belongs to it.

  That's not my name.

  The thought came, but thinly. Tiredly.

  By the fourth day he answered to Cassius in camp and kept Marcus for the moments when he lay awake in the dark. Marcus remembered the thrum of conduits under marble, the smell of heated bronze after the toll. Cassius carried river water uphill in a hide bucket because the goats needed it.

  He tied the pen wall. The knots were poor. One of the Grave boys redid them later without bothering to remark on it.

  At dawn the family heads gathered at the central fire because there was nowhere else to put decisions. Decimus kept the talk moving. Tullus spent labor like coin. Maren remembered what older winters had cost. Nerva spoke for what the valley would or would not give them. Silena, when she chose to, spoke for bodies.

  Silena did not ask if Marcus meant to come. She stepped over his feet where he sat by the brazier and said, "If you can walk, you can listen," then went out into the morning dark. Following her felt less conspicuous than staying behind.

  Decimus stood with his arms folded, smoke curling past one shoulder. Tullus Grave sat opposite him on a split log, broad through the chest, thick wrists braced on his knees. A tradesman's hands. Scarred knuckles, blunt nails, skin worn into something closer to leather than flesh. His sons stood behind him, already awake enough to look annoyed at the day. Maren Sulla settled onto a hide with no wasted motion. Nerva crouched rather than sat, as though ready to spring up and go before the council had finished naming the next problem. Silena took her place at the edge and began crushing dried leaves in a small stone bowl, because her hands rarely let themselves be still.

  Calla built a wall of pebbles just beyond the circle and flattened it with one finger.

  Marcus sat beside Silena and kept his mouth shut.

  Food first. It was always food first.

  Nerva informed them of the state of the food stores. They were running lower than he liked.

  One of the Thane hunters spoke up. "Less game north of the ridge. We push too close to camp, they scatter."

  "Then we range wider," Decimus said.

  One of the Grave boys opened his mouth, but Tullus got there first.

  "Wider means darkness on the way back," he said. "Dark means dragging meat where wolves can scent it, or leaving it where wolves can take it. We can do it. It costs."

  Maren spoke without raising her voice. Everybody leaned closer to hear her.

  "Traps cost less."

  Nerva looked over. "You know where?"

  "My husband's father did. North ridge. South gap. Anywhere the ground squeezes them narrow."

  "And who checks the lines?" Tullus asked. "The same hands cutting wood?"

  "Unless we mean to burn wet brush all winter," somebody from the Varros muttered.

  The talk went on like that. Not circling. Grinding. One need chewing into the next. More hunting meant less wood. More traps meant fewer hands for shelter. Marcus sat with his jaw tight, listening to the first hunger crisis of the founding arrange itself around a fire. The Chronicle described three in the first year. He had written that sentence in clean ink. Here it smelled of ash and old wool and men who had not slept enough.

  Tullus let the others spend themselves first. His silence gathered weight.

  Then he looked at Marcus.

  The turn went around the circle before Tullus spoke again.

  "And the stranger," he said.

  No one asked which stranger.

  "We've fed him four days," Tullus said. "Food. Water. A place under canvas. The healer says he's a mage. A strong one." He looked at Marcus. "I've seen a soft-handed man who carries water badly and ties knots my boys fix after him."

  Silena's stone ground once, twice, then stopped.

  "He is recovering," she said. "His reserves were nearly gone."

  "I heard you the first time." Tullus lifted a hand to stop him there. "I am not arguing about what he might be. I am asking what use he is to us now."

  He looked around the fire before coming back to Marcus.

  "We have thirty mouths. Maybe three weeks of food if the hunting holds, and the hunting is failing already. More people on the road. Winter not far off." His voice stayed even. That made it worse. "When does the mage do something useful?"

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Nothing moved for a beat except smoke.

  In Marcus's own time somebody would have softened the question, apologized for the bluntness while meaning every word. Tullus did him the cleaner injury of saying it straight.

  Heat climbed into Marcus's face.

  He had been entered in the tally. Mouth. Weak hands. Claimed mage. Current value uncertain.

  Decimus did not answer for him. He turned and looked at Marcus instead.

  It was the look Decimus gave when he wanted an answer: steady, patient, and somehow more unnerving than any direct probing would have been. Just space. A silence laid in front of him and left there for Marcus to fill.

  Marcus said nothing.

  The council shifted on. Trap lines. Wood. Whether to stretch the dried stores now or wait another few days. Morning light found the edge of Maren's sleeve. Calla's pebble wall collapsed and got built again.

  The camp spent the rest of the morning failing at the food problem a little at a time.

  Nerva came back with a hare and a bird so small Marcus first took it for a crow. Foragers returned with winter greens and a little sack of roots that looked better in a heap than they would in bowls. Near the sorting hide, one of the Sulla women dumped out a clutch of thick, dirt-caked tubers and shoved them aside with the back of her hand.

  Marcus stopped.

  The roots were ugly enough to dismiss, knotted and dark and still clotted with soil. Fresh, they looked meaner than they ever had on a plate.

  Not from hunger, though hunger sharpened it. From feast days. From winter tables in Aeterna where emberroot came split open and steaming, dressed with salt and fat while people raised cups to the city's beginning. His mouth watered before the rest of him caught up.

  Somebody here had already tried them and thrown them over.

  By the central fire, Decimus and Nerva were already talking. Marcus caught part of it as he passed.

  "Another week like this," Nerva said, "and we start pulling from the dried stores to make up the gap."

  Decimus did not answer. He did not need to.

  Marcus might have kept walking if the Sulla woman had not caught him staring.

  "You want those?" she asked, nudging the roots with her foot. "Take them. Bitter enough to strip your tongue."

  Marcus looked at her. Then back at the roots. "How did you cook them?"

  That got Decimus's attention as quickly as if Marcus had shouted.

  "Tried them raw first," the woman said. "Then boiled. Waste of water both times."

  "No," Marcus said, too fast. "No, don't boil them. They're emberroots."

  Silence gathered around him before he noticed.

  He kept going anyway.

  "You bury them in embers and leave them there until the skins split. The eastern slope gets more sun. Around the rock breaks, where the soil runs thin. That's where they'll be."

  Now Nerva was looking at him properly.

  "Ash," he said. "These?"

  Marcus nodded. Hunger had gotten there first. Excitement right behind it.

  "They're better roasted," he said. "Sweet, if you do it right. Filling." He pointed before caution caught up. "Higher up. In the clay below the trees."

  Decimus stepped away from the fire.

  "Show us."

  Marcus could have bitten through his own tongue.

  But the roots were already there in his mouth, split open and steaming in memory.

  He put down the bucket and went.

  The eastern rise looked short from camp. It was not short with a half-recovered body. Nerva climbed as if the hill had been built for him. The Varro boy ranged ahead and back, restless with curiosity. The Sulla woman saved her breath. Marcus's lungs started to burn halfway up. The cold scraped the back of his throat raw. Twice he bent to study the ground when really he only wanted a reason to stop moving.

  Below them the camp shrank to five clusters of hides and smoke. The river ran south in a grey line. The whole basin opened under the pale sky, and the city waited inside it with hideous familiarity. The northern ridge where the College would stand. The bend where the lower market would spread. The higher ground near center where his mother would one day buy bread and complain about the price. Empty now. Grass, scrub, frost. A future stripped back to dirt.

  Rock began to shoulder through the clay exactly where he had expected it. Granite outcrops. Thin soil. Darker lines of gravel where water had cut its habits through the slope.

  Marcus stopped beside the first outcrop and pointed.

  "There."

  Nerva crouched, pulled one free, turned it in his hand. "Ash. These." He snorted. "My sister tried them the second week and cursed me for bringing them."

  The Sulla woman drove her digging stick into the earth beside the rock. On the second thrust she hit resistance. On the fourth she levered up a clump of wet soil and roots, thick and crooked and not promising to look at.

  "These?" she asked.

  Marcus knelt, ignoring what his thighs thought of that. He got both hands around the crown and pulled. The cluster came up all at once in a heavy burst of earth. More tubers. Five, maybe six. Dense enough to surprise him with the weight.

  Nerva laughed once, short and disbelieving, and dropped down a yard away to dig for himself. "Here too."

  After that Marcus barely mattered. Nerva and the others found the pattern almost at once, reading the ground faster and better than he ever could. Rock. Scrub. A slight run of poorer soil where water drained off. They spread along the seam and started hauling cluster after cluster out of the hillside.

  Marcus dug because he was there. Dirt packed under his nails. Cold grit found the cracks in his skin. His fingers went numb. Every cluster sat where the reports said it would sit, at the elevation his thesis had once described in cool language meant for examiners and shelves.

  The reports existed because Cassius had found them.

  Cassius was finding them because Marcus had read the reports.

  The loop pulled tight enough to make him dizzy.

  Nerva held up a root crown thick with tubers and whistled through his teeth. "We've walked past these a dozen times."

  "Probably."

  "And the east taught you that too?"

  The question came light. Curious. Even amused. Teeth in it all the same.

  "The east taught me poor cooks ruin good food," Marcus said.

  Nerva barked a laugh. "That I'll believe."

  They filled two sacks and the fold of Marcus's robe besides. Going down proved worse than the climb. His knees shook. Clay slid under his boots. Twice he caught himself badly and nearly lost the roots he carried. By the time the camp came fully into view again, his legs felt hollowed out.

  The Sulla woman emptied the first sack by the central fire. Someone from the Grave side of camp muttered, "Ash, not those again." Marcus ignored it, crouched by the embers, and pushed three roots down into the hottest bed with a stick.

  "Leave space between them," he said when the Varro boy tried to crowd in more. "Heat has to reach around the skin."

  He heard the certainty in his own voice too late.

  No one challenged it. They watched.

  Children drifted closer. Decimus stood with his arms folded. Silena came out of her tent wiping her hands on a cloth and took in the whole scene in one pass. One of Tullus's sons lingered near the woodpile, pretending to be slower about his work than he was. Tullus himself did not appear.

  The emberroots took time, and Marcus was grateful for that. Time let things roughen. Smoke moved blue over the fire. A dog nosed too near and got shoved back. Somebody argued quietly about kindling. The camp remembered itself while people kept half an eye on the coals.

  When the first skin split with a soft pop, everybody noticed at once.

  Marcus scraped it free with two sticks and broke it open on a flat stone.

  Steam rose.

  The smell changed first. Smoke and earth, yes, but underneath it the smell of starch opening into food. Honest food. Hot and pale and immediate.

  Marcus blew on a piece and put it in his mouth.

  He held it a moment before biting in, letting the heat sink into his fingers. It was too hot at first. Then the scorched skin gave way to soft starch and a faint sweetness, dense enough that after days of broth he could feel himself filling.

  He handed the next piece to Nerva.

  Nerva bit down, chewed, and stilled. His brows lifted. He chewed again, slower this time.

  "Well," he said.

  That was enough.

  The Varro boy reached for the next piece. Calla was suddenly at Marcus's elbow, taking over the business of handing portions where she thought they ought to go. One of the Grave sons brought more split wood without being asked. Silena accepted a piece from Calla and ate it with the attentive expression she might have given a new herb. Maren took hers, looked once at Marcus over the steam, and said nothing at all.

  Within the hour more roots were buried in the embers. The smell spread across camp. People ate with the concentration of the hungry, quiet at first, then quieter still once the edge had gone out of them. No cheering. No relief grand enough to name. Just a change in the air. A new calculation. This would stretch the stores. This would keep bowls from going thin quite so soon.

  Nobody thanked Marcus. He would have distrusted it if they had. People stayed near the fire, kept eating, kept glancing at the embers and then at him. Then Nerva clapped him between the shoulders hard enough to knock him a step toward the fire.

  "Useful after all," he said.

  Marcus coughed smoke and stayed on his feet.

  By evening the settlement had adjusted its gaze.

  Not trust. Nothing that generous. But the old tolerance had been replaced by attention. A stranger was one thing. A stranger who could point at a hillside and turn bitter roots into supper was another. People who had not spoken to him that morning now nodded as they passed. One of the Varro women asked how many more roots were up there in the same tone she might have used for a trapper or a man with a good eye for weather.

  Decimus found him once the hard cold started dropping into the basin.

  He stood beside Marcus without speaking for several breaths, looking over the camp rather than at him. Fires reddened. Smoke flattened under the night air. Somewhere behind them a child cried once, then stopped.

  "There are other things we don't know," Decimus said.

  That was all.

  Marcus turned to answer and found Decimus already walking away.

  * * *

  Tullus met him at the edge of the light.

  Marcus had started toward Silena's tent because that was where his body was going to end up whether his pride liked it or not. His hands hurt. Dirt sat black under his nails. The skin across his palms had gone stiff around the new blisters. Everything below his waist felt borrowed.

  Tullus came from the Grave fires at an unhurried pace that gave Marcus time to see him and nowhere to go.

  He stopped a few feet away.

  Behind him the camp had softened into evening sounds: low voices, wood settling in the fires, a baby fussing near the Sullas. Beyond that lay the valley's old silence. No conduit hum. No ward-light threading the dark. The absence still wrong-footed Marcus. This world did not buzz under the stone. It breathed in wind and labor and animal noise. Nothing hidden. Nothing carrying power in its bones.

  Tullus looked first at Marcus's hands.

  "My sons found those roots last week," he said.

  Marcus said nothing.

  "Maybe the week before. We boiled them. Bitter enough to waste the water and the breath it took to swear at them." Tullus raised his eyes. "Today you climbed a slope you've never seen and put your hands where they grew."

  "Nerva found them too."

  "After you put him there."

  The sweat drying under Marcus's collar turned cold. He fought the shiver and lost.

  Tullus saw that.

  "Listen to me carefully," he said. "I am not saying the camp should have gone hungry because your story sits badly in my ear. They ate tonight. My wife ate. My sons ate. I know what that is worth."

  He let that stand. Then:

  "I also know what it costs to leave a strange thing unquestioned."

  Marcus made himself speak. "What question?"

  Tullus's mouth shifted by a fraction, not close to a smile.

  "How does a stranger know too much?"

  There it was, stripped of the fire circle and the audience with it.

  Marcus looked past him toward the dark shoulder of the eastern slope.

  "I told you."

  "Yes. The east." Tullus rolled the words as if testing weak timber with his foot. "A useful place, the east. Full of valleys exactly like ours. Full of roots exactly where we need them."

  "Maybe it's true," he said. "Maybe you've spent your life walking from one hungry place to another and learned something from every hill. Or maybe you're the sort of man who comes here knowing more than he wants to tell."

  Marcus said nothing.

  Tullus stepped in until Marcus could feel the warmth of his breath in the cold.

  His eyes flicked once toward the central fire, where the last emberroots still baked under ash. "You helped today," he said. "I saw it. That is not the same as trust."

  Then he turned and walked back toward his family's fire.

  Marcus did not move at first. He stood where Tullus had left him, still hearing the words, until he noticed he was shivering. Then he turned toward the tents.

  Tullus had every right to ask. That was the part that lodged as Marcus crossed the camp. He was the sort of man who pressed on a thing the moment it felt wrong, before it had time to turn dangerous.

  He flexed his hands as he walked. The skin at the base of his fingers pulled. Small calluses had begun there, mean little things, hardly enough to count and still more than he had carried into this valley.

  Silena found him by the tent flap with her sleeves pushed back.

  "Hold still," she said.

  He did.

  Her fingers found his pulse. The hum started almost at once, low and rough, warmth moving through him the way her magic always did: intimate without tenderness, all work. Marcus closed his eyes.

  For a breath there was only cold air on his face and her hand at his wrist.

  Then the hum changed.

  Silena opened her eyes. "There."

  "What?"

  "More warmth than this morning." She let him go but kept looking. "Useful work agrees with you."

  Marcus nearly laughed. What came out was thinner than that.

  "I carried roots uphill and almost died."

  "Ash on it, no you didn't." She pushed the flap aside. "Come in before you start saying foolish things just because you're tired."

  Inside, the brazier held a low bed of red coals. Calla had already folded herself under a hide, one hand still twisted in the cord of her herb pouch. Silena knelt by the brazier and sorted dried leaves by touch. Marcus lowered himself onto his bedding with less grace than he would have liked and lay still while every part of him started complaining at once.

  His legs throbbed. Shoulders ached. His palms burned where the blisters had hardened.

  Sleep should have come fast.

  It didn't.

  The water problem rose the instant he went flat on his back.

  Buckets. Riverbank. Mud when thaw came. Men losing half their strength on the climb before the real work of the day had even started.

  He knew, roughly, where a well ought to be.

  Higher ground inland. Somewhere near the old city center. If he could get a clean look at the ridgelines by daylight, maybe he could start from that. River bend. The long rise from the basin. The northern ridge.

  Or maybe that was nonsense. Too much had changed. No streets. No walls. No stone to fix anything in place.

  Maybe when his reserves came back he could try for water-sense. He had never needed it. Shaping water was simple enough. Moving it. Separating it. Useful things for cleaning. Finding it under earth was something else. Search work braided into water, maybe. Pressure. Resonance. He did not know. Under normal circumstances he would have found a book and looked it up instead of lying here trying to reason it out in the dark.

  And then the harder part.

  Finding water was one thing. Reaching it was another. If it came to magic, he would need his reserves back first, and they were coming back faster now. A little each day. Maybe enough soon. He would have to do it out of sight. Quietly. Nothing that looked like the sort of work no one here should know.

  They would need a better camp position before the larger column arrived. Higher ground. Drier ground. Room for more tents and less wasted labor. Decimus had to be thinking along those lines already. If they chose the ground first and found the water later, they might have to move twice.

  Magic was probably the only way he would find it in time. Sooner or later they were going to see him use it. The question was what sort of magic he wanted them seeing.

  His mind kept working ahead, from water to drainage to shelter to labor, each answer clearing the next problem into view.

  The danger was the feeling that had moved through him when the first root split open and the camp smelled food.

  He had hated that feeling on sight.

  Because it had felt right.

  Marcus turned onto his side. The hide under him smelled of smoke and old wool. Across the tent, Calla made a sleepy sound and settled deeper. Silena kept working by the brazier, leaf against stone, stem against thumb. Outside, somebody laughed once and then the camp quieted around it.

  He shut his eyes.

  The city waited in the valley beyond the tent walls, invisible and certain, like memory reaching backward for him.