Chapter Five: Who Told You

"He didn't leave a name," the broker said. "But he's still across the road at the weigh station, arguing with my loaders about how to stack barrels. Tall fella. Scar on his jaw. You can't miss him."

I missed nothing. I was already moving.

The weigh station sat on the far side of the dirt road, a tin shed with a rusted scale and four flatbed trucks parked in a ragged line. Two men in coveralls were hauling barrels onto the third truck. A third stood over them with a clipboard, perfectly still.

He was the kind of tall that makes a doorway look careless. Broad across the back, dark hair cropped short, a scar running from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. He wore a canvas coat the color of old dust and no Pack badge at all. A faded brand circled his right forearm where the sleeve had ridden up: three black rings, snapped through the middle.

A rogue. An oath-breaker, or someone who'd been named one.

He glanced up as I crossed the road, and I felt it land on me, flat and unhurried and thorough. Not hungry. Not hostile. Just a man taking a measurement.

My first thought was not handsome. My first thought, cold as a coin on my tongue, was: if this man is my enemy when the sky breaks, I won't last a week.

"That's my diesel," I said.

"Is it." He didn't look away. His eyes were the grey of a sky before snow. "I don't see your name on the receipt."

"I called last week. I had a verbal agreement."

"Then you should have sent a deposit." His voice was low and even, entirely without malice, which was somehow worse. "I did."

Heat crawled up my neck. "I'll pay double."

"No."

"Triple, then."

"No." He tucked the clipboard under his arm. "It isn't a money problem, healer."

I went rigid. "I haven't told you what I do."

"No." A flicker, tiny, at the corner of the scar. "But everyone in the province knows what the Hollowmere girl did last week. Rejected an Alpha at the stones. Inherited half the coast. Started selling every acre of it, fast, and spending the cash on the strangest shopping list I ever heard."

The air went thin around me.

"You've been tracking my purchases."

"I've been tracking everyone's purchases." He said it mildly. "Two years now. Not a hobby. A habit. Last spring the gulls came inland. This summer the wells dropped four feet in a month, and the old salt-wives stopped selling their charms because they said the sea had gone quiet. I decided I'd be the only fool in the province laying in stores for a bad winter." He tilted his head. "Then your name started appearing in every grain merchant's ledger. Forty tons. Filters. Wool. Medicine. Same dates I was buying, give or take a day."

I said nothing. My heart hammered so hard I thought it might show through my coat.

"So," he said. "Either you are a very organized woman with a very odd hobby, or you know something."

"I like to plan."

"That's what Pell said when I asked her."

Isaura. The name hit like a slap. She'd sat in Brynja's loft not three days ago with those careful eyes and her pen, and she had gone and told a stranger...

Or she'd told him nothing at all, and the name was bait, a clean little trick to watch me flinch. I couldn't tell which. I hated how well it worked.

I did the only thing I could think of. I lunged for the clipboard.

It was a stupid move. I know that. I'm a healer who had been jogging for six days. He didn't even look at my hand. He just turned, caught my wrist between two fingers, and held it there, gently, like a man holding a bird he doesn't intend to hurt.

I couldn't get free. I tried twice.

"Careful," he said. "I'd hate to see you cut yourself."

The gold thread under my collarbone flared. I felt it rise to my pulse, a bright, rushing warmth, and for one wild second I thought it might do what it had done to Dravik's palm. Burn him. Make him let go.

His eyes dropped to my collar. They sharpened.

Then, slowly, deliberately, he released me.

"Interesting," said the rogue.

"What is?"

"Nothing." But he'd stepped back half a pace, and the easy stillness had changed into something wary and intent. "You carry yourself like someone who's lost something big. Not money. Something you counted on." He paused. "I know the look."

I rubbed my wrist. "Is this the part where you tell me you've got a sad past too?"

"No. This is the part where I tell you I'm not selling you the diesel." He nodded at the stacked barrels. "Because I've got a feeling that if I do, I'll have nothing at all in the cold, and I suspect you'd say the same."

I said nothing. He was right, and I hated that too, and he saw.

We stood in the dust, two strangers who'd each cornered the same fear, and for a long moment neither of us moved. A wind picked up. Somewhere behind the shed a flock of gulls wheeled overhead, miles from the sea, screaming.

I counted. Fifty-four days.

Fifty-four days, and the one man I couldn't afford to lie to was the one man I couldn't afford to tell.

"Caldris Rook," he said at last, unprompted. "In case you want a name for your list."

"Sorrel."

"I know." He regarded me with those snow-grey eyes, and his voice dropped, quiet as a blade being drawn. "So here is the question I've been circling all week, Sorrel, and I'd like an honest answer."

My pulse jumped. Behind him, the trucks stood heavy with everything I'd needed. Behind me, the whole fragile plan I'd built out of nothing.

"Who told you it was coming?"

It wasn't a question about the weather.