There was no coming up out of it. He was simply back inside himself, shoved in and left there, awake. No slow surfacing, no gray drift back across the edge of a dream. One moment there was nothing, and the next moment there was all of him, wet and cold and face down in the reeds, and the river still talking.
River in his mouth. He rolled his face off the mud and coughed until his ribs put a stop to that, then lay with one cheek on cold stone and let the water talk past his ear.
Reeds leaned over the top of him, close and dry, and the reeds were the reason he had not gone back down the river with the rest of the morning. Somewhere out past them the current kept going, indifferent, and he was glad of that at least.
It had carried him this far and then lost interest, which was more than most things had done for him lately.
Stock-taking, then. All of it reporting at once, so it took a while.
Shoulder: bad since the clearing, sitting at an angle that suggested it had gone somewhere and not come back. Ribs loud on the left, mutinous on the right. The cut on his forearm had opened up again and gone quiet, and the quiet was the part he distrusted.
Underneath the lot sat a low grind with no address on it that did not answer questions. His fingers were cold. His teeth were not exactly his own. The mud had found its way into his collar, his cuffs, and one boot, and the boot had opinions about it.
He reached across to feel at the shoulder, got as far as the angle of it, thought better of the whole idea, and stopped.
"Great," he told the reeds. "Alive. Love that for me."
The reeds took it well. They had heard worse. Probably.
Sitting up happened in stages. First the elbows, then the shoulder, which complained, then the hips, which had been lying in cold water and had gone stiff about it. The world listed left, considered the matter, and agreed to stay. Trees on three sides, water on the fourth. No road, no smoke, no roofline whichever way he turned his head. He looked twice, because looking twice was cheaper than walking once.
Coat had nothing in it but wet. No bread, no flint, no map, no coin. The cowl lay slack at his collar where it lived when there was nothing to fight, and the river had not improved it any. Belt: dagger, yes. Rapier, still at his hip, still wearing the water.
Two soaked blades he could not lift a hand for did not add up to an inventory. They added up to two weapons that would rust if he did not see to them, and he could not see to them, and that was the kind of arithmetic that got a man killed in a story. He was not in a story. He was in mud.
"Excellent inventory. Well stocked. Ready for anything."
Then he looked at the water, and the joke went thin in his mouth.
Somewhere up that river were the other two. Midknight had gone in with Archon.
The last thing Shadow could actually place was his own fist closed in Archon's coat while the current took the whole arrangement sideways, and after that only whitewater, and after that nothing he could use. He could see the fist.
He could feel the cloth in it, the twist of it, the way it had gone tight when the water pulled. He could not see what happened after.
"So there's that," he said.
Two of them had gone in together. He had gone in alone. He could not tell which of those facts was the good news, and he was not going to stand in the mud and build a story out of it. Stories were Midknight's trade. Midknight was not here. The job stood open and nobody had applied.
He could have made a story anyway. He had made stories out of less. That was the problem. A story started telling itself and pretty soon it was the only thing in the room, and he did not have a room.
He got his feet under him.
Standing turned out to be a negotiation. He found a stick, leaned on it, found it would carry him, and kept it. It was dead wood, gray, and about the height of his hip, and it had been lying in the reeds long enough to have given up on being a tree. He tested it against a stone. It held. He tested it again. It held. That was two tests, which was one more than he usually gave anything. He took it as a good sign.
Then he picked a direction, on the grounds that any direction beat the mud he had been lying in, and walked while the sun stayed behind the trees and declined to tell him anything.
Walking left room for thinking. Mixed gift.
Midknight would have started with numbers. That was the whole of the man. Out of a river with him and he takes stock in an order that means something: broken, bleeding, keeps, will not.
Then a route out of it, then the route walked, then the route corrected, and never one step spent on whether he was the sort of man who walks routes. He had a rule he had said once at the inn and never explained.
Information that does not produce a usable outcome has no value. Shadow had heard him say it that once and had understood it and had never once been able to make it work in his own head.
Shadow gave it a go. Listed the damage, ranked it, and got three items in before the list turned into an argument about the list. Shoulder, it said.
Yes, shoulder, he agreed, and then the list wanted to know why the shoulder was first, and the argument started.
Then he tried to lay a course down the bank and back toward the inn, and found he did not know which way the inn lay, or whether the river had already carried him past it, or whether the memory he had of the place was the place itself and not something he had assembled out of wet cloth and cold. Midknight's method wanted a map in the head. Shadow didn't even have a compass.
"Right," he said. "So that's not happening."
Gone, all of it. Good method. Wrong man. He did not feel bad about it. He felt bad about not feeling bad about it, which was a different thing and took up more room.
Archon's way was worse, because it usually worked.
Archon would have gone still. He had done it in the trees, before the woman in the plate walked out of them, and Shadow had been standing close enough to watch: feet planted, hands loose, the whole of him waiting like a cup filled to the brim and carried without spilling.
Something had been taking the measure of the three of them through the air that night. Archon answered it by not answering, and then he moved, and the moving counted. Shadow had seen men stand still before. He had never seen stillness do anything.
So Shadow stopped in the middle of a path he could not name and tried to be a full cup.
He got the feet. He got the hands. He got the breathing, which was harder than it sounded, because his ribs had opinions and his shoulder had a louder voice. He held it long enough that his own breathing slowed and the forest came up around him, branch and drip and root. A bird somewhere. The smell of wet bark. The ground cold through his boots. He was doing it. He was actually doing it.
Then something moved in the leaves at his back and his whole body turned on it before his mind got a vote: stick up, shoulder shrieking, pulse going hard in his throat. Nothing there. Nothing had been there. Same spot, same mud, whatever he had been reaching for was over, and he had learned precisely nothing.
"His move. His body." Saying it out loud helped. "Mine doesn't work like that."
Archon could stand in the dark and let the dark come to him. Shadow's body had never once stayed where he put it. It went where it wanted and told him after.
So he did it the other way, the way that had kept him upright through fights he should have lost twice. He kept moving. He kept talking, because talking costs nothing and fills the space where fear goes to stand.
He let the ground pick the route and his feet tell him where the trouble was, and he walked toward whatever was loudest. It was not a method. It was a habit.
He had gotten this far on habits, and he was still alive, and the stick was still holding, and that was three things, which was three more than he could prove about anybody else in the valley.
"You'd hate this," he said to no one, imagining Midknight walking beside him. "No direction, no count, no plan. You'd say something precise about it. I'd say something better and you'd correct my grammar." He stepped over a root. "And Archon would tell us both to shut up, and then he'd walk in front, and we'd all feel better. There. That's the whole system. Saves time when I do the voices."
He waited, the way you wait after a joke, which was stupid, because there was nobody there and the forest did not laugh. The forest did not even heckle. He kept walking. Talking to them beat not knowing whether they were alive.
He kept at it a while, then dropped it, because a man explaining his own jokes to nobody gets strange about it fast. The quiet came back in behind the words and filled the space the way water fills a boot, and he let it. He had been in worse silences.
He had been in one, in fact, that had a woman in plate attached to it, and the memory of that silence had a shape he could still walk around. He put his eyes on the path and made his feet keep pace with the stick.
Which was how he found them. A small wet sound with a break in it, and the break repeating. Not a bird. Not water. A sound that came in pieces and put the pieces back wrong.
He slowed. The sound came out of a dip where the ground held water, and he took the last steps slowly, hands half out, a man who does not know whether the dog bites. The trees had gone quiet around the dip, in the way trees go quiet when something has happened under them and nobody has told the trees what to do about it.
An imp girl crouched beside a fallen orc boy. Between them, a body. Orc woman. Still, broken in ways that did not need explaining. Her arm lay at an angle the arm did not agree with.
There was blood on the ground that had stopped being blood and started being part of the ground. The children had not moved her. They had not covered her. They had stayed where they were, which was the part that told Shadow more than the body did.
"Hey," he said, low and even.
Both children snapped up. The boy came off the ground with a root longer than he was tall in both hands, put himself between Shadow and the girl, and got it across his body like it might actually do something. His arms shook, and none of it was the weight.
The thing was thicker through than his own thigh and it came up off the ground the way a stick comes up.
He was shorter than Shadow's waist and broader than a boy that size had any business being, and there was something in the set of his jaw that had been there before today and was not going to leave because of it. Behind him the girl's hand came up.
A small flame stood at her fingertips, purple, no taller than a candle's first breath, tight and controlled, and did not go out.
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Shadow raised both hands, open, and left them there.
"No harm," he said. "I'm not here for that."
Nothing. Nobody stepped back, nobody stepped forward. The boy's grip stayed where it was, which Shadow respected, and the girl watched him with the flat attention of somebody counting the ways a thing can go wrong. He had seen that look before, on people older than her and taller than her and with worse hands. He did not move. Moving was a language and he did not want to speak it yet.
"Look," he said, quieter. "I'm not your enemy." He glanced toward the treeline and gave a short chuckle. "Which I know is exactly what the bad guy says to get your guard down."
The root shifted an inch. The flame at her fingertips flickered and steadied. The three of them stayed where they were, breathing, measuring the distance across the wet ground. The boy's arms had stopped shaking and started being still, which was worse.
He crouched. Lower, not closer. The stick went down in the mud beside him, well out of reach.
"Did someone hurt her?"
The girl swallowed. "She carried us," she said. "She woke us. Then..." Her voice broke on it and came back uneven. "No noise. Then she couldn't walk anymore."
"Yeah."
Not an answer. He said it anyway, because it was the only thing in that clearing small enough and true enough to hand over. He looked at the body and said nothing else about it, and the quiet after his own voice was worse than the crying had been. He kept his eyes on the children.
He did not tell them it was going to be all right. He had a stick and two open hands and no idea where he was, and a man who said things he could not pay for was worse than one who said nothing.
Then something shifted.
No step heard. No shape arriving through the trees. The man was simply kneeling a short way off, at exactly the distance from the children that the children needed him to be. He had not come through the brush. He had not come around the dip. Shadow had been looking at the whole clearing and had a clear memory of the whole clearing, and the man had not been in it until he was.
The man spoke to the children first. The words came out low and unhurried in a tongue Shadow did not have, and they arrived at his ear as shape and rhythm and nothing he could hold. Consonants in places they did not belong. A rolling sound where a word should have gone flat. It was the voice a man uses on a horse that has already spooked, and that part needed no translating.
He said more of it. Softer. Same tongue, same unhurried turn, and not aimed at Shadow either.
Shadow got none of the words. He got the shape of them, which was one thing ruled out and one thing handed over, and he built both readings out of what he could see rather than what he heard, which was the only way he was ever going to get them.
The boy's shoulders came down first. The girl took longer and then she did it too, and both of them looked at the stranger the way people look at a door that has just opened by itself. Shadow did not blame them. He was looking at the same door.
Shadow blinked. "Okay. That's new."
The man turned his head toward him, unhurried. "Friends," he said, with a small gesture at Shadow, "aren't a threat. Not to you."
"Big fan of that policy."
The man looked at the children first. "This one is not with them," he said, in Common, so Shadow heard it. "He is a hero. Not the polished kind. The kind who shows up."
Shadow made a sound. "That's one word for it."
The man turned back to the children and said something in their own tongue, low and brief, and whatever the words carried, the boy's grip eased on the root before Shadow watched him decide to let it. The girl's hand went dark. The man asked a question. The boy answered first.
"Grimdal," he said.
"Remdalla," the girl said.
Shadow nodded once. "Right. Hi. I'm Shadow. Apparently I'm safe now."
He put his hands down, slowly, and picked the stick back up, which took the last of the weight off his shoulder. The man had not looked at the stick once. That was either good manners or the kind of confidence that did not need to notice a stick, and Shadow filed it under things to think about if he got a quiet hour.
Remdalla looked at him after that, long enough that the looking counted. Then she nodded, once, the smallest nod he had ever been given. He had been nodded at by tavern keepers and watchmen and one duchess, and none of them had put that much into it.
"Right," Shadow said, and found he had no follow-up, which was rare enough to notice. "Glad we're past the part with the tree."
He glanced toward the trees, because he had never once left a question alone. "Hey. Do you know where Midknight went?"
"He's out of reach right now."
"...That's not ominous at all."
His breath caught, and he let it. "You mean he's probably dead."
"For an Informer, one question, one answer. That was yours."
"Yeah."
He did not ask again. Asking again would have cost something and he did not know the currency, and the man had a way of making a question into a closed door. He closed his eyes for a second, opened them, and the kneeling man was gone. Shadow had not seen him leave. He had not seen him move. He had seen the man, and then he had seen the ground where the man had been, and the ground was exactly as it had been.
"Hate when they do that."
He stood there a moment longer with the stick in his hand. The children watched him do it. He was aware of that. He was aware of a lot of things at once and none of them were useful, and then a small hand closed on his cloak.
Remdalla had crossed the wet ground without him hearing a thing, and she was standing close enough that he could see the flame had gone out of her fingertips and left her hands shaking. She pointed at his shoulder. Then at his side. Then she said something he did not understand, in a voice that expected him to hold still.
"She knows how," Grimdal said. The boy had moved closer too. "She learned it before. Before all this."
Shadow looked down at her. Small, filthy, waist high, chin up like the whole morning had been her idea.
"Yeah?" he said. "Can you?"
She did not answer that. She put both hands against his ribs and went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with being a child. The shaking did not stop but it changed, and the change was worse. It was the quiet of somebody doing arithmetic behind her eyes.
The light came. Same violet. Same small tight burn he had been watching at her fingertips while he decided whether the boy with the root was going to be a problem. Only it was not standing at the ends of her fingers this time. It was going in, and it startled him, because he had spent the whole of the standoff reading that light as one of the things in this clearing that could hurt him.
It came thin. Shaking, no more than a thread out of her palms and into his ribs, and it went out twice before it caught.
The third time it held, and it came in cold, then hot, then a pressure that had nothing to do with any hand and everything to do with being pushed from the inside. Worse than the wound.
All of it worse than the wound, and that was the part he had not expected.
The shoulder had been a bad, honest, sitting-still kind of hurt, the kind a man knows how to carry for a day or two, and this was that shoulder being put back, which was worse, and there was nothing to brace against. He went down.
His back hit the mud and came off it again. The joint lifted out of nowhere and seated itself with a wet click he felt in his teeth. His ribs pulled, bound, pulled again. The cut on his forearm closed like a mouth told to be quiet.
The girl was shaking all over. A sound came out of her, high and thin, and the thread thinned with it.
"Keep it," Grimdal said.
She faltered. The light guttered down to a spark.
"Keep it." His hand went flat against her back. "You've done this. She taught you. Same hands she taught you with. Do it the way she made you do it."
Remdalla said something through her teeth. Her arms had gone rigid. The light jumped and sank.
"Do it the way she made you do it," he said again. "You're not stopping here."
The light came back up and steadied, and this time it went all the way through. Shadow had no words for the next part. Bones moved under his skin and settled into places that held. The thing in his side that had been wrong since the clearing pulled, resisted, gave.
The ache with no address found one and filled it. He got a hand into the mud and held on and let it happen while a small pair of hands stayed pressed against his ribs and a boy's voice kept telling her to keep it.
He did not make a sound. He wanted to. He set his teeth and watched a leaf on the water beside his hand and did not make a sound, because she was making enough for both of them and one of them had to keep still.
Then it stopped. The light went out of her hands and she sat down hard in the mud, breathing like she had run a mile to get there.
Shadow lay where he was and took stock a second time.
The shoulder worked. Not well. It moved, and it held when it moved, and the joint had stopped having opinions. His ribs were whole enough to breathe past half a lung, which beat the last hour by a wide margin. The bleeding was done and the forearm cut had gone to a flat pink line.
Something deep in his side stayed wrong and stayed quiet about it. Filed under tomorrow. The mud under his hand had gone warm, which was either the healing or the day, and he did not investigate.
He rolled up onto his feet. The world stayed put. He raised the arm past his chest and it went, with a stop in it that had not been there before the river.
"...Huh," he said.
Then he looked at Remdalla, and the grin came off his face, because she was wrecked. Wrung out, hands still going, dirt on one cheek from where she had gone down, and Grimdal kneeling beside her with one arm out in case she tipped over sideways, which she looked about ready to do.
She was gray around the mouth. She was trying to get her breathing under control and not managing it, and she was watching him while she did it, like his shoulder was going to fall off if she looked away.
Shadow went down on one knee in front of her, which cost him, and did not show it.
"Okay," he said. "Look at me. Hey. That was you?"
She nodded.
"All of it? No help, no tricks, nothing I didn't see?"
She nodded again.
"Then listen." He kept his voice low and even, the same voice he had used to talk her down off the root. "That was the best thing anybody's done for me in a long time. Longer than I can count. I'm standing up right now because of you."
She looked at the ground, then up at him.
"You did good," he said. "You hear me? You did good. Now you're going to sit there and breathe for a minute, and nobody in this valley is asking you for anything else today."
Grimdal watched him over her head, and something in the boy's face set.
Shadow pushed himself up. He found the stick in the mud where he had put it and picked it up, then gave them both a long look. The boy had a bruise coming up on his forearm and no complaint about it. The girl had stopped shaking and started looking like she might sleep sitting up.
"Right," he said. "Here's where we are. Somewhere warm. Then food. Then we figure out the rest."
The two of them glanced at each other. Then they got up, and they did not argue, and that was that.
He looked once at the woman in the dip, and at the ground the children had not wanted to leave, and he had nothing to say about it that would have helped. No shovel. No torch.
No words for whatever he was supposed to tell them later. A stick and two kids and the day already moving away from him. He could have said something. He was good at saying something.
He stood there with the words in his mouth and let them go stale, because the girl was watching him and the boy was watching her, and neither of them needed him to make a speech over a body they were going to have to leave.
Shadow looked at Remdalla, then at the ground she'd have to cross on legs still shaking. He crouched in front of her and put his back to her.
"Up," he said. "We take turns. You're first."
She did not move right away. Grimdal said something to her, quiet, and she stepped in close and got her arms around Shadow's neck. He stood with a grunt he tried to make sound like nothing. She weighed less than she should have. Her breath went past his ear, fast and slowing, and her hands were cold where they locked into his collar.
"Stick," Shadow said, and held it out sideways. Grimdal took it, tested it against the mud, and walked with it like it had been his all along.
So he started walking, and they came.
Remdalla's weight settled against his back, small and warm, her hands locked in the collar of his coat. Grimdal walked at his off side with the stick, jaw set, watching the trees. Behind them the river kept running, indifferent as ever. Ahead of them the trees kept going the way trees do.
They had decided something about him in that clearing, and he did not know what it was and had no plan to ask. He had no map, no supplies, the two of them on his back and at his side, and a shoulder that would remind him about this morning every time it rains.
They needed him moving. So he moved.