Derrick learned to walk after the blisters opened.
Before that, every step had been a bargain. Heel down, teeth locked, breath held until the sting passed. Then the next step. Then the next. His sandals had split somewhere behind him, maybe on the stone road near the broken shrine, maybe in the ditch where he had slept with his face pressed into wet grass. He had stopped checking. The straps were tied to his feet with cord torn from his own tunic, and the knots bit almost as badly as the ground.
His father would have hated those knots.
Not hated. Corrected. Derrick could almost hear him, low and patient, hands moving faster than Derrick's eyes could follow. A bad knot spends your strength twice. Once when you tie it, once when it fails. His father had taught him that while mending river line, when Derrick still thought the worst thing water could steal was a hook. Thumb over loop. Cord through. Pull flat. Test it with both hands.
Derrick had tied the sandals wrong three times since the fire. Each time, he fixed them because he could not stop moving long enough to fall apart.
Ash clung to the hem of his tunic. It had worked its way into the cloth, under his nails, into the cracks of his lips. Some of it was from the burned beams. Some of it might have been from the storehouse roof, or the winter hay, or the little row of prayer sticks beside the well. He did not let himself think past that. The road behind him carried too many names.
He remembered pieces, never the whole.
Clay bowls jumping on the shelf before he woke. His mother's hand over his mouth because he had started to cry out. His father lifting him so hard Derrick's ribs hurt. Heat against the wall, then through the wall. A sound from outside that did not belong to any throat Derrick knew. It had rolled over the village in a long, breaking roar, deeper than thunder, full of breath and burning sap.
Then antlers through the smoke.
They had not looked real. They had looked like trees pulled from the ground and set on fire. The beast moved on long arms, gorilla-shaped, too high above the huts, its hide dark between licks of flame. Hardened quills bristled along its back. When it struck a house, the wall did not collapse all at once. It bent inward, groaned, then burst apart in sparks and straw.
Someone had shouted the name later, or maybe Derrick had only heard it in a story by firelight: Burshemark.
Corrupted, one of the older men had said before the roof fell. Burned wrong. Burning from the inside.
Derrick did not know what that meant. He only knew the village had existed, and then it had not.
His mother had kept dried roots under their sleeping mat, wrapped in waxed hide against damp. She had shown Derrick the hiding place the first winter his father let him help check the food stores. If the storehouse goes, we still eat two days. Never tell the lazy ones. He had laughed because she smiled when she said it. After the fire, he had crawled through the smoke to reach that mat. The roof beam above it had fallen. The roots were black stones. His mother's comb lay beside them, split down the middle.
That was when his father shoved him toward the dark between two huts.
"Run. Don't look back."
Derrick had looked back.
He remembered that too.
Now he kept his eyes on the ground ahead. Dirt. Moss. Pebbles. A beetle shining green beneath a leaf. A smear of old blood on his knuckles, cracked brown and stiff. If he looked too far, the road wavered. If he looked behind, the fire came back.
The land changed slowly as he walked. The charred smell thinned until wet bark and crushed fern took its place. Hills rose where the river country flattened behind him. Once, he found a stream no wider than his arm and drank until his stomach cramped. Once, he ate berries too sour to swallow without gagging. Once, he saw a pair of small furred Leyoki rooting beneath a fallen tree, brown bodies and twitching beaks, Coustel by the shape of them. He crouched behind brush and watched until they scattered. His village had kept Coustel in low pens for meat. He had helped clean those pens and hated the stink. He would have crawled inside one now if it meant a roof.
By the third morning, or the fourth, the sky turned white with heat. Derrick's tongue stuck to the back of his teeth. He followed crow calls because birds meant trees, trees meant shade, and shade sometimes meant water. He had stopped thinking of destinations. He measured the world by what might keep him alive until sundown.
Then he smelled smoke.
His body answered before his mind did. He dropped behind a rock with both hands over his head. His breath scraped in and out. The burned village rose whole inside him: roof straw catching, animals screaming, his mother's comb black beside the mat.
No roar came.
No sparks drifted down.
The smoke smelled wrong for disaster. Richer. Low and steady. Wood smoke, yes, but mixed with boiled grain, rendered fat, and something sharp like onion grass. Cooking. A hearth. People who had enough time to stir a pot.
Derrick lifted his head.
Through the thin trees ahead, roofs showed over a rise. Straw and timber. Smoke holes. A rough palisade made from sharpened logs, some newer than others. Beyond it, he heard a pulley creak, a goatish bleat that was not a goat, and a child's voice complaining about splinters.
The sound loosened something dangerous in him.
He staggered toward it, one hand out to catch tree trunks when the ground tilted. The village was smaller than his had been, or maybe it only looked that way because the wall pressed everything close. Huts crowded around a central well. Smoke curled from three hearths. Drying racks stood near the storehouse, guarded with netting. A patch of grain bent in the wind outside the wall, thin but alive.
Children at the well saw him first.
A little girl had both hands on the rope, heels dug into mud while she pulled a bucket up inch by inch. Beside her, a boy a few years older counted under his breath, making a game of the work. The girl looked past the bucket, saw Derrick between the gate posts, and let go. The bucket plunged. Water slapped stone far below.
The boy spun toward him. His hand went to the little knife at his belt, though the blade looked more suited to peeling roots than fighting.
"Someone's at the gate!" he shouted.
Derrick tried to speak. His throat closed around dust.
Doors opened. Faces appeared in smoke holes and doorways. A woman stepped out with a weaving shuttle still in her fist. Two men came from the fence line with hammers. Another carried a spear with a chipped iron head. A child started crying, then was pulled behind a skirt.
The ring formed quickly. Not trained like soldiers, but practiced by fear. Hoes lowered into grip. Axes shifted from tool to weapon. Someone shut the gate behind Derrick, not to welcome him, but to control where he could run.
He raised one hand. It shook too badly to stay lifted.
"I don't have anything," he said. The words came out dry and small.
"Name," the spear man said.
Derrick swallowed. His name had belonged to a house, a mother, a father, a row of friends by the river. Without them it felt stolen.
"Derrick."
"From where?"
He opened his mouth. Smoke filled it. Not real smoke. Memory. He coughed once, bent double, and nearly fell.
A woman pushed through the ring. She was broad-shouldered, hair tied back with a strip of faded cloth, sleeves rolled past her elbows. Dirt lined the creases in her hands. She did not put down the pruning knife she carried, but she uncorked a waterskin and held it out.
"Drink first," she said.
"Mara," someone warned.
"He falls, we learn nothing from him." She kept the waterskin extended.
Derrick took it with both hands. Water ran down his chin. His stomach clenched at the first swallow, then demanded more. He forced himself to stop before he vomited it back up.
An old man came forward while he drank. He leaned on a staff polished smooth where his hand had gripped it for years. His back had bent, but his eyes had not. They moved over Derrick's burns, torn sandals, ash-stiff tunic, empty belt, shaking hands.
"Where?" the old man asked.
Derrick wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Riverbend." The name scraped. "South. Past the black reeds."
The spear man muttered something under his breath.
The old man's gaze did not move. "What took it?"
The truth was too large. Derrick found the smallest piece he could carry.
"A Leyoki. Big. Fire on the antlers." His fingers curled around the waterskin until the hide creaked. "It came at night. I think... I think I am all that's left."
Talk burst around him.
"Fire antlers."
"That is too close."
"Burned places bring sickness."
"Look at his clothes."
"He is a child."
"Children carry curses same as men."
Mara's jaw tightened. The spear man shifted his grip. The little boy from the well stared at Derrick with round, hungry curiosity, until the older boy beside him pulled him back by the sleeve.
The old man lifted his staff and struck the butt against the packed earth. Once. The sound was not loud, but the crowd quieted because they had learned to quiet.
"A burned village sends smoke before it sends survivors," he said. "We saw no smoke. That means the wind was wrong, or the fire was far, or we were blind. None of those are comfort."
He looked at Derrick again.
"You breathe. Your hands move. That is enough for tonight. Stay if you work. Lie, steal, or break our rules, and you leave by whichever gate is open fastest."
Derrick nodded. He would have agreed to worse.
Mara took back the waterskin, corked it, and jerked her chin toward the well. "Sit before your legs quit pretending."
The little boy whispered, not quietly enough, "He looks like the ash men from Halen's story."
The older boy elbowed him. "I am Halen. You told it wrong."
"Both of you," Mara snapped.
The two boys shut their mouths at the same time.
Derrick lowered himself onto the well stones. His knees trembled long after he sat. Around him, the village went back to moving, but not back to normal. People watched while pretending to coil rope, lift buckets, and carry kindling. The gate remained closed behind him.
He had found people.
That did not mean he had found safety.