Iruga had been smiling since the moment he stepped out of the house and he knew it and could not stop. The road out of Smardoh was the same road he had walked to the field outskirts a hundred times, but it did not feel the same. The end of it was different now. This time there was more road after it.

  Chiyo walked beside him, the borrowed clothes fitting him the way borrowed clothes fit a child — which was to say, adequately. His hair was tied back loosely, trailing down between his shoulders. He glanced up at Iruga's face and then at the sword strapped across his back.

  "Why does your father," Chiyo said, "a farming village head, have a well built greatsword?"

  Iruga's smile settled into something quieter.

  "He wasn't always a village head," he said. "When I was small, my father was a captain in the kingdom's military. A real one — not a border post assignment, an actual unit." He shifted the sword's strap against his shoulder. "He was well respected. People followed him the way people follow someone who has earned it rather than been handed it."

  He paused, watching the road ahead.

  "Something happened. I don't know the full of it. He never spoke about it directly and I learned early not to ask. Whatever it was, he resigned his commission and came to Smardoh." He glanced at Chiyo. "He showed up in a farming village with a greatsword and a manner that made people listen when he talked. It didn't take long before the village trusted him with more than just their attention. They put it to a vote. He became village head."

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  Chiyo was quiet for a moment. "And the sword stayed."

  "The sword stayed," Iruga said.

  The road north carried them out of Smardoh's flat farming land and into something else entirely. The ground began to rise, slowly at first and then with more intention, the path threading between shoulders of rock and stands of old trees that grew thick enough to dull the morning light. Mount Vesuvius sat behind them, its mass still visible when the path curved and opened long enough to look back. Ahead, the land kept climbing.

  Iruga had known, in the abstract way a man knows things he has only been told, that northern Eustad was mountainous. He had not known what that meant from the inside of it. The scale of it was different from the descriptions. The ridgelines stacked behind each other in shades that went from deep green to grey to the pale blue of distance, and between them the valleys held pockets of forest so dense they looked solid from above. Waterfalls came off the rock faces in thin white lines. The air was cooler here and tasted different — clean in a way that had nothing to do with the absence of dung, though that was part of it.

  He did not say any of this out loud. He just walked and looked, and the smile came back without him deciding to let it.

  The kingdom lay to the north-west. The road would take them through the range before it descended toward Syvarius. They had days of walking ahead of them, maybe more depending on the passes.

  Iruga found, for the first time in his life, that he did not mind the distance.