Aldous came to the door just after breakfast.

  That was the first sign that something was wrong. Aldous did not make house calls. He was the kind of man who expected the world to come to him - not out of arrogance, but out of the particular economy of movement that settled into a man's bones after sixty-odd years of living. He sat in his chair at the elder's hall each morning, drank his tea, and waited for whatever the day intended to bring him. Most days, it brought him nothing but peace.

  That he had walked the length of Barrow Lane and climbed Milos's front steps before the morning was even properly underway meant that the day had brought him something that he did not wish to handle alone.

  Milos saw him through the kitchen window before he heard the knock. With the practiced patience of a man who wasn't easily rattled, he set down his mug and walked toward the door, trying to keep his curiosity at bay.

  He opened the door and Aldous stood there in his good coat - the grey wool one that he wore for public praise, funerals, and disputes - with his hat in both hands and an expression that had been carefully arranged into something that Milos might called 'practiced calm'. He wasn't a big man in his prime, and now pushing the back half of his sixties, he'd seemingly shrunk in that way that old people seemed to. With a face like a walnut and eyes that had seen enough of the world to stopped being surprised by most of it, Aldous's masked apprehension set a small alarm bell off somewhere in Milos's brain.

  "Morning," Milos greeted after the briefest of pauses.

  "Morning." Aldous adjusted the hat in his hands once. "We've... got some young people at the Inn. Came in off the south road about an hour ago. Maret's done what she knows, but..."

  Well, that certainly explained it, didn't it?

  "They're in a bad way, Milos."

  Milos looked at him for a moment. Then, he turned to the left and reached for his coat that hung on a hook next to the door. Next to it, he made sure to grab his old leather satchel that hung just beside it - the one that his sister had affectionately called his 'worrying bag', stuffed with linen strips and a small pot of drawing salve that he'd accumulated over his days with the passing traders. In a town with no designated healer, it did a mountain of good to be prepared.

  "How bad," he said. It wasn't quite a question.

  Aldous put his hat back on, a flash of relief flickering across his aged features. "One of them's on the floor, but... they're all still breathing."

  For now.

  Milos swung the satchel over his shoulder and followed him out into the morning.

  They walked quickly - which, for Aldous meant briskly, and for Milos meant holding back. Neither of them said much; there wasn't much to say, in retrospect. The village was waking up around them. The smoke began to trickle into the sky from the chimneys, while the smell of bread wafted through the air. A few people watched them pass with the quiet attention of a small town that noticed anything that wasn't of the normal routine.

  Milos didn't look back at them.

  "Are they adventurers?"

  Aldous didn't answer immediately. "Young ones, if the answer is yes. Very young, honestly. But, well, we didn't yet ask."

  "Who found them?"

  "Lucy Morran. She was out inspecting the grounds - some of her animals were right irritated, and I can imagine why. Saw them limping along, covered in all sorts of material. Blood, namely." The old man's mouth thinned. "Said one of them was carrying another for the last part of it. She was worried that she had a dead kid on her hands."

  Milos absorbed this without comment. But his gaze involuntarily flickered down toward Aldous, who realized the silence. "Ah - but they're all alive. And I reckon that not all that blood is theirs."

  The Ashford Inn sat at the nearby corner of the crossroads, a broad-shouldered building of old, chipped stone and newer timber that had been added onto so many times over the centuries that it had lost any original intention and simply became itself. It was best described as comfortable and slightly asymmetrical, with window boxes that Maret, the Innkeeper, replanted every spring with more optimism than the climate really warranted.

  As the duo arrived at the front, there was a small knot of villagers that had gathered near the door, expressions flickering between curious and outright nosy. Milos walked forward, his shoulders pulled back and his posture sturdy, and they parted without being asked. All except one.

  "Milos!"

  He turned just to the left, peering down at a blonde-haired woman, somewhere in mid-twenties, giving her a gentle bow of the head. "Mornin', Lucy."

  "Please," she said, offering him the strongest smile she could muster. Which, given her timid and nervous disposition, was not very sturdy - but it still counted for something. "Take care of them."

  There was nothing else to say; he walked forward, parting through the wooden doors of the inn like destiny has scripted it. Inside, the common room smelled of woodsmoke and last night's supper, with the lingering hint of something particularly metallic, which Milos recognized before his mind had finished deciding what it was.

  Blood. Not a lot. But some.

  He took in the room in the way that he always did, the same old habits falling into place - exists, obstructions, the position of every person and their focus of attention - and found four young people in various states of damage. They were distributed across the room like they had reached the door and then simply stopped having the energy to exist.

  A boy with a rogue's lean build sat against the far wall with his knees drawn up, a rag wrapped around his forearm that had soaked through badly enough to suggest that it had been applied some time ago, and not changed since. He was watching the room with sharp, wary eyes that certainly didn't miss the arrival of a large stranger, and his chin came up in the automatic way of someone who had learned that looking unbothered was a form of armor.

  Near the window, a girl with ink-stained fingers sat hunched forward over the table with her head in her hands and her black braids falling loose around her face. She wasn't unconscious, but she wasn't focusing, either - there was a particular hollowed-out stillness that filled her eyes, like she'd been running on empty for far longer than a few minutes.

  Directly beside her, a slight blonde boy sat very straight in his chair, which Milos immediately recognized as the posture of someone who was trying hard not to let anyone see how close to the edge they were. His hands were in his lap and they were trembling finely, the same way his own hands trembled when they had been working in the fields for far too long. His eyes found Milos immediately and there was something that flashed within them - relief, perhaps?

  But there was more, too. There was a hint of guilt; the type that seemed to accompany relief, when someone else was taking charge for a situation gone wrong.

  And on the floor, in the space between two tables that Maret had clearly cleaned in a hurry was another girl.

  Unlike the black-haired girl, this girl was tall - even laying flat. Dark auburn hair cropped close, jaw set even now, and she was conscious (which was something). But her consciousness only extended from her thick, shuddering breathing; a sign that it was driven by stubbornness, rather than natural status. One arm was pressed against her midsection while the other was flat on the floorboards. Her color seemed wrong, too - a hint of pallor, which stood out against the dark wooden panels just below her.

  Maret hovered nearby with a basin of water and the expression of a capable woman who had reached the outer edge of her abilities. She was an innkeeper - broad, practical, and unflappable in the ordinary run of things. This was not ordinary, though.

  "I've kept her still," Maret said, with the barest hints of relief shining through her words. "She didn't want to be still, though."

  "I can imagine," Milos said evenly.

  He crossed the room and crouched down beside the girl on the floor, putting himself as close to her level as he could muster. From his shoulder, he shrugged off his satchel and looked at her properly - a bit more closely. Suddenly, Aldous's eyes didn't seem so old and frail. Up close, she was even younger than she'd looked from the door.

  Her jaw was still set, and her eyes were still open, fixed on the ceiling with determined focus. Each breath was a forced one - like she was trying to exhale the physical pain and whatever exhaustion was tinting her vision. As his shadow fell over her, she turned her head and looked at him with an expression that was trying very hard to be defiant, but not quite managing it.

  "I'm fine," she said in what almost seemed like a rehearsed manner.

  "All right."

  He didn't argue with her; there was no point in being right. Instead, he began to look at her with the methodical attention of a man who had assessed a great deal of damage over the years. He was careful and unhurried about it, despite the gentle prickle of time peering over his shoulder. Gently, he moved his hands, but made sure to communicate exactly what he was doing with the girl, first. He had learned, long ago, that people who had been hurt were often frightened, and needed to know what was coming.

  It was a small thing, but it mattered.

  "I'm going to lift up your shirt a little bit, okay?" There was permission inquired, but a strength in his words - he needed to do this, but he would respect her answer.

  While her breathing didn't change, her arm shifted subtly, granting him access to tug her damaged leather armor up across her belly, revealing the beginnings of a nice patch of bruising near the bottom of her ribcage. Her arm remained rested across the rest of the bruising that surely existed higher up, hid by the height of her clothing and armor, like it was protecting her from the outside world.

  They both knew it wasn't.

  There was also a gash on her forehead that was sloppily wrapped and stained with what appeared to be old blood. The same blood caked her hair into thick clumps, sticking to her scalp - but, with her injuries, she probably hadn't even noticed. As his gaze swept down further, past the faint bruises and skin scrapes that would have caused a normal kid to cry a little, he reached her left ankle that had grown to the size of a grapefruit.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  It, too, was bruised - but the swelling was more impressive than anything.

  "What hit you?" He asked, not unkindly.

  There was a pause. "A rock troll."

  Her voice was low, suggesting that she didn't particularly want the rest of the room to hear. "By the side of the ravine. The footing was bad, and I..."

  "You went to hold it," he finished for her.

  It wasn't a question, either. He had looked at her and read the story the way that a general could read a field after a battle - who had been where, what had happened, and the shapes of the choices that had been made. She had the bruising that told its own story; she'd been hit broadside and hit hard. And the way her jaw had barely unclenched, she was clearly the type of person to plant her feet between something dangerous and the people behind her.

  But, in that moment, she looked at him without defiance. Just a flicker of herself: honest and unguarded. She didn't say anything else: her silence said it all.

  "I'm going to need you to move your arm," he finally said. "Slowly."

  There was a moment that she hesitated - but, whether it was because of his tone or her pain, she complied silently, allowing him to continue assessing her as he pulled the armor up a bit higher.

  "What's your name?"

  He wasn't looking at her when he had asked; but, judging by the way her torso seemed to stiffen, he could tell that she hadn't been expecting him to ask so suddenly. That said, he still didn't look at her directly - rather, he moved upward toward the gash on her forehead and looked toward Maret with a silent expectation that only she could understand. Her silent nod was enough as he turned back toward wound.

  Without asking, his outstretched left hand found itself warm and damp as the cloth he now held reached up to dab at the bloodied wound, while his right hand tenderly worked to pull her hair away. She hissed as the rag pressed against the tender borders of the wound, any effort to hide her pain going to the wayside.

  "Not too deep, but... it should be covered for safety," Milos said to no one in particular. "Hold this..."

  As he pulled away, exchanging his large hand with the girl's far smaller palm on the cloth against the wound, he heard her mumble something.

  "Pardon?"

  "Ria. You asked... it's Ria."

  "I see. It's nice to meet you, Ria. I'm Milos."

  Neither of them said anything more; something told him that just getting a name was a significant hurdle to overcome in their limited meeting. So, he left Ria to brood in silence. Whatever thoughts plagued her, time would help more than anything he could rush to say. He offered her a small red vial, in which the contents sloshed gently as he passed the bottle toward her. She immediately understood and downed the liquid, grimacing as the poultice hit her tongue.

  It might not taste good, but the way her color seemed to return just a hair was a welcomed exchange.

  The next hour was dedicated toward treating each of them, one-by-one.

  Maret kept the water coming and heated more without being asked to do so, while Aldous sat in the corner with his tea and said something, which was its own kind of help. The villagers outside had eventually dispersed, or pretended to - which, to Milos, amounted to the same thing.

  The boy against the wall - the lean one, with the watching eyes - was the second worst off physically, though he submitted to the examination with a particular studied indifference that was clearly meant to suggest he didn't care about the outcome either way. As it turned out, the wound on his forearm was older than it initially looked, which meant that he'd been managing it himself for at least a day, probably two, tightening the rag when it soaked through and not mentioning it to anyone.

  "You should have said something," the blonde boy said from across the room quietly.

  "I'm saying something now," he replied with a causal indifference. "I'm saying it's fine."

  "It's not fine," Milos supplied, with the same event tone that he'd used for everything else. "But it will be. What's your name?"

  Just in Ria's case, there was no immediate answer. So, Milos took the silence in stride and cleaned the blood properly, wrapping the wound with clean linen as he let the boy stew in his thoughts. Expectedly, the boy watched him do everything with his owl-like gaze, looking for something - maybe an angle, a catch, the thing that might explain why a stranger in a random village would bother.

  So, Milos didn't offer any explanation - he just did the work.

  "...'s none of your business."

  "Alright."

  The blonde boy gave him a look - it was difficult to tell if it was a glare, as it lacked any semblance of heat, but between the two, it was clearly something. That said, the wiry boy said nothing further in response; he remained sitting with the dressing changed, allowing the shadows to claim him as Milos shifted his attention toward the black-haired girl, who was neither here nor there.

  He knelt in front of her, ignoring how his knees popped uncomfortable. "Hey, can you focus on my voice?"

  It took her a second to blink. Her eyelids closed sluggishly, as if debating whether or not to reopen, before the fluttered upward once more, vibrant green eyes trying desperately to focus on the man in front of her.

  "That's good," he complimented gently. It was good, too. Just by looking at her, he could tell that she wasn't physically injured, as much as simply empty. Drained to the waterline and then past it. He'd seen it before in mages, who had pushed beyond what their bodies could sustain, burning reserves that they didn't have, because the alternative was simply worse.

  He reached over and snatched a loaf of bread from a nearby table, complete with a glass of water, setting it next to her. Her bleary gaze shifted toward the sustenance, her stomach growling loudly as the scent hovered near her nose.

  "Here. You'll need to eat and refuel your mana."

  "How do you know she's a mage?" Maret asked lowly. There was no accusation in her tone - simply curiosity.

  The smiled thinly in response. "I've seen mana depletion a time or two in my life. It's like a hangover."

  Judging by the confused looks on the kids' faces, but the dawning of understanding on the adults, Milos knew that he needed to say nothing more.

  "Lyra..."

  Her voice was soft, almost strained.

  But even in her daze, she seemed to offer it carefully; like she wasn't sure yet whether names were safe currency here. He nodded slowly and gave her a gentle smile. Then, he turned away, giving her the privacy to eat without an unknown man staring at her.

  Before he'd even fully sat before the blonde boy, he was already given a breadcrumb - and then some.

  "Edrin. T-thank you."

  While the immediate offering of information was appreciated, it came with a quiet courtesy that sat oddly on someone so young. "Is... is there anything I can do to help you?"

  Both Maret and Aldous looked at the boy with raised eyebrows. It was difficult to say with certainty, but the boy at least looked the youngest in the group. Perhaps that was partially the reason for his overt openness. Or perhaps he was just naturally trusting - to Milos, it didn't quite matter.

  At some point, Edrin's hands had stopped trembling, and that was a big step forward in Milos' opinion. Then, he stood up shakily, his ambition lighting up within his gaze.

  "I-I have some training in healing magic," the boy offered quickly, before Milos could answer. "I also know a good deal about herbs, basic remedies and salves, that kind of stuff. I can help... if you want me to."

  "Sit," Milos said firmly, but gently. "Eat something. You can't pour something from an empty jug."

  Edrin opened his mouth, then closed it, and followed the simple command.

  "When you've eaten your fill, we can talk again. But for now, I want you to help yourself. Alright?" Milos studied the boy's gaze, and how it fell directly into his lap. It wasn't quite shame, but it wasn't far off, either.

  "O-okay..."

  Milos nodded, turning back to Ria.

  Now that the others had been assessed and deemed stable, he could focus on the brunt of the injuries. He crossed back, patting old Aldous on the shoulder, and giving the man a reassuring smile as he shuffled by him.

  In front of Ria, he wasn't surprised when she once again took on a defense posture. As he grabbed another set of gauze and bandages, he realized that she was the most difficult of all of them. Not because her injuries were the most complex, but because she had opinions about each stage, and expressed them with the thoroughness of someone who had been holding her silence for a very long time and was now making up for it. The cracked rib he was fairly certain of made her breath hiss sharply when he confirmed it, and she said several words that made Marget raise her eyebrows, for which she apologized (and then un-apologized when he did it again). All the while, Milos said nothing and kept working.

  When he had bound her properly and the ankle wrapped and elevated on a folded blanket, he sat back and looked at he, and she looked at him, and somewhere in the process, the defiance had shifted into something else. Not softness - he didn't think this particular girl had a great deal of softness available to her ion the ordinary run of things - but a kind of wary, reluctant acknowledgement. He was here - he had done the things he'd said he'd do. And now, the damage was smalelr than it had been.

  "How long did you walk on that ankle?" It was morbid curiosity that pushed him to ask.

  She stared at the ceiling a moment. "A while."

  "Since the ravine?"

  There was a long pause that followed. "Most of it."

  He said nothing for a moment. The swelling confirmed her words were true, if nothing else. "How far back was the ravine?"

  "Half a day, maybe?"

  Half a day. He looked at her and thought about what it cost to walk on a bad ankle, with cracked ribs, and say nothing about it. To keep moving, to keep being the one at the front, to not let others see. He knew what that could cost. He knew it in his lungs and his hands, and the places where amor had fused to his skin long ago, when he was barely older than she was now.

  But he didn't say anything in response; he knew that neither of them wanted to hear him lecture. Now wasn't the time - and she wasn't willing to listen.

  "Alright. Sleep." His voice carried over the room, all eyes turning to him - some slow, some quick. "All of you. Maret will sort the rooms."

  "We don't have much coin," the lean boy said from across the room instantly, like it had been waiting behind his teeth.

  "Kellen," Ria said pointedly. "I'll handle it."

  "I didn't ask about coin," Milos said, purposely ignoring the glare that the wiry boy - Kellen, he told himself - shot toward Ria. "You need rest. I'll see to it that your expenses are covered."

  Kellen looked at him. That watchful, searching look again returned, hunting for an angle. For a moment, Milos was certain he'd refuse for them - not that it mattered, Milos wouldn't be outdone in stubbornness by a boy - but Kellen remained silent. Slowly, Milos stood up from his uncomfortable position on the floor, one hand braced against his knee for a half-second - the cold had gotten to the joint during the hour on the floor - and picked up his satchel.

  "I'm going to come by and check on you this evening," he said to the room generally. "Don't do anything that requires moving quickly, please."

  He nodded toward Maret, who nodded back with the efficient gratitude of someone who had a great deal to do, and would see it diligently done. He spared a glance toward Aldous, who had reassumed his position in the corner with his tea, having watched the full display without so much as a peep.

  At the door, Milos paused, not quite turning back.

  "The rock troll." His voice was low, but clearly audible in the quiet inn. "Did you finish it?"

  "Yes." Ria's voice, flat and certain, held little room for doubt.

  Milos didn't say anything else; he nodded once, more for himself than her, and walked out into the afternoon.

  Aldous caught up to him halfway down the lane, moving faster than a man his age had any right to.

  Respectfully, Milos slowed his pace so that the elderly man could reach his hip - then, they walked together in a comfortable silence while the village moved around them, and the mountains say against the northern sky as they always had.

  "So, they're just children," Aldous said, breaking the quiet.

  "They are," Milos agreed.

  "The girl on the floor - Ava?"

  "Ria."

  "Right, Ria. She's what - sixteen?"

  "Around that." In truth, he wasn't really sure - he just assumed she was around that age, because she had that defensiveness that only a teenager with everything to prove could have.

  Aldous made a sound that communicated a great deal without being any particular word. Then, he cleared his throat, calming himself a bit in the process. "Are you going back tonight?"

  "I did say I would," Milos replied with a light smile, as if that explained everything.

  There was another silence that passed by the two. A cart rumbled by them, the oxen tugging the carriage along huffing with a heavy sigh as it moved by them. The driver raised a hand, and they raised a hand back, like the world was otherwise normal.

  "You know," Aldous said carefully, in the tone of a man who had chosen his words with the deliberateness of someone with long experience. "I remember when you came back. What, six years ago? Seven? You looked... like a man who had put something down and wasn't sure his hands remembered how to be empty."

  Milos said nothing.

  "I'm not saying anything," Aldous spoke again. "Just remembering. Like old folks do."

  They reached the turning where the paths separated, and Aldous stopped, while Milos stopped beside him. The old man looked up at him with those walnut-shelled eyes, calm and unhurried as they normally were - and smiled at him warmly.

  "Good work in there," Aldous said simply. He put his hat on more firmly against the breeze, and turned toward the elder's hall without waiting for a response.

  And Milos simply watched him go.

  Then, he turned toward home, and the mountains were pale gold in the midday sun, somewhere behind him in the Ashford Inn, four young people were hopefully resting. It was probably strange - he had no idea how long they'd been moving, but he knew how much his body had once disliked it when he stopped. The moment that one's body finally felt safe enough to hurt properly, and how long the ache lingered.

  He rolled his shoulder once, unconsciously, where old scar tissue tugged in the cold.

  Then, he walked home to start supper - because supper still needed making and preparing for later tonight, and the rows still needed their tending in the next morning, and the world kept its ordinary pace regardless of what arrived to interrupt it.

  That was the thing about Ashford Crossing.

  It endured.

  And so did he.