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Ivy saw the innkeeper's death-prints before she saw the man.
They were burned into the floorboards outside his room, overlapping in tight circles like he'd been pacing the same three steps for hours. Fresh prints. Still smoking at the edges where the wood remembered his weight. But they didn't lead anywhere. They just stopped at the wall.
She pushed the door open. Cole was already inside, crouched next to a low cot where the innkeeper sat with his back to them both. The man was maybe fifty, greying at the temples, wearing an undershirt gone yellow with old sweat. He was muttering something low and steady. Not words. Just sound.
Cole glanced back at her. Raised an eyebrow.
Ivy stepped in and let the door swing shut. The room smelled like tallow and unwashed skin. One window, shutters half-closed. A cracked basin on a shelf. The innkeeper didn't turn. Didn't stop muttering. His right hand was moving, fingers twitching like he was writing something in the air.
"How long's he been like this?" Cole kept his voice low.
"Since last night." The answer came from behind them. Ivy turned. A girl, maybe sixteen, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed tight over her ribs. Her eyes were red. "He went up to check on the Farrow boy. Came back and just... started."
Cole stood, brushing dust off his knee. "Started what?"
"Talking to the wall."
Ivy looked at the wall. It was bare. No cracks, no stains, nothing but old plaster gone grey with smoke. The innkeeper's hand kept moving. His muttering got a little louder. Still not words. Or if they were words, they weren't any language Ivy knew.
She stepped closer. The death-prints thickened around her boots. She could feel them pulling at her, the way they always did when they were this fresh. She knelt next to the innkeeper and tilted her head, trying to see his face.
His eyes were open. Pupils blown wide, black eating up the brown. He wasn't blinking.
"Sir." Cole moved to the other side, careful not to touch him. "Can you hear me?"
The muttering stopped.
Ivy's stomach dropped. She knew that silence. She'd felt it a hundred times in a hundred dead men's footprints. The moment right before something broke.
Then the innkeeper turned his head. Slow. Too slow. Like his neck was rusted.
He looked at Cole.
"West," he said.
His voice was his own. Ivy could tell that much. But it sounded scraped out, like he'd been screaming for hours and this was all he had left.
Cole leaned in. "West where?"
The innkeeper's hand shot out and grabbed Cole's wrist.
Ivy saw it happen a half-second before it did. Saw the grab, saw Cole jerk back, saw the moment the innkeeper's grip slipped and Cole stumbled into the shelf and the basin tipped and cracked on the floor. She saw all of it. And then it happened exactly that way.
Except Cole didn't stumble. He held his ground. The innkeeper's fingers were locked around his wrist, nails digging in hard enough to leave marks.
"Through Ironthorn," the innkeeper said.
Ivy felt the air shift. Not wind. Not magic. Something else. She looked down at the death-prints and they were moving now, crawling up the walls like smoke, spreading across the ceiling in thin black veins.
She stood fast. "Cole."
He was already pulling back, but the innkeeper held on. His other hand came up, fingers splayed, and pressed flat against the wall.
And then Ivy saw it.
Cole, lying face-down in the dirt outside the inn. Blood in his hair. One hand reaching for something he'd never catch. The sky above him the wrong color, purpled and sick, and the trees in the distance bent at angles that didn't exist.
She saw it clear as glass. Saw the way his chest wasn't moving. Saw the flies starting to gather at the corner of his mouth.
She didn't move. Didn't let her face change. She just stood there and watched Cole try to pry the innkeeper's hand off his wrist, and she didn't say a word.
The girl in the doorway made a small noise. Ivy looked at her. The girl was staring at the wall.
The innkeeper was scratching something into the plaster with his thumbnail. Slow, deliberate strokes. His hand left thin white lines in the grey.
Cole finally got his wrist free and stepped back, breathing hard. He looked at Ivy. "You see that?"
She nodded. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the wall.
The innkeeper finished his scratching and dropped his hand. His head lolled forward. For a second Ivy thought he was dead. Then his shoulders started shaking. He was laughing.
Quiet at first. Then louder.
Cole moved back another step. "We need to go."
Ivy didn't answer. She was reading the word scratched into the wall.
West.
That was all. Just the one word, letters uneven and shaky, like a child had carved them. But underneath it, in smaller scratches, something else. Ivy stepped closer. The death-prints were everywhere now, layered so thick she could barely see the floor.
She crouched and traced the air above the smaller scratches. Not words. Symbols. Three of them, stacked in a column.
She'd seen them before. In a book Cole kept in his pack, the one with the cracked leather spine and pages that smelled like mold. Binding marks. Old ones. The kind no guild mage used anymore because they didn't just hold things. They invited them in.
The innkeeper's laughter cut off.
Ivy looked up. He was staring at her now. Eyes still black, still wide, but focused. Locked on her face like he could see straight through to the back of her skull.
"You're the half-blood," he said.
She didn't answer.
"It knows you're coming." His voice was flat now. Empty. "It's been waiting."
Cole grabbed her arm. "Ivy. Now."
She stood. The innkeeper's hand came up again, slower this time, and pointed at the window.
"Through Ironthorn," he said again. "Through the bones. Through the old road."
His hand dropped. His head tilted back. His mouth opened and something came out. Not sound. Not breath. Just a thin ribbon of black that curled up toward the ceiling and dissolved into nothing.
Then he slumped sideways onto the cot and didn't move.
The girl screamed.
Cole pulled Ivy toward the door. She let him. The death-prints were fading now, pulling back into the floor, but she could still feel them buzzing under her boots. She looked back once. The innkeeper's chest was rising and falling. Shallow, but steady.
He wasn't dead.
Not yet.
They hit the hallway and Cole didn't stop until they were down the stairs and out into the common room. It was empty except for an old man asleep in the corner and a dog curled up by the cold fireplace. The morning light coming through the windows was thin and grey.
Cole let go of her arm and leaned against the wall, breathing hard. He had scratches on his wrist where the innkeeper had grabbed him. Four red lines, already starting to bruise.
"What the hell was that," he said. Not a question.
Ivy looked at the stairs. She could still hear the girl crying up there. Crying or screaming, hard to tell.
"He's been touched," she said.
Cole wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "By the Taker?"
"Or something close to it."
He looked at her. "You see anything?"
She thought about the vision. Cole in the dirt, flies gathering, sky the wrong color. She thought about the binding marks scratched into the wall and the black ribbon that came out of the innkeeper's mouth. She thought about the way the death-prints had moved, alive and hungry and reaching.
She met his eyes. "Yeah. I saw west."
Cole pushed off the wall and started pacing. Three steps one way, three steps back. The same way the innkeeper had paced. Ivy watched him and didn't say anything.
"Ironthorn," Cole said finally. "That's cursed ground. No one goes in there. No one comes out."
"The Taker went in."
"The Taker's not human."
Ivy looked at him. "Neither am I."
That shut him up.
She walked to the door and pushed it open. The air outside was cold and damp, the kind of cold that got into your bones and stayed there. The street was empty. No one moving. No smoke from the chimneys. The whole village felt like it was holding its breath.
She looked west. The trees started maybe half a mile out, a solid black line against the grey sky. Ironthorn. She could feel it from here. The weight of it. The pull.
Cole came up behind her. "You sure about this?"
She wasn't. She'd seen him dead. Seen it clear and certain, the way she always saw things that were going to happen. But she'd also seen the binding marks and the black ribbon and the way the innkeeper's eyes had locked onto hers.
It knows you're coming.
She nodded. "Yeah. I'm sure."
Cole was quiet for a long moment. Then he sighed and adjusted the strap of his pack.
"All right," he said. "Let's go die in the woods."
Ivy didn't smile. She just turned and started walking west, toward the trees, toward the old road and the bones and whatever was waiting for them in the dark.
Behind them, the inn was silent. Upstairs, the innkeeper lay on his cot with his eyes closed and his hand still pressed against the wall, fingers resting on the word he'd carved there.
West.
And underneath it, the binding marks that would let something through.