She went alone.
She had the argument with both of them — Aldric concise and specific about his objections, Thessaly detailed and slightly louder about hers — and she understood both sets of objections and she went alone anyway. Because what was required at the border was not protection. Protection would corrupt the thing that needed to happen, which was two people facing each other with nothing between them — no allies, no witnesses, no structure to hide behind.
She was afraid.
She acknowledged this to herself clearly, in the specific way she'd learned to acknowledge things she was afraid of: named them, let them be real, and then continued.
She walked to the border in the early morning. The Vane territory's edge was marked in the old way — not a fence or a wall but a line of specific
