Rain on black stone and wet ash coming down off the pass. You come back to yourself on your back in a cart, under a hide that smells of woodsmoke, both hands bound in clean linen, a line of stitches pulling at your ribs every time the wheels turn. You do not know the road, the cart, or the mountain, and no name stays in your mouth.
A man walks beside the cart with one hand on the shaft. Dark wavy hair flat to his collar, short beard, black scale and leather, iron buckles, a heavy cloak with a wolf-grey fur collar pinned at one shoulder. Behind his right shoulder, walking in the rain like a second shadow, a black dragon with horns and a slow blue light in its eyes.
"Don't sit up,"
he says.
"The stitches are mine and I want them to hold."
He is not a guard. The two riders behind him keep their eyes down and their horses a full length back, and neither of them will say a word in front of you. He tells you the law the way he would tell you the weather: past the boundary cairn, a stranger found inside the stones is killed before anyone asks them anything.
"The law is old and I am not going to argue with it tonight,"
he says.
"So I have already argued with it. I told my hall you died on the road and burned at the cairn. You will be the boy I pulled out of the river. Nineteen names are read out at dinner to keep the story flat, and yours is the nineteenth."
At the keep gate he stops the cart himself and cuts the linen off your wrists with a knife he does not look at. Then he pulls the leather cord out of his own hair and puts it in your hand.
"Give that back to me when you can say a word that belongs to you. Until then you sleep in my hall, and you do not go near the east gate."