Rain had not followed them this time, though the sky had threatened it for half the morning. Remy counted it as a small miracle, one he did not trust in the slightest. He had learned to expect the sky’s treacheries the same way he expected men to lie, kings to tax the poor, and bandits to grow bolder in lean years.

  They rode southeast of Szeged, the ground turning to a low quilt of marshland that sucked at hooves and swallowed sound. Visibility vanished in pale belts of mist. Reeds shivered in icy winds. The air tasted of wet soil and stagnant water, and the horses fought the terrain the way tired men fought sleep.

  Remy let Morgan guide himself, trusting the animal’s instincts more than the shifting ground. A single misstep in marsh country left a horse lame or worse. For a while, their company rode in uneasy silhouettes, reduced to shapes more than men, sound swallowed by the damp.

  The Maros floodplain opened only grudgingly, revealing a few scattered homes, a village so small he almost mistook it for a lonely fishing outpost. Banners fluttered from poles hammered into the mud, red cloth marked with chalk-white crosses to keep strangers from mistaking them for raiders.

  News of Saracen incursions traveled faster than reason.

  The villagers must have seen the glint of armor and the discipline of the riders before recognizing their intentions. Suspicion softened into welcome. They called the place Deszk, though Remy only caught the name once a woman said it twice, loud enough for him to hear over the snorting of horses.

  They rested there long enough for Morgan to drink and for the men to stretch their armored legs. River folk were generous in the old way, bread still warm from the fire, smoked fish, a cup of sour wine that tasted better than he expected. The children stared at Jehan more than anyone else, perhaps sensing something strange in her, something restless. Or perhaps they simply had never seen a squire like her who held herself with such wariness.

  They did not linger.

  When they resumed their ride, the land smoothed into gentler curves. Fields widened. The river remained faithfully at their side, sometimes hidden between reeds, sometimes glinting plainly beneath the sun.

  By afternoon they reached Makó, a market village that lived and breathed according to the river’s whims. Merchants here made their coin from mills, fish, and trade that passed through like tides. The merchant who housed them was a rotund, red-cheeked man who talked more than he breathed.

  Remy tolerated him because the man offered clean place to sleep, and because he had a mill worth studying. Or at least ‘concerning’ to Remy.

  The mill groaned like an old drunk trying to rise from sleep. Its wheel thrashed the river with each uneven turn. Inside, the wooden beams strained and complained under every rotation. Remy noticed the problem almost immediately, the iron fitting holding one of the load-bearing beams had warped and was clinging to its purpose out of stubbornness alone.

  “A few more weeks,” he murmured, “and this would be rubble.”

  The miller did not like hearing it. No man liked being told his livelihood perched on a rotten hinge of fate. But Remy was not in the business of comforting lies. Truth saves lives far more often than kind delusions. Whether the miller would do something about it, was not his concern.

  They left Makó the next morning for Apátfalva, a monastic estate village that wore its devotion plainly. The structures clustered around a chapel, and monks moved the between low stone walls. They accepted the travelers without question but offered little conversation. Monastic silence had a way of enveloping even those who walked only briefly through its domain.

  From there they pressed through the dark hours, riding overnight to Csanád, where the episcopal seat still clung to its dignity. A fortified church rose before them. Markets stretched beyond it, selling wine sweet enough to dull the tongue and grain in quantities few villages could boast. The Tisza, ever-present, carried barges thick with produce.

  Sixteen miles beyond Csanád lay Pecica.

  The world flattened there, turning to lowlands stitched with farms and orchards that rolled gently to the horizon. The huts were simple but strong. Smoke drifted peacefully from their chimneys. Lodging and fodder were easy to find. As men living by the earth understood the needs of travelers better than wealthier towns did.

  They stayed a night. Enough for the horses to recover. Enough for men to remember what rest felt like.

  On the fifth morning, they rode for Lipova.

  The fortress appeared long before the town, perched on its hill like a watchful fist. Its stone walls gleamed in the sharp daylight. Lipova had inns, forges, a ferry large enough for twice their number, and a population accustomed to strangers. Yet the fortress denied entry, renovations, so they said, which was merely another way of refusing trouble they had not invited.

  Still, the townsfolk showed them courtesy. Their innkeeper gave them ample rooms. Blacksmiths offered fair prices. Children lingered near the horses, though always at a cautious distance. Especially around Morgan who was too proud for a horse.

  While the company tended to the horses, checked tack and straps, and inspected the condition of their gear, a commotion stirred near the marketplace. A man approached, breathless, asking, pleading, really, for the knights’ help with bandits.

  Sir Gaston listened without interruption, gaze unreadable. Banditry was not their task here, and time was something he guarded fiercely. Remy expected him to refuse. But the word payment changed the angle of the conversation, as payment often did.

  Sir Gaston selected a small detachment. Bringing along Sir Raimund von Falkenberg, Sir Marco della Torre, Sir Henri de Montclar, and Sir Bernat d’Urgel. They rode with the local riders and found the bandits without difficulty, men foolish enough to harass merchants but wise enough to surrender the moment knights in armored horses thundered toward them.

  A man facing death beneath hooves tended to rediscover prudence quickly.

  Two pouches of coin were handed to Sir Gaston. A priest offered blessings none of the knights accepted, he was from a sect they did not recognize. Remy stood beside Jehan the entire time, watching quietly, knowing his medical skills were unnecessary. No blood spilled. No bones broke.

  The world, for once, chose restraint.

  On the seventh day they left Lipova behind and pressed toward Arad, whose weekly fairs were famed across the region. Too famed, perhaps, for they had missed the fair entirely, and the town felt hollow without the vibrancy of tents, traders, shouting crowds, and livestock penned in rows.

  They stayed only long enough to water the horses.

  From Arad they rode into a harsher land. N?dab lay scattered across the terrain like discarded stones, small hamlets clinging to the edges of a steppe-like plain gone yellow with wind. The air carried grit. Travel slowed. Even the horses seemed to resent the emptiness.

  They pushed through regardless.

  By the time they reached Temesvár, night was folding over the world. The great Banat fortress-city glowed in the dusk, its walls towering, its inner lights sparkling like anchored stars. It was a bastion of trade and wealth, filled with the mingled voices of Serbs, Hungarians, and Vlachs who conducted their commerce with rapid hands and louder tongues.

  Remy felt the shift in atmosphere immediately. Temesvár had this pulse of restless ambition of border cities, places where nations pressed against one another and where every rumor, every price, every whispered truth carried the weight of influence.

  Jehan stayed close to him as they crossed into the crowded streets. Her shoulders were high, senses sharpened. She watched everything. The horses, the merchants, the architecture, even the way the guards at the gate held their spears as though expecting conflict, not merely prepared for it.

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  They found lodging near the inner wall, a stone building thick enough to silence the street noise. The stablehands took the horses with brisk professionalism. Remy watched Morgan disappear into the stall row before stepping back into the lamplight after coaxing it not to kill the stablehands who shook when it pretended to strike the boy.

  Sir Gaston was already giving instructions.

  “We rest here,” the knight said. “No hasty decisions, no unnecessary wandering. The Serbian lands begin beyond the next stretch, and we will not ride blind.”

  Remy nodded.

  Information mattered more in foreign territory than armor or swords. And Serbia was not merely foreign as of late, it was unpredictable.

  Jehan drew closer, her voice low. “Do you think trouble waits for us there?”

  Remy looked past her, watching merchants barter under the archway, watching a pair of Vlach traders argue over a crate of cured meat, watching a patrol of city guards vanish behind the main road.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that trouble waits everywhere. But some lands teach it sharper teeth.”

  She accepted this with a quiet nod. Then went to her studies once more. She was always passionate about her studies.

  The others dispersed, some to drink, some to eat, some to seek conversation that might reveal what maps could not. Remy remained for a moment longer, letting Temesvár’s hubbub settle into him, letting the noise form its own rhythm.

  Remy worked in the dim quiet of the chamber they had taken in Temesvár, a modest room above a merchant’s house whose windows overlooked the narrow street below. The clamor of the fortress-city seeped faintly through the shutters, iron striking iron from the forges, the rumble of carts, the shouts of traders bargaining in tongues as tangled as the histories that had birthed them. Yet all of it lay at the edge of his senses, distant, muted, as though cushioned by the weight of the task before him.

  Cartography passed the hours, but it was more than a pastime for him.

  He laid out the folded map with the slow precision of a man handling a concealed weapon. The map was one of the few things he could not allow any man to glimpse, not Jehan, not Sir Gaston, not even the most trusted among the Knights. To have it found would invite questions he could not answer without unraveling the the truth of his existence. The map was like a contradiction in ink, in a way that they were both too accurate and not accurate enough. A memory of the world he had left, matched against a world that had not yet become it.

  He unrolled it across the wooden table, weighing its corners with stones taken from the roadside. The faint afternoon light slanted over it. The sheet bore the faint scars of rewrites, corrections, hesitations. It was the only place he admitted uncertainty.

  He opened his satchel and took out his pencils he had concealed among his more ordinary possessions.

  There were many, kept sharpened with almost ritual care. He had made a lot.

  “How much has the land changed since 1432?” he murmured under his breath, though no one was there to hear.

  In his memories, continents had been stitched together by satellites -- the ridgelines, coastlines clean-cut, with every river’s path charted from sky to sea. But the land he rode now was different from what he knew. Rivers shifted. Borders bent beneath the boots of kings and the pressure of invading armies. Villages appeared where none had been. Others vanished without leaving corpses of stone.

  He set his pencil to vellum.

  He began with the Danube.

  The river was a constant between eras, one of the few really. He drew its spine first, the great arc bending across the page. His mind conjured the satellite’s clarity, but he forced himself to blunt the lines, to let the river wander as it would have wandered in this century, unshaped by dams, untrimmed by modern hands, its banks wider and more wild.

  South of it spread the lands that, in his world, had belonged to Serbia. Here, in 1432, the realm was another creature entirely, its shape pliable, its future brittle. From what he recalled, Despot Stefan Lazarevic had died a year past, leaving his nephew Durad Brankovic to wrestle with a kingdom held together by diplomacy and dread. Hungary leaned upon Serbia. The Ottomans pressed against it. Nothing between those forces remained stable for long.

  He marked the fortresses Smederevo, Belgrade, that were still in Hungarian hands; Krusevac, Uzice, Novo Brdo. He spelled each name with care in a language that no one would understand. And as he did so, he could feel the knowledge he carried tugging at him as he did, the certainty of which places would fall, which would burn, which would become mere archaeological reminders in his own time.

  Staring at the map, Remy reminded himself again:

  He was a witness to history.

  To change it, to preempt, to warn, to shift the course of kingdoms, would be to sever the final thread that might someday lead him back home. Selfish, perhaps. But the one thing he could not do was destroy the world as it must become. To witness history and wait through centuries was his long road back. Time, he realized with the familiar hollow feeling, was the one resource he had in abundance.

  He stopped thinking. The thought was dangerous. How many times had he thought he could change the world?

  He returned to the drawing. His lines loosened. The map had to remain intelligible to him yet unreadable to any other eye. Like a cipher made of geography. If someone found it, they would see nothing but an amateur's rambling sketch of rivers misplaced, mountains misaligned, towns floating in wrong valleys. Only he saw the geometry beneath the apparent errors.

  The sun dipped lower, and he lit a small lamp, shielding the flame to keep the light from leaking through the shutters. Outside, the fortress-city continued its cadence. Riders clattered across stones. A merchant called out in Vlach. A dog barked twice, then fell silent. Through it all, Remy sat bent over the map, adjusting the Morava valleys, the rough rise of the Dinaric mountains, the jagged frontier that edged the Ottoman domains.

  Marking the Ottoman frontier always unsettled him. It was a line that in his time had collapsed, shifted, and dissolved, yet here it was fierce and hungry, advancing year by year, village by village, fortress by fortress. A still living organism of the empire, inhaling land.

  He shaded the boundary carefully, his hand steady though his throat felt tight.

  Later, when the ink dried and the lamplight grew soft, he stepped outside to clear his head.

  The perimeter of Temesvár was quiet at dusk. The marshlands stretched outward, great flat expanses broken by reeds trembling in the wind. The air smelled faintly of wet earth and distant fires. The sky darkened to a bruise of violet, then indigo.

  He walked with a slow, thoughtful gait, his blue cloak gathered around his shoulders. Somewhere beyond the marshes lay the villages and strongholds he had traced on the map, some thriving, others already dying, though the people within them did not yet know it. Forests older, denser, wilder than any modern eye had ever seen rustled in the distance. Paths twisted where future roads would someday straighten. Armies marched unknowingly toward defeats that would echo through centuries. And he stood between all those eras, stitching together two worlds with nothing but a memory that did not forget and fragile ink.

  He felt an odd peace in that tension.

  He returned to the room when darkness had fully settled. The lamp had guttered low, its flame a small trembling ember. He leaned over the table again, studying the map with the sharpened gaze he applied to all things he could not afford to fail.

  It was imperfect, and perhaps deliberately so.

  He adjusted the thickness of a line, erased a stray mark with a bit of worn cloth, drew the faint edge of a hill chain that, in this century, still rose higher than it would five hundred years later. The Dinaric ridges were rougher, the Morava valleys broad, the frontier ridgelines restless.

  Jehan knocked once before entering, the quiet, cautious knock she always used when she wished to avoid startling him. She peered in, saw the table, the lamp, the map half-covered by his hand. She asked him whether he wanted supper.

  “Yes,” he said. “In a moment.”

  She did not ask what he was working on. She had learned not to. She left as quietly as she had come.

  When the room was again his, he set down the pencil. His hand ached faintly from gripping it too long. He flexed his fingers. The ache was familiar, almost comforting.

  He rolled the map with the same careful pace as before, binding it with twine, then slipped it into its case. The object vanished again into his belongings, indistinguishable among cloaks and papers unless one knew precisely what to find.

  He sat for a long time without moving. The lamp’s flame curled and straightened, as though breathing.

  To witness history and not touch it.

  To walk along its edges without steering it.

  To wait for years that had not yet been born.

  It weighed on him.

  It always did.

  Remy closed his eyes and then muttered to himself in English, one that Sir Aldred would not understand, “Every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.”

  And he was that bird.

  Pecking away.