Remy spoke with their merchant acquaintance about the road to Constantinople on the evening before their departure. The man traced the route with his finger on a low table dusted with flour and oil, naming each stop with the ease of someone who had sent caravans along it for years.

  Babaeski first. Then ?orlu. Silivri. Büyük?ekmece. After that, the walls of Constantinople themselves.

  It was the old Thracian road, the spine of movement between worlds. Ancient, older than the emperors who claimed to have built it. The Ottomans maintained it carefully, not out of sentiment, but because roads were arteries, and empires that neglected their arteries usually bled out quietly. Inns stood at measured distances. Bridges were kept sound. Milestones were replaced when they cracked. It was not out of kindness. It was for efficiency.

  With the itinerary decided, Sir Gaston informed the men that they would move at first light. There were no protests. Only the low murmur of preparation. Bedrolls folded. Harness checked. Wagons lightened off the unnecessary weight. Thirty men learned long ago that movement favored those who did not argue with it.

  Remy felt the familiar settling in his chest that always came at every departure. Cities were useful, but roads were honest. Too honest times. On the road, intent revealed itself quickly.

  It was during these final preparations that a messenger approached the company.

  He was not difficult to identify. His clothing bore the cut and quality of the Venetian merchant class. Practical, but costly in subtle ways. The leather of his boots was too well treated. The stitching of his doublet was too precise. His sword was well-worn and well-used despite the merchant attire. He moved with the confidence of a man who expected to be received rather than challenged.

  He spotted Remy’s blue cloak almost at once.

  Remy allowed him to approach.

  “Greetings, Sir Remy,” the man said, bowing slightly. “I was… informed to bring a message unto you.”

  Remy studied him for a moment. He found it endlessly fascinating how certain people could track others across cities and borders with unnerving accuracy. Then again, subtlety had never been their strength. And he did remember, dimly, mentioning his intended route to a merchant months ago when he left for France. Information moved faster than horses when men had reason and means to push it.

  “You have found me well,” Remy said evenly. “Though I had hoped to receive word in Constantinople. Not here.”

  “Ah,” the man replied, spreading his hands apologetically. “Alas, Sir Knight, we were already bound this way. It was… in our interest to find you.”

  Of course it was.

  These men always framed their intrusion as necessity.

  The Firekeepers.

  They called themselves humanists. A strange, self-fashioned fraternity that existed in the seams between courts, knight orders, universities, merchant houses, and monasteries. Men who spoke of progress, of reason, of the betterment of mankind, while quietly probing factions and influencing outcomes in ways no sermon ever could.

  Remy had met them first in Rome.

  Unwillingly.

  They had spoken to him as though they had always known him, as though he had merely been late to a meeting he had never agreed to attend. And before he had fully grasped what they were, they had already decided he was useful and had become part of them.

  The Firekeepers were a cabal Remy had never encountered in any text he remembered. Either history had forgotten them, or they had been careful enough to ensure it did. Both possibilities unsettled him.

  They were useful. That was the worst of it.

  They had connections across borders. They trafficked in ideas and people with equal ease. And many of them genuinely believed they were shepherding humanity toward something better.A dream that Remy had seen before in the future. Had seen it burn itself out under the weight of its own certainty with nuclear fire.

  His feelings toward them were complicated.

  Because for all his knowledge, all his awareness of what would come, these men existed outside his memory and unrecorded from history. Unaccounted for.

  And anything unaccounted for carried risk.

  “Pray tell,” Remy said at last, “what do they have to say?”

  The messenger hesitated, glancing around the courtyard where men moved about their tasks. His eyes lingered on armored shoulders, on Jehan speaking quietly with Aldred near the wagons, on Sir Gaston overseeing preparations with calm authority.

  Remy sighed.

  He gestured toward a quieter wing of the merchant’s house, away from the main courtyard, where thick walls dulled sound and curiosity died quickly.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  They stopped in a small storage room that smelled faintly of oil and dried herbs. The messenger reached into his satchel and produced a rolled parchment bundle.

  He handed it over.

  Inside were two items.

  The first was a drawing. A careful, realistic rendering of a Greek man. Middle-aged. Clean-shaven. His eyes were sharp, intelligent. The kind of face that belonged to someone who survived by knowing when to speak and when to disappear.

  The second was a letter, written in a language Remy recognized at once.

  A dead one.

  Remy’s expression hardened.

  “I am not their killer for hire,” Remy said flatly. “I will not accept this.”

  “Please read the letter, Monsieur,” the messenger said, unperturbed. Confident. As if refusal had already been accounted for.

  Remy rolled the parchment back up.

  “I will decide later.”

  “As you wish, Sir Knight,” the man said smoothly. He rubbed his palm against his sleeve, a small habitual gesture Remy had come to know from men like him.

  Remy reached into his pack and withdrew a folded sheet of his own parchment. He wrote briefly, his hand steady, the words written precisely in a language only those who in the know would recognize. When he finished, he pressed his signet ring into the wax and sealed it.

  “Go to Venetia,” Remy said, handing it over. “Earn your due. And tell them to keep out of my affairs. I am a pilgrim.”

  The messenger accepted the letter, but his smile thinned.

  “We are aware,” he said. “But this matter must be examined, Sir Knight. Those Who Live Long must be cared for.”

  Remy’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

  The Perennials were the inner circle of the Firekeepers. Men who pursued longevity not merely as a hope, but as a project. Scholars, physicians, alchemists, patrons of obscure knowledge. They believed history could be guided if its stewards lived long enough to do so.

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  They were a troublesome group who were troubled by those who did not comfort with them.

  Then again, Remy reflected, who was he to complain about strangeness? He was a man displaced from his own century, walking roads built for empires that no longer existed where he came from.

  “Begone now,” he said quietly.

  The messenger bowed again. “As you wish.”

  He left without protest.

  Remy stood alone for a moment longer.

  He hated this.

  He did not like these things.

  When he returned to the courtyard, Sir Gaston glanced at him once, reading his expression with the ease of long familiarity.

  “Trouble?” Gaston asked.

  “Possibly,” Remy replied. “But not today.”

  By dawn, they were on the road.

  The Thracian plain stretched before them, pale and subdued beneath a veil of morning mist. It was a land without drama, wide and yielding, shaped more by wind and feet than by walls or towers. The road cut through it like a patient incision, straight where it could be, bending only when the land insisted. Grass lay damp against the hooves of their horses. The air carried the faint scent of earth and distant water.

  The Company of the Cross-Borne Star moved at a steady pace.

  Babaeski came and went with little ceremony. A cluster of roofs. A modest market. An inn whose keeper asked a few questions and offered clean water before wine. The customs officials glanced at their papers, noted the letter of protection, counted the men, and waved them through with practiced indifference. No one lingered. No one stared. It was a place accustomed to movement, and so it did not pretend that arrivals mattered.

  ?orlu followed the next day. Larger. Better organized. Its inns were efficient, its stables well kept, its officials dutiful and incurious in equal measure. Taxes were collected without ceremony. Guards were visible but unobtrusive or too afraid to question ten knights. The city did not ask who they were beyond what was required. It did not care where they had come from, only that they complied with the expectations of those passing through.

  Remy approved of that.

  Cities that demanded curiosity were dangerous. Cities that settled for order tended to endure.

  Silivri presented itself before it was seen. The air shifted first, cool and sharp, carrying salt and the cries of gulls that wheeled somewhere beyond the low hills. When the sea finally appeared, it did so without grandeur. A broad, gray-blue expanse under a washed-out sky. Ships moved slowly near the coast, their sails rather pale against the horizon.

  Constantinople was no longer a distant idea then.

  It was ahead of them. Not yet visible, but present in the way the road subtly leaned eastward, in the way merchants spoke with more anticipation, in the way the men checked their gear with renewed attention. Cities of fame had gravity. They pulled thought toward themselves long before their walls came into view.

  At each stop, Remy felt annoyed by the thought of the Firekeepers.

  Remy did not speak of it to the others.

  Some burdens were lighter when carried alone.

  On the third night out from Adrianople, they made camp near a stand of low trees where the road dipped slightly, sheltered from the wind. The men ate, spoke quietly, and slept. Horses were watered and tethered. Armor was loosened. The routines of travel settled over the company like a blanket that was familiar and grounding.

  When the camp had quieted and only the low sounds of night remained, Remy sat apart with a lantern and the letter.

  He broke the seal at last and unfolded the parchment carefully. The script was precise, confident. Written by the hand of a man accustomed to being read by equals. There was no urgency in the phrasing. No threat. No flattery either.

  It was not a demand.

  That would have been easier to refuse.

  It was an argument.

  Carefully reasoned. Calm. Written by someone who assumed intelligence on both sides, and who believed persuasion to be more durable than force. It spoke of balance. Of individuals whose continued existence stabilized regions. Of people who, by living longer, prevented worse men from rising too soon.

  It framed intervention not as domination, but as restraint.

  History, the letter suggested, had a tendency toward excess. Toward cruelty magnified by ignorance, toward wars accelerated by pride. Some events, it argued, were best slowed. Some lives were preserved not because they were righteous, but because their removal would create voids too easily filled by chaos.

  It did not ask him to kill.

  That, too, would have been simpler.

  It asked him to observe.

  To travel. To confirm whether a story held truth beneath its surface. To determine whether a figure long dismissed as legend might in fact exist, altered by time but persistent in form. It did not insist on action.

  Only on verification.

  Remy’s eyes lingered on the section where the argument shifted tone.

  For long ago, in ancient Greece, the letter read, the physician Hippocrates had a daughter whose beauty rivaled the denizens of Olympus themselves. Diana, jealous, transformed the girl into a fierce dragon. A curse supposedly imposed not for cruelty, but for imbalance. For her beauty disrupted order and that invited correction from the Gods.

  The girl’s salvation, it continued, lay in paradox. Only a knight brave enough to kiss her in her monstrous form could free her.

  She retreated to the island of Lango, once ruled by Hippocrates. There she was regarded as sovereign, feared and revered in equal measure. An old castle became her dwelling. She could reclaim her human form only three days each year. As a dragon, she harmed no one who did not first raise a hand against her.

  Remy read on, his expression unchanged.

  The Knight Hospitaller from Rhodes whose horse panicked and made him fall from the cliff. Then a sailor with a misunderstanding who became a false knight, saw the dragon’s form, and then ran.

  Then the lady’s despair.

  The letter concluded with the assertion that the Lady of Lango remained to this day. That she endured. That the curse had not lifted, not because no knight had come, but because none had come who understood what courage required.

  Remy folded the letter slowly.

  He extinguished the lantern and sat in darkness for a time, listening to the wind move through the trees.

  It was an absurd tale.

  Remy knew myths were plentiful in this era. Dragons more so in the imaginations of men who had never seen crocodiles, let alone pre-historics things that the Firekeepers kept on finding.

  Greece was fertile ground for stories that refused to die. The many Islands bred legends the way damp cellars bred mold.

  And yet.

  The Firekeepers did not usually concern themselves with this sort of thing.

  They dealt with people. In documents. In influence that could be traced, if one were patient enough. Remy had been asked before to look into strange matters at their behest. Relics. Healers whose results defied explanation. Men who did not seem to age as they should.

  Never once had they presented a tale so elaborate unless it concealed something tangible.

  They did not deal in whimsy.

  That troubled him.

  Remy lay back and stared up at the stars, faint through the thinning mist. He thought of Hippocrates not as a legend, but as a man. A physician who had written about balance. About humors. About the dangers of excess. A man who believed disease arose when equilibrium failed.

  A daughter cursed into imbalance.

  A punishment framed as myth, and preserved as story.

  Firekeepers spoke often of those who lived long. Perennials, they called them. Individuals whose lifespans exceeded expectations by margins too consistent to be coincidence. Some through means Remy understood. Others through methods that did not align with any knowledge he carried.

  A dragon.

  Or something remembered as one.

  He slept little that night.

  By morning, the road called them onward again. Büyük?ekmece lay ahead, with its long bridge and shallow waters, a final threshold before the great city itself. The men spoke more freely now. Anticipation loosened tongues. Constantinople was a word that invited speculation, even among those who claimed indifference.

  Remy rode quietly at the center of the column and as the day wore on and the first distant hints of walls began to suggest themselves in the minds of the men, Remy made his decision.

  He would not act on the letter.

  Not yet.

  But he would not discard it either.

  Some questions did not demand immediate answers. Some truths revealed themselves only to those who walked long enough without insisting on conclusions.

  If there truly was a Lady of Lango, cursed or otherwise, then she had endured centuries of waiting.

  A few more days would not harm her.

  And if the tale was nothing more than that, a tale. then it would dissolve under scrutiny as so many did.

  Either way, Remy would see.