He told them. He told them about the Altar, and the Marches, and the three weeks' road. He told them what he had felt when the god's hand closed on his, and he did not soften it. He told them about the weight, and the sea, and the small cold voice that was not his own. And last of all, because he had promised himself he would not leave it out, he told them what Serath had refused to say: that something would pass to him when the god died, and that nobody, not even the god, would tell him what.
The silence afterward lasted a long time.
Then Harl Dunmore stood up so hard that his bench went over. "No," he said. His voice shook. "No. I'll not have it. You are a boy. You are our boy, and you do not walk into the north with a thing like that and an unknown at the end of it. Let him leave. Let him take his grey lights and his dead and go. We never asked for any of this."
"We didn't ask," said a woman at the back. "But he's here."
"Then he can leave—"
The room broke into argument, a rising roar of voices. Orrin let it break over him. He stood very still and watched them, the faces he had known his whole life, split along lines he had never seen before. Half of the village wanted the god gone by morning. A quarter wanted to guard him, to hide him, to protect what they did not understand. The rest wanted only for it to be over.
But when it was done, and the lanterns had burned low, he found that he was not alone. Lysa had come to stand beside him, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. "I'm coming," she said, before he could ask. "Someone has to be able to patch you up. And someone has to be honest with you when you start making excuses." Brannoch limped up on his other side, leaning hard on his stick, and spat neatly on the floor. "I never liked the idea of you going anywhere without someone behind you who knows what a spear is for," he said.
By dawn, half the village would not meet his eyes. But the two people who mattered most to him were at his side, and they knew everything. That counted for something.