Chapter 2: Thessaly's Taxonomy of Ruin

The command tent smelled of tallow and damp canvas and the particular exhaustion of a camp that has stopped moving long enough to remember it is tired. Three torches burned in their iron stands, doing inadequate work against the night's reach, and their light fell unevenly across the folding table where Thessaly had arranged her materials with the methodical care of someone who had rehearsed this moment for a very long time and was not comforted by its arrival.

She had not been invited. She had simply appeared, as she did, at the tent's entrance an hour after nightfall, and Caedric had looked up from his dispatch correspondence and gestured at the camp chair across from him without speaking, which was the closest he came to apology for the afternoon's argument. The gesture had the quality of a man who has decided to be generous about having won.

Wren was already inside, seated at the far edge of the table with her current map spread open and her pen moving in small, precise arcs along a supply route she had been refining since they made camp. She looked up when Thessaly entered. She did not look back down.