Chapter 19: The Price of Old Magic

The rain started before they cleared the marsh boundary.

It came in the way of the southern marshes — not suddenly, not building from anything you could track, simply present between one step and the next, fine and cold and intimate, the kind of rain that works its way into the seams of things. Arthur pulled his cloak tighter across his shoulders and felt the water find the gap at his collar anyway. The Continent had opinions about waterproofing, and they were consistent.

Behind him, Gerolt walked in the particular silence of a man who has already catalogued everything he intends to say and has decided most of it can wait. Ahead, Serafka navigated by compass and the kind of intuition that passed for compass when the first one confused itself, her coat bleeding slow dark stains from the damp, her free hand occasionally brushing the sedge grass as though reading something in the contact. She had not said another word about Aldric Vael.