Chapter 5: What Caedric Asks, and What He Does Not

The wound in Caedric's shield arm had stopped bleeding on the second day and begun its slow, reluctant work of mending. He did not favor it openly — Elwin had watched him all morning and could not catch him at it — but there was a fraction of a second's delay before he reached for anything on his left side, a small pause that his body inserted without asking permission. The arm remembered what the mind had already filed away.

The rest camp sat in a bowl-shaped clearing half a day below Vellhaven's southern approach, sheltered on three sides by a rock shelf that curved like a cupped hand. Someone had used it before — there were old fire rings, stones carried here and arranged, the kind of accumulated intention that appears wherever soldiers stop long enough to improve their immediate situation. Caedric had chosen it from Elwin's maps, pointing with one finger and saying simply, three days, and no one had discussed it further.

The company was quieter now than it had been in the Mirewood. The pass had taken three riders, and the living had rearranged themselves around the spaces the dead had occupied, the way a column of water closes over a dropped stone. Elwin had put the names in his field journal — Aldric, Sevas, Porryn — not in the casualty column Sorra kept in precise military notation but in the margins of the terrain sketch he'd drawn during the engagement, their names placed approximately where they had been standing when the line broke. It was not a cartographic notation. He was not certain what it was.