Chapter 6: The Night Caedric Takes the Ring

The Greyveil crossing was not a river so much as an argument the land was having with itself — a quarter mile of shallows that shifted channels with each season, braiding and rebraiding between gravel bars that looked solid until you weighted them, the water never deeper than a man's knee but never, at any point, entirely predictable. Elwin had mapped it twice in his career and gotten it wrong both times. The river did not hold still long enough to be documented. This was, he had noted in his field journal with what he recognized even then as slightly too much feeling, its primary and honest quality.

They crossed in the gray hour before dawn, fifteen riders strung out in a loose diagonal to distribute weight across the gravel, the horses picking their way with the particular careful attention of animals who have learned that this specific type of ground cannot be trusted. The water was cold enough to make the horses blow. Elwin kept his maps inside his coat. The ring, against his sternum, was warm — had been warm since Vellhaven, warmth that had nothing to do with his body heat, that remained constant through cold nights and cold river crossings alike, a warmth so steady he had stopped noticing it in the way you stopped noticing the sound of blood in your own ears.

They made camp on the eastern bank in a stand of white-barked birch stripped bare by the season, the tents going up in the practiced quiet of people who had been doing this long enough that efficiency had replaced all ceremony. Caedric posted a double watch — four riders instead of two, stationed at the cardinal points with instruction to signal not if they saw movement but the moment they heard something they could not identify — and then he stood at the camp's edge for a long time looking south, where the scouts had gone at dusk and not yet returned.