Chapter 20: Aldric Offers Tomas a Kindness

The morning arrived without particular ceremony — a thin grey seam along the eastern horizon that widened slowly into the colourless light of a day that had not yet decided what it intended to do. I had not slept. This had become, over the past fortnight, less of an aberration and more of a professional condition.

I was sitting apart from the camp, on a flat-topped rock that jutted slightly over the scrub, with my coat pulled close and my journal open on my knee to a page I had not written anything on. The Shard pressed warm against my sternum. It had been doing that more insistently these last few days — a quality of warmth that was not quite comfortable, the way a hearthstone retains heat too long into the night and becomes an irritation rather than a comfort. I did not mention this to anyone. It seemed the sort of observation that would prompt a conversation I was not equipped to have before breakfast.

I heard him coming at a reasonable distance. Aldric moved quietly when he chose to and did not choose to now, which was itself a kind of courtesy — announcing his approach the way one knocks before entering.