Chapter 8: The Boots by the Fire

We left Vethara before the tannery opened, which put us on the marsh road in the grey, undecided hour between night and morning when the mist sits at knee height and the light cannot yet commit to a direction. Cassian set the pace — brisk, silent, the kind of walking that discourages conversation without forbidding it. Dara fell into step behind him. The rest of us arranged ourselves according to our natures: Breck beside Morvaine, who moved slowly in the cold and made no complaint about it; Seraphine a few feet to my left, turning over something in her thoughts that she had not yet decided to share; Aldric directly behind me, close enough that I could hear him humming a fragment of something — a border song, I thought, with the particular lilt of the northern provinces.

It was pleasant, that humming. I noticed I found it pleasant, and filed the noticing away.

The Greyveil marshes announced themselves first as a smell — reed-water and old mud, a mineral heaviness that settled at the back of the throat — and then as a texture underfoot, the road softening by degrees until the cart ruts were half-filled with standing black water and the verges had given up pretending to be solid ground. Cassian had been here before; he moved without consultation through the route's various indecisions, taking the firmer ground by instinct or by some private map he carried behind his eyes. I concentrated on placing my feet where he had placed his, which was an unglamorous but effective strategy.