Chapter 9: What Morvaine Almost Said

Two nights after the marsh ambush, we had made camp in a shepherd's shelter above the Greyveil flats — a low stone building with a sound roof and two narrow windows that Cassian approved of for defensive reasons and Breck approved of for entirely different ones, having to do with the dryness of the floor and the condition of his knees, which he mentioned once and did not mention again.

Morvaine's arm was healing cleanly. I knew this because Seraphine had looked at the dressing that morning with the practised eye of someone who had seen worse things than arm wounds and had said so without sentiment, and because Morvaine himself had resumed carrying his pack on the injured side, which he would not have done had it pained him seriously. He was, in most observable respects, the same as he had been before the marsh — steady, quiet, accommodating in the particular way of elderly people who have decided long ago that accommodation costs nothing and ill-temper costs everything.

What was different was that he had twice that day moved toward me and then, for no reason I could identify, moved away again.