Chapter 14: Caelen's Twenty-Year Silence Breaks Briefly

The camp that night was a poor one by any measure — a shallow depression in the scree where the Greywood's eastern margins finally thinned to sparse pines and open rock, with a fire that wanted for decent fuel and produced more smoke than warmth. Aldrath had been helped from the cart to his bedroll by Siovhan, who performed this task with the quiet competence of someone who had managed the indignities of illness in others for long enough to have lost any self-consciousness about it. He was sleeping now, or doing a convincing impression of it. The Shard's case sat by his head where he could lay a hand on it without waking fully, which I had noted earlier and found either touching or alarming, and had not yet decided which.

Perenthia had claimed the best position by the fire — which was to say, the one with the most light — and was engaged in what she had described at dinner as a reconstruction exercise, though it looked from the outside rather more like controlled fury than academic method. She had three sheets of blank parchment before her and was writing on all of them in rotation, moving between them with the intensity of someone outrunning a deadline. When I had asked, earlier, how the reconstruction progressed, she had said 'incompletely' with an emphasis that made it sound like an accusation directed at the universe, and I had thought it wisest to leave her to it.

Rook was ostensibly sleeping on the far side of the fire. He had arranged himself with his back to the pine he had selected with his characteristic quiet purposefulness — not the nearest tree, not the most comfortable position, but the one that afforded sightlines to both the camp approach and the fire simultaneously. I had learned to find this detail informative rather than reassuring.