Chapter 17: A Conversation About Dead Brothers

The fire had burned down to its honest coals by the time I found the occasion.

It requires a certain quality of patience to engineer a private conversation with a man who is never, in any meaningful sense, alone. Rook did not pace, did not wander, did not absent himself from camp for purposes other than the perimeter — not since the Thornwall, anyway, which I took to be an adjustment in response to my perimeter inspection, though I could not be certain he had noticed me noticing. But he did sit apart from the others. It was a habit so consistent I had ceased cataloguing it individually in my journal and simply noted it once with an asterisk: *prefers positions offering comprehensive sightlines and maximum reasonable distance from colleagues. Not antisocial. Operational.*

The others retired with reasonable promptness. We were two days from the Ashpeaks' lower passes, the altitude had introduced a cold that discouraged lingering, and the Battle of the Bridge, as Bryndis had taken to calling it with a proprietary satisfaction, had left everyone with the particular exhaustion of people who had done a great deal of sudden violent activity and then walked for two more days regardless. Perenthia had gone to her bedroll still frowning over the implications of her genealogical reconstruction, which I had asked her to leave unshared and which she had agreed to leave unshared with the compressed reluctance of a woman who considers the withholding of scholarly discovery a small personal crime. Caelen was on watch at the camp's northern edge. Bryndis slept with her axe beside her in the manner of a woman who has arrived at a simple and efficient domestic arrangement with violence. Siovhan had simply ceased to be visibly present, which was her way.