Chapter 3: Sir Aldous Vane, Found at Dawn

I have never been a particularly sound sleeper. This is, in the general course of events, a minor inconvenience — the sort of constitutional quirk that results in an intimate familiarity with the ceiling of whatever room one happens to occupy, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of which floorboards creak in one's own cottage at three in the morning. It had never previously seemed like a useful quality. It is not, for instance, listed among the professional competencies of a cartographer.

On the third morning out of Veldmere, it was what saved me from being the second body.

I woke, as I had woken the two mornings preceding, in that particular hour before dawn when the darkness has given up its absolute conviction but has not yet committed to anything warmer. The camp was arranged as Caelen had directed it: a central fire burned low, ringed by bedrolls at equal intervals, with the watch rotation posted on a strip of bark that Caelen had tacked to a convenient tree and that Tobias had read three times purely from cartographic reflex. The sky above the tree line was the colour of old pewter. A light frost had come down in the night and now sat on every horizontal surface with the possessive quiet of a thing that considers itself invited.