Chapter 22: Bryndis Is Told Half the Truth

The midday halt was Caelen's doing — he called it at a natural shelf of volcanic rock where the path widened sufficiently to allow boots to be re-laced and the water-skins addressed without anyone falling into the ravine that ran along our left-hand side. We had been ascending since first light and the gradient had been, in the technical language of cartography, entirely unreasonable.

I ate half my rations, drank a measured amount of water, and watched the group distribute itself across the shelf with the unconscious precision of people who have been travelling together long enough to know one another's requirements. Caelen crouched at the ravine's edge and looked at the path ahead with his particular expression of professional calculation. Perenthia sat with her back to a boulder and was writing with an intensity that suggested she had forgotten she was also supposed to be eating. Aldrath remained in the cart, which had been manoeuvred onto the shelf with considerable difficulty and a moderate volume of instruction from Bryndis, and from the angle of his breathing he was sleeping or something very close to it. Siovhan had positioned herself at the shelf's highest point, arrow on string and gaze on the middle distance, performing the function she always performed which was being the reason nothing crept up on us unannounced.

Rook sat apart, eating methodically, his back to the largest available rock face.