Chapter Two - three nights

Three days.

That was how long the road to Velmoor took on foot. Edgar's horse had gone lame two miles back, she'd arranged for that, through the stable boy she'd given her second-to-last silver coin, and so it would be walking. Three days, two nights, the Kelwick valley road, and then Lord Caen's gates.

She did not let herself think past the gates. There was no useful thinking to be done there.

Edgar walked half a step behind her. She'd expected him at her elbow, watchful and close, the way men with authority walked next to women they were controlling. Instead, he gave her the length of a breath, enough space that she could almost pretend this was her direction and her pace.

It wasn't. But almost was something.

"You're not going to chain me," she said. Not a question.

"No."

"Or bind my hands."

"No."

"Why not? That would be the practical choice."

He was quiet for a moment. The road ahead curved, and the morning light was coming up gray and cool through the trees.

"Because you'd chafe through anything I tied you with inside an hour, and you'd do it without complaining to make me think it was fine. And then you'd run when I thought you'd stopped thinking about it." A pause. "You're a physician. You know rope. You know skin. I'm not giving you something useful to work with."

She opened her mouth. Closed it.

He wasn't wrong.

"So what's your actual plan?" she said.

"Walk with you. Watch you. Don't sleep."

"For three days."

"Yes."

"You'll be exhausted."

"I've been more exhausted."

She glanced back at him sideways. The war, she thought. The Drennic campaign — she'd heard about it, everyone had. Four years of the kind of fighting that restructured what men thought was survivable. He had the particular stillness of someone who'd learned to sleep in pieces, to rest without switching off, to be ready without performing readiness.

She filed that away. She was filing everything away.

"Why does he want me?" she asked.

"You'd have to ask him."

"I'm asking you."

A pause. Longer than it needed to be.

"Your father's name carries weight. A respected physician's lineage. Your presence at Velmoor is —" He stopped. Chose a different word. "Useful. To him. Politically."

"So I'm decor."

"Essentially."

The word landed without softening. She appreciated that, actually, the absence of a cushion around it. Men who softened things did it for themselves, not for the person they were softening things to.

"My father is dead," she said. "He's been dead for eight months. That name you're talking about — it dies when the last person who carried it stops being worth something. Does Caen understand that?"

"Caen understands what he chooses to."

She turned to look at him fully then. He met her eyes without looking away, which she hadn't expected.

"You don't like him," she said.

Nothing on his face moved.

"He's my commanding lord."

"That's not what I said."

The nothing on his face stayed exactly where it was. But something behind it shifted by approximately one degree, and she saw it, and she thought:

There. That's something.

...****************...

They stopped for water at midday. She sat on a rock beside a stream and took off one boot and massaged the arch of her foot without thinking, the automatic maintenance of a body she'd been ignoring in favor of the plan.

He sat a few feet away. Not watching her — or watching her the way competent people did, without appearing to.

"Tell me something," she said.

"What kind of something?"

"Anything. We're going to be walking for three days. The silence is going to get oppressive."

He considered this seriously. She liked that he didn't dismiss it.

"What do you want to know?"

"Were you in the Drennic campaign?"

"Yes."

"How old?"

"Nineteen when I went. Twenty-three when it ended."

She did the arithmetic. He'd have come out of it four years ago. Gone into Caen's service shortly after, presumably. The trajectory of a man who'd learned one trade and had nothing waiting at home.

"Did you have people?" she asked. "Before. Family?"

The pause was different this time. Not the careful pause of someone choosing what to reveal. Something older.

"No," he said. "Not by the time I came back."

She heard what was under that. Did not push it.

"I had my father," she said instead. "Just him, after my mother died. He was— he was the kind of man who taught you things without knowing he was teaching you. Who talked to you like you were worth talking to, even when you were eight years old and asking questions that probably annoyed him." She stopped. Turned her boot over in her hands. "I didn't know what that was worth until it was gone."

Edgar was quiet.

"When did he die?" he said finally.

"Eight months ago. A fever. Ironic, for a physician." Her voice was even. She'd had eight months to make it even. "He was sick for two weeks, and I was with him every hour and I could not —" She stopped. Smoothed the stop. "It doesn't matter. The contract with Caen was signed a year before that. My father thought he was securing the family's future. He didn't know what Caen actually intended."

"Did you know?"

"I suspected. But my father was— he believed in the good faith of agreements. He thought a contract was a contract, not a trap." She put her boot back on. "He was wrong."

The stream moved between them, and she watched it and did not look at Edgar and did not particularly want to, because something in this conversation had stopped being useful information-gathering and started being something else, and she needed to keep her head straight.

"Your turn," she said. "Something true."

A long pause.

"I hate this road," he said. "Every time I've travelled it, something has gone wrong."

She looked at him.

"That's very small," she said.

"I know." He stood. Picked up his pack. "Come on. We lose the light if we stop too long."

She followed. And tried not to notice that he'd deflected with the precision of someone who'd had years of practice doing it.

What she noticed instead was this: there was a scar on his left forearm, old and badly healed, and below it— just visible at the cuff — a mark she didn't recognise. Not a soldier's brand. Something else. Something that looked almost like the remnant of a seal. The kind of mark that families used, once upon a time, when families had enough weight to mark their own.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***