Chapter Four – What Competence Does

Day two. The valley road. Morning light coming in low and gold, and she refused to find it beautiful.

Edgar bought bread and two hard apples from the innkeeper's boy. Gave her the larger apple without comment. She took it without thanking him, because she wasn't grateful, and she wasn't going to perform gratitude to make either of them more comfortable.

She ate while walking. He matched her pace.

"You're going too fast," he said, after an hour.

"I know."

"You'll be exhausted by midday."

"I know that too."

"Then–"

"I walk fast when I'm thinking," she said.

"When I stop thinking, I'll slow down."

He went quiet. She appreciated that he didn't push it.

She was thinking about the fourth plan. She was always building a fourth plan. The contact in Kelwick was gone, but Kelwick itself wasn't, there were people there, a market, the possibility of a horse if she could get near enough to the stables without him noticing. The problem was that he noticed everything. She'd been watching him watch things for a day and a half and his range of peripheral attention was frankly insulting.

She needed a different approach.

She needed him distracted.

She looked at him sideways. He was scanning the road ahead with the automatic vigilance of someone who'd made a habit of knowing what was around him. Strong jaw. Honest hands. That scar she'd noticed yesterday, running silver along his forearm.

She could work with attraction. She'd done it before, strategically. She knew how to deploy a look, how to close distance, how to make a man think she was offering something she wasn't.

She looked at him again.

The problem was that he was– she could see it even through her own clinical assessment– the problem was that he was genuinely, inconveniently appealing, and she had never been good at operating levers she was also somewhat affected by.

Save it, she told herself. Not yet. Wait for the right moment.

She slowed down. Stopped thinking about escape for thirty seconds and let herself just walk.

"Better," he said.

"Don't," she said.

"I wasn't–"

"You were about to say something that would make me want to walk faster again. Don't."

Another of those almost-smiles. She was starting to catalog them. This one was different from the first – less guarded, more involuntary.

Stop cataloguing them, she told herself.

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

At midday she sat beside a stream and took off her boots and put her feet in the cold water and did not care even slightly about dignity. Her feet were her instruments. She was a physician. She needed her instruments.

Edgar sat on a rock nearby. He'd shed the heavy coat. She noticed – clinically, professionally, as a person with relevant medical training – that he was built in the way of men who used their bodies for actual work rather than for demonstration. Not excessively. Just functionally.

She noticed the scar again. The one on his forearm. In the daylight it was more visible – long, poorly healed, the tension in the tissue pulled wrong.

"That was stitched in the dark," she said.

He looked down at it. "Field medic. It was the middle of the night, and we were both–" A pause. "We were both in poor condition."

"The tension's pulled at the distal end. It would have healed with less scarring if someone had gone back in after and –" She stopped. "Sorry. I can't stop looking at these things."

"It doesn't bother me."

"The scar or my looking?"

"Either."

She leaned over, before she'd decided to, and ran her thumb along the length of it. Just the pad of her thumb – assessing the tissue, the way she would with any patient, reading the damage under the skin. Clinical. Professional.

He went absolutely still.

Not tense – still. All the small unconscious movements that people made constantly, the tiny adjustments and shifts of a body at rest – all of it gone, like he'd forgotten to make them. Her thumb on his forearm, the scar under it, and the quality of his stillness was something she felt all the way from her fingertips to somewhere considerably less professional.

She pulled her hand back.

"Sorry," she said. Different from the first sorry.

"Don't be," he said. His voice was level. Exactly level, with the care of someone making it so.

She looked at the stream. He looked at the stream. Neither of them said anything for almost a full minute.

"You're going to try something," he said finally. "In Kelwick market."

She turned to look at him.

"The stables," he said. "You've been thinking about the stables for the last two hours. I can tell by the way you look at every horse we pass."

She stared at him.

"You're insufferable," she said.

"I know." He stood, picked up his coat. "We go around Kelwick. Northern track. Adds an hour, but it avoids the market entirely."

"You can't just –"

"I can." He held out his hand to help her up.

She ignored the hand and stood on her own. And then she had to stand very close to him for a moment because the bank was narrow, and he didn't move back, and she didn't move back, and they were close enough that she could see the exact shade of those unremarkable gray eyes, and they were – she amended – not unremarkable at all, actually. There was a quality to them that was almost uncomfortably perceptive.

"Move," she said.

He stepped back. The ghost of that smile.

Stop cataloging them, she thought again. Louder this time.

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

The riders came at the fourth hour of the afternoon.

She heard them before he said anything – hoofbeats, multiple horses, coming faster than travel required. She was already slowing. He was already moving – half a step sideways, angling himself toward the tree line, one hand at her back before she'd processed why.

"Off the road," he said quietly. "Now."

She went. He was behind her, and they pressed into the trees as four riders came around the bend. Dark coats. No insignia. Two swords drawn already.

They flew past without slowing or looking.

She stood in the tree-shadow with her heart loud in her ears and his hand warm at the small of her back – not gripping, not directing, just there – and watched the riders disappear around the next curve.

"Caen's men?" she asked.

"No." He was frowning. "The colors are wrong. And Caen's men don't travel without insignia."

"Then who?"

"I don't know." The frown deepened. "Which is a problem."

She was still standing very close to him. She became aware of this with the same clinical detachment she'd applied to his scar, and with approximately the same success.

"Are they looking for us?" she asked.

"Maybe. Maybe not. This road sees other traffic." He stepped away. "But we're not taking chances. There's a waystation east of here – off the main road. Stone construction. Defensible if we need it."

"Defensible," she repeated. "That's a word that implies scenarios I'd rather not imagine."

"Then don't imagine them. Just walk."

She fell into step beside him. And noticed – though she told herself she was simply noting it for professional reference – that he'd moved to her left. Between her and the direction the riders had come from.

She told herself it didn't mean anything. She told herself a lot of things that day.

And she kept walking.

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