Chapter 2 Enzo #3
The fire was going by the time the light went.
She'd made no move to help with it—sitting on a supply pack and watching me with the expression of someone who had decided some admissions were acceptable.
Fair enough. I handed her food without comment.
She ate without a word, which told me she was hungrier than she'd let on.
Through the evening, she disappeared into the shadows three times. Brief—a few minutes each. Reconnaissance, or habit, or both. Each time she came back with that quality of slightly too-focused attention, adjusting from a different kind of seeing.
The third time was different.
She came back and stood at the edge of the firelight, with her hand pressed flat against the shadow at the farmstead wall. Perfectly still.
“Perimeter?” I asked.
“Clear.”
My attention dropped to her hand against the wall. “That wasn’t the perimeter.”
Her eyes cut to mine in warning. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”
I inclined my head and let the matter rest. Her face did something I almost caught—there and gone in the second before she felt me looking and put it away. Whatever it was, it cost her something. I could see that much even after she'd hidden it.
I turned back to the fire and didn't ask.
When she crossed to the far side of camp to clean her weapons, I checked the blood stores. Fourteen days, rationed. We were on day one, with resupply points ahead if the map held and no one tried to kill us at every crossing. Fine, I told myself, and returned the case to my pack.
“I’ll take first watch,” I said.
Her hand paused over the line of blades laid out beside her knee. “Generous.”
“Practical.”
“There’s that word again.”
I fixed my attention on the dark beyond the farmstead wall.
“You’ve been riding—poorly, I might add—for twenty-five miles.
You were injured badly enough three weeks ago to sleep through the better part of a week, and you’re still recovering, whether you find that convenient or not.
You’ve also disappeared into the shadows three times in the last hour to check something you don’t want me asking about, and each time you returned looking worse. ”
She stared at me, her eyes glassy in the firelight.
I met her gaze. “First watch is mine.”
For a moment, I thought she might argue.
Then she gave a small, humorless smile and picked up her dagger. “Careful, Veyne. Someone might mistake that for concern.”
“They would be mistaken.”
“Obviously.”
She went back to her blades.
Six of them lay in a row she would have denied was precise, the dagger last. The one that lived in her hand. The one she flipped without thinking. She ran the whetstone along its edge in long, even strokes and stared into the fire as if it had personally offended her.
What she did not do was sleep.
She made a respectable effort at pretending otherwise, stretched out on her bedroll with her back to the fire and one hand tucked beneath the edge of her coat where the dagger had disappeared.
Her breathing slowed by careful degrees.
Her shoulders softened by deliberate increments.
Even the long line of her body was convincing at a glance—loose, exhausted, surrendered to the night.
At a glance.
I was not glancing.
I took first watch and let her pretend.
By the time I completed my third circuit of the perimeter, she’d refined the performance. Her breathing had evened. Her fingers had gone slack beneath the fold of her coat. Every visible part of her suggested sleep with admirable commitment.
Except for the stillness.
Sleeping people shifted. Dreamed. Surrendered, eventually, to the small indignities of the body. Nadia lay too precisely, too deliberately arranged, a blade pretending to be harmless because someone had set a blanket over it.
The fire burned down between us, and the quiet had a presence to it.
I thought about her hand against the shadow at the wall.
The expression she'd put away before I could read it.
I thought about the traveler in the road, the shadows swirling around a thrown blade like they were hungry—like they recognized her intent before she'd consciously formed it, as if the dark itself leaned toward her.
I thought, briefly and without permission, about a great many other things, and then I pulled the route map from my coat pocket and made a small amendment to tomorrow's heading that would buy us an extra hour if we needed it.
It was preparation, not sentiment. That was what I told myself, anyway.
The fire went to coals. Somewhere in the farmstead, an animal shifted in its sleep, and the night settled around us like it had nowhere better to be.
"Insufferable," she murmured very quietly in her Fae dialect. To the fire, apparently. Or the night. Or possibly some private tribunal running in her own head, the verdict of which I suspected I wasn't going to enjoy.
I stared into the dark and said absolutely nothing as something settled in my chest—quiet, inconvenient, entirely unwelcome, and considerably harder to manage than anything else that had happened today.
Tomorrow I'd make a new map.