“Away fromyou,” I called back. “I’m feeling murderous, and I fear one of us won’t make it much further unless I calm down.”
His laughter irritated me even more than he did.
“Stay close, bunny,” he warned.
“Go fuck yourself, asshole.”
I was half a league away from them when they caught up. The cut on my neck had stopped bleeding, but my temper hadn’t improved. I noticed they were a soldier short, and I didn’t ask who delivered the killing blow.
I knew we’d had a hard trail so far, but I genuinely thought any suspicion about me would have long since passed. Had they been biding their time? For what purpose?
“Trailfinder,” Captain Marson said as he joined me. “It is done.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to ask. It didn’t matter, but I needed to scratch the itch under my skin to know who it had been.
“Who?”
“Who?” he echoed, frowning at me.
“Who ended his misery?”
Captain Loel Marson drew his shoulders back and gave a slight bob of his head. “I am his captain.”
“I’m sorry.” And I was. No one should be left to die like this, but I was pleased it was the captain and not Nicco.
“I am also sorry,” he said carefully. “The mercenary is… harsh.”
“He’s a dick.”
The captain licked his bottom lip as he looked away from me. “Perhaps. However, it is not their place to air their grievances with you like that.”
I was already frowning. “You’d have preferred them in written format?” I scoffed when I saw the captain about to reply, not caring about his answer. “Well, I can’t read, so that would have been a waste of everyone’s time.”
“You can’t read?” Marson looked confused.
He should be. I could read and write well, but I just didn’t like people knowing that. It was better if they thought you were soft in the head. I hadn’t been playing my role on this trailfind. I’d been too alert, which was my job, but also too open.
A trailfinder didn’t have friends. We had clients.
A mistake I would not repeat.
“I think we should keep you and the mercenary separate, and gods willing, there are no other setbacks for us on our way north.”
He was delusional. I couldn’t tell him what was or wasn’t waiting north of here. I’d never been farther than this. Well, not much farther.
The unfortunate fact was that after a particularly bad skarveld storm, you either went through multiple days of mini storms or had clear days with normal snowfall and travel, which was almost… pleasant.
We’d been climbing, and they hadn’t noticed it. Because in the conditions we’d been traveling in, the snow had been upto their knees at times, so an incline basically went unnoticed. The mountains had started to get closer to us, and soon we’d be walking through the pass.
By the time we'd climbed enough that my legs felt it, and the sky was the lightest gray we'd seen for days, it was hard to ignore the curl of smoke that lazily floated into the air.
“What is that?” Gralen asked no one and everyone at once.
I could feel Nicco and Baxley’s eyes on me before I even turned my head.
“There’s another one,” someone murmured.
“It’s a fire?”
