And usually, I wasalwayspaying attention. That was what concerned me.
“You look like you're plotting something terrible or trying to solve a riddle. Which is it?”
Nicco appeared at my shoulder from the direction of absolutely nowhere, which I was beginning to understand was simply how he moved. At least this time, I didn't startle. That felt like a small victory.
“Or I just woke up,” I said.
He stopped beside me, close enough that I could see his profile without turning. He was looking north. He did that a lot, looked north the way someone looks at something with reservation, but knows they still want it. It was a look I knew well.
“How much farther?” he asked.
“Days. Depending on conditions. Could be weeks. I’ve never been, so I really don’t know. It could be a hundred leagues, or it could be over the next rise.”
He gave me a flat stare, unimpressed by my vagueness. “And what are conditions likely to be?”
I looked at the sky. Flat gray, no movement, the kind of stillness that in Crystallese meant one of two things: clear weather holding or something building that hadn't committed to itself yet. “Unclear,” I said honestly.
He made a sound that wasn't quite an acknowledgment or a dismissal. It was somewhere between the two. I think I was frustrating him.
Oh no.
We stood in silence for a moment. It had a different quality to most of our silences — less loaded and less like two people calculating who’d draw first. This was more like two people standing in the same cold, looking at the same horizon.
“So the soldiers are warming to you,” he said.
“Apparently.”
“They think you handled the situation with Vorn and his men well.”
“Did they,” I murmured, refusing to fight with him. Again.
I turned to look at him. He was still watching the north, his face in profile, expression giving nothing. “And what do you think?” I asked him. “Without the slurs against my virtue.”
“Your virtue?” He sounded amused. He turned just slightly, enough to study me sideways. “I’d say you're more versatile than I initially assessed.”
I held his gaze for a moment, those eyes holding so many secrets. I thought about the conversation I wasn't supposed to hear — I won't lose the best trailfinder in Crystallese — and about the word “assessed.” I wasn’t sure they complemented each other, but it was clear they held some value.
“How reassuring,” I murmured. “My sleep will be undisturbed tonight.”
The corner of his mouth moved upward. “I thought you’d appreciate it.”
He walked away, back toward the front of the group, back to his position at the head of things that he'd never officially been given and never seemed to need permission for.
I watched him go.
Baxley came and stood beside me with the quiet efficiency of a very large man who had learned to move without announcing himself. “You were awake,” he said. It wasn't a question.
I looked at him. “I slept for a while.”
“You were awake,” he said again, pleasantly, with a tone that said he wasn't going to argue about it and didn't need to. He looked toward Nicco's retreating back. “He's not wrong, you know. What he said.”
I said nothing.
“About you being the best.” He glanced at me sideways. “He's also not telling you everything.”
“Is anyone ever telling someone everything?” I asked.
Baxley smiled that small, genuine smile that changed his face briefly into something warmer. “No,” he said. “But with him, the gap between what he says and what he means can be more interesting than most.”
