He said nothing.
“Baxley.”
“I like talking with you. You listen,” he said, pleasantly, with the tone of a man who had decided to pay a compliment instead of answering a question.
I let the silence stretch. “A census?” When he nodded, I carried on. “A census doesn't need mercenaries, does it? It doesn't need men like you. Women like Larana. That's a job for a, a… clerk? Not fighters.”
“Mm, you'd think,” Baxley agreed.
“So… is something else happening?”
He looked at me then, briefly, with that steady, not unkind expression. “Something else is always happening,” he said. “The question is whether knowing it would change what you do.”
I thought about it. “I'm already walking north,” I said. “I'm already past the point where knowing would have changed the decision.”
He nodded slowly, as if this were the right answer to a question he'd been asking for longer than this conversation. “Aye,” he said. “You are.”
He dropped back without another word, moving to check on the soldiers behind us, and I was left with the official version of a reason and the very clear impression that it was approximately half the truth.
I tried to understand everything Baxley had shared with me. Diamonds? I’d lived here my whole life. Why had I never heard of the land beneath my feet being mined for stones?
And a census sounded like an information-gathering exercise. That wasn’t the work of mercenaries.
By midafternoon, the landscape had shifted again, in ways I could not name with certainty. I just knew the feel of it was different. The light was flatter, if that was possible in a country where the sky was already the color of old pewter.
The cold had a different quality to it, not sharper, not exactly, just more absolute. More committed. Almost solid.
I growled in frustration at my own inability to describe it. I wished I were a scholar. I’d be warm if I were a scholar.
And bored. Horribly, horribly bored.
I stopped at the crest of a low ridge and looked north.
Nothing.
This wasn’t just an empty flat snowfield or frozen plain. It was the kind of place that hadn't yet decided what it wanted to be. The horizon was hazy, with sky and land blending, making it difficult to gauge distance. It could have been a league or even ten. It was impossible to tell.
I stood there for longer than I should have.
“Problem?”
Nicco had joined me. I hadn't heard him move up from the group. I was beginning to accept that I probably never would.
“No problem,” I said, forcing my tone to be casual. “Reading the terrain.”
“And what does it say?”
I looked north for another moment. “That it hasn't made up its mind yet.”
He stood beside me and looked at the same horizon I was looking at, and for a while, neither of us said anything. The group had slowed behind us, grateful for the pause, and the sounds of people resting and drinking from tin cups drifted up from behind us.
“You've been here before,” he said.
“No.”
“But you know it.”
“I know terrain,” I said. “This is terrain.”
