"Some of them were."
Her eyes come to me. "And the ones that weren't?"
"Were still close enough."
The silence after that is ugly. Too honest. I've stood inside it before, on the side of decisions that looked different in orders than they looked in daylight.
"You want me to tell you I ordered the burning," I say flatly.
"Did you?"
"No." I start walking. "I was given orders to clear a supply corridor. I cleared it. What happened after I left the command tent wasn't in my orders."
"That's a careful distinction."
"It's the truth." I glance at her. "I left that command six weeks after. Cited strategic disagreement."
She doesn't believe me yet. Not disbelief exactly—the suspension of judgment. The thing people do when they can't afford to update their certainty too fast. I'd do the same. The escorts fan out. An escort signals a check and I lift a hand in acknowledgment.
"There was an action in the third year," I say. I turn my attention away from her while I say it. "Forty kilometers north of the Vareth crossing. We were ordered to process a village as a rebel staging point and hold all residents for questioning."
"I heard about the Vareth clearing."
"You heard the report. The report said full compliance." I watch the road. "Fourteen children were in the holding compound. Under questioning orders, which meant—" I don't finish it. She knows what it means. "I moved them out before the processing teams arrived. A service road. Got them to a settlement run by an independent healer six kilometers west."
She's quiet for enough time that I hear the wind moving across the plateau.
"You were still a commander," she says. "That would have been?—"
"Treason. Insubordination under wartime authority. Execution-level, yes."
"How did you avoid it?"
"The report said all fourteen were processed. I wrote the report." I confess.
"You falsified military records," she takes it in and speaks slowly.
"The records said what they needed to say."
I can feel her working through it. Not the emotional version—she hasn't got there, and I'm not clearing a path to it. She'srecalibrating. I recognize that because I've done it, since the night she didn't leave.
We reach the refugee camp three hours before sundown. I smelled the cookfire twenty minutes before seeing it—green wood, wrong fuel, which means whoever is burning it doesn't have anything better. Theren moves up to my shoulder. "Civilian."
"Civilian," I repeat.
Nine people around a dying fire on the far side of a collapsed waystation. Four adults, three children, two older men. Their food is gone. I can tell before we're close—the stillness of people who have moved past hunger into managing their energy against it.
I signal a soldier forward and hand him a pack without making it a ceremony. "Leave the supplies on the south side of the station as we pass. Don't stop. Don't identify."
He nods and goes. We keep moving—at a distance, unhurried, eyes on the road ahead. Travelers. Nothing more. I don't watch to see if Corrine is watching. I know she is. The camp drops behind us as the road curves west and the light starts dropping. Theren checks our rear and the men stretch into travel formation. Corrine comes up beside me.
She doesn't speak for a full minute. I match it.
"You didn't want them to know?" She asks.
"It's simpler."
"Simpler than what?"
