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"I mean it, Alex."

"I said I know." Alex looked up, and whatever he saw on Corian's face made him drop the joke entirely, his voice settling. "I'm not taking it lightly."

Corian held his eyes a moment longer, then nodded, satisfied, and went back to his pack.

I noticed the whetstone go quiet before I understood why. Jade's attention had drifted past the fire, past the room, past all of us. I couldn't read her, never been able to, but I didn't need the ability I was born with to recognize what crossed her face just then, a small, careful hope she likely hadn't meant to let show, gone almost before it arrived. I knew it because I'd worn it, not because I'd looked for it in her. She caught herself a half second later, jaw tightening, eyes dropping back to the knife as though she could scrub the thought out through sheer focus on the steel.

I knew that look. I'd worn it myself more than once since the first small assignment turned out to be exactly as small as its name promised, since the second ended with nothing worse than a headache and a magistrate's polite thanks. A month of paperwork dressed up as fieldwork, and here sat a squad of people trying hard not to feel anything close to relief that something, finally, might turn out to be real.

None of us would have said it out loud. Saying it meant admitting we wanted two dead miners and a missing man to add up to something worse than an infestation, and none of us were quite that far gone.

But I watched her set the whetstone down, watched her weigh her own hope the way she weighed everything, carefully, like wanting something for herself still felt like theft.

"Skitters, probably," Alex said, breaking the silence, reading off the crumpled corner of the Generals page that had somehow migrated from the map room to the kitchen table sometime during the afternoon. He said it flat, unconvinced, the tone of a man repeating a lie back to the room that told it to him.

"That's a hell of a thing to bury two men under."

Nobody answered him.

Nobody needed to.

Chapter Nineteen: Day by Day

Alex

We left before the rest of the Citadel had awoken, packs loaded and horses saddled while the sky still held more gray than gold, and by the time the sun cleared the rooftops we were already through the Citadel gates and onto the old road that ran north into Gledhi Forest.

The trees here grew taller and stranger the more we moved deeper, pale bark streaked silver in the early light, leaves so dark green they read almost black until the sun caught them right.

Jade rode at the front beside Corian without being asked to, and I noticed her studying the tree line the way she studied anything unfamiliar, curious rather than at ease, which told me something I hadn't expected. Even the forest had a boundary she'd never crossed.

"You know this stretch?" I asked her, nudging my horse up alongside.

"Not this far in."

"I thought this was your forest."

"The edges are. I never had time to get further before I'd have to get back." She glanced up at the canopy, thicker and stranger the deeper we went. "So this is..."

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.

"New," Halver said.

"New," she agreed, and didn't look away from the trees the whole time she said it.

I had a whole comment loaded about her finally exploring her own kingdom like a tourist, and something about the way she said it made me swallow it instead. There was something in the way she took in this stretch of Gledhi, quiet and careful and a little more open than usual, that felt like it belonged to her rather than to the rest of us, even if she'd never actually seen it before this morning.

Once, without looking up from her saddle, she told Halver there was a nesting bird two branches above his head before he'd shifted enough to smell it himself.

"That's unsettling," I said. "Do that to me and tell me what I had for breakfast."

She just turned her head and stared at me. I was counting it as a win.

We stopped for water around midmorning at a shallow pool fed by some spring I couldn't see the source of, clear enough to show the pale stones on the bottom, and Jade crouched at the edge of it longer than the horses needed to drink.

"It glows at night," she said, when she caught me watching her. "Near the edges, at least. The moss, mostly, some of the fungus too. I don't know if it's the same this deep in."

"You never checked?"