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Jade beat me a third time before the night was through, three matching fours that made even Halver look up from his knife, and by then I'd stopped pretending the loss bothered me and started genuinely enjoying the look on her face when she won. Small, private, quickly smoothed over, like she wasn't sure yet whether she was allowed to be pleased with herself out loud.

"That's three," she said, gathering the dice.

"I noticed."

"You keep losing."

"I keep being generous."

"You keep losing."

I couldn't argue with that one, so I didn't try. Losing four coppers a night felt like a fair enough trade for that look on her face, the one that showed up only when she'd won something nobody had handed her, and I intended to keep losing to her for as long as she'd let me.

I caught the tail end of Corian and Nykos's conversation later that same night, more by accident than anything, coming back from checking the horse line and finding both of them at the far edge of the firelight instead of the middle of it, voices low enough that I nearly walked past without noticing.

They'd taken to doing this most nights since we left, trading the first watch between just the two of them rather than splitting it the way Corian usually split everything, evenly and without favor. I'd noticed it the second night and said nothing. By the third, it had stopped looking like coincidence.

"...doesn't have to be decided before we get back," Nykos was saying.

"I know."

"You keep saying you know."

"Because I do." Corian's voice had the flat, worn quality of a man circling the same argument for the third or fourth time that week. "Knowing what I should do and being able to do it aren't the same thing, and you know that better than most people."

Silence stretched long enough that I almost kept walking.

"She sat two seats down from you at breakfast for a month," Nykos said, quieter now. "You know why."

"I know why."

"Then say the words instead of dancing around it."

"It doesn't fix anything if I say it."

"No. But at least you'd stop pretending nobody's noticed."

I made a point of stepping on a dry branch after that, loud enough to announce myself before I heard anything neither of them meant for me to hear, and both of them went quiet in the particular way men go quiet when they know exactly how much you caught and are deciding whether to acknowledge it.

"Horses are fine," I said, mostly to fill the space. "Bay mares got a stone in her shoe. I got it out."

"Good," Corian said, and that was the end of it.

I didn't push. Wasn't my business, not really, though I had my own guesses about which words Nykos meant and why Corian couldn't make himself say it standing at the edge of a fire two days from anywhere. I went back to my bedroll instead and left them to it, and if I noticed Jade's tent glowing faintly with Ashter's ember light long after she should have been asleep, and Halver's shape curled up behind her, I didn't mention that either.

By the fourth day the hills had started giving way underfoot, softer ground turning to broken stone in patches, the trail widening as the trees thinned toward whatever lay at the island's center. The change came slow enough that nobody remarked on it directly, but I caught Jade looking north more than once, toward higher ground, her expression doing something careful and unreadable that she didn't share with the rest of us.

The air changed with the ground, salt creeping into it a full day before we'd see any water, faint at first and then unmistakable, riding under the pine the way smoke rides under a closed door. Even the horses noticed, picking their feet up higher over ground that no longer gave the way soft earth did.

"Coast country," Halver said, the first time we crossed a stretch of exposed rock that rang under the horses' hooves instead of muffling them. "Smells different too."

He was right, same as he usually was about anything that involved paying closer attention than the rest of us bothered with.

Halver's cooking lesson that night was the most ambitious yet, a proper stew built from the last of the fresh vegetables and whatever he'd caught that afternoon, and Jade had progressed from watching to actually being trusted with the knife.

"Sear it first," he told her, guiding her wrist with two fingers until the strip of meat sat flat against the hot stone instead of curling at the edge. "You want the outside to seal before the inside cooks through, or you lose all the juice into the fire instead of the meat."

"That seems like it would apply to anything."