"You draw a line where I see none, Nathein," Leafdancer insisted stubbornly in his own tongue. "You fight with us; therefore you are a part of our company when you do so, not a tool to be risked or discarded."

"It is nearer the mark to say that you see no line where all others can." He shook his head. "I understand that one's actions might reflect upon those who hire one, but that does not alter the nature of the terms of employment."

“Oh, Nathein!” Tahira’s beam lit her face as she turned to face him. “I did not realise you were here in the hall.”

"I have been speaking with Leafdancer. Is Astran about, as well?"

"Astran got called out on some business," she replied regretfully, and gave him a thoughtful look. "Things are well between you and sister?"

"Well?" Nathein tilted his head.

"Yes, well."

“He shall not return, Anelie,” said Nathein, implacable. “Three months have come and gone. You know he is gone. Bring his leavings, if you must, but it is time to return home.”

Anelie flashed him the same yellow glare a wounded she-wolf might give a hunter, pained and savage all at once. “Your niece,” she replied, using the word as her own weapon, “goes nowhere without her father.”

Entered Eocambe, the words on the page said. Seal moved. Portal of demons/drow found in inner keep. Destroyed. Departed.

And that was, indeed, the meat of it; the facts, shorn of unnecessary detail. But the details, albeit unnecessary, were not irrelevant, and they preoccupied him still as he sat on his bunk with the journal open on his lap.

Mother stood there like graven statuary - no queen of old could ever have been so stately, nor as grim in her majesty - and regarded both her children with wordless ire, though the only outward sign of it was the tight suppression of her lips. It was clear what was to come, of course, and it made even a whipping from Father seem entirely attractive by comparison.

The wind blew, and blew. Nathein’s attitude towards the cold, like his mood, was not much improved by Thomas’s ward against the elements. Up here - camped between chasms amongst some of the highest peaks of the north - the only ‘shelter’ was the leeward side of a rocky outcrop where the snow could be scraped away and a faltering fire set. The ink in his bottle routinely froze if he let it sit by too long, but he doggedly continued to lean forward and thaw it over the subdued flames of the campfire each time, nevertheless; his account had lapsed for too many days.

---

"It is possible that the one who ... starts this ... is doing so to make us more known to one another. Perhaps in an attempt to bind us closer, make the Company more ..." The grugach waved her hand, lip bitten, losing the precise words to explain.

Lyssa frowned, her dark eyes still reddened and tearful after her visions. "What would a dragon hope to gain by that, Dancer?"

---

Swallows dipped and wheeled amongst the high places, ducking and diving above the spray to snap insects from the air over a drop of hundreds of feet. The sheer cliffs below plunged with the waters of the falls into the wide, cold waters of the lake beneath, surging from wrath to tranquillity in only moments.

---

"Tell me," the half-elf invited, watching his face with that same keen, voraciously curious expression of his, "do you have some goals of your own? If you were to join, they and I would have to help you with that as well."

Another man's legendary advice was a fitting response for that. "I intend not to die, if at all possible."

"Surely you have something more interesting as well?"