He nodded as if she had confirmed a weather report. "I can live with both."
"I did not ask what you can live with."
"No," he said. "You asked, earlier, for me to say what made me put my hand on you. I am still saying it. The medallion. The bracer. My mother's margin note. And the way your face looked when the glow held it—like someone had borrowed your bones and forgotten to return the person."
Serenya's boots found a root and she stepped over it with unnecessary precision. "Do not describe my face as a tragedy you rescued. Describe your order as a mistake you interrupted. Those are different stories."
"They are," Torven agreed. "I prefer the second. I am trying to stay in it."
Callen glanced back, decided this was not a conversation that needed a polished spare, and rode farther ahead until the mist made him a softer shape.
They made a cold camp in a hollow where an old charcoal burner's stones still held a ring. No fire—too easy for the shared lattice to hum along with flame and invent hunger. They chewed dried meat and mint leaves until their mouths tasted like apology and garden. Serenya sat with her back to a pine. Torven sat an arm's length away, palms carefully separate, as instructed. Callen took first watch and pretended not to listen.
"Hard honesty," Serenya said into the dark. "You used me as a solution before you saw me as a person with a sister who sends apples. I nearly killed a full being because the glow made the world simple. We are both compromised. If you need me to say you are the only villain so you can enjoy your guilt cleanly, I will not."
Torven was quiet long enough that an owl finished a sentence in the canopy. "I do not need a clean villain," he said. "I need you to tell me when the lattice sings loud enough that my mouth might order something I will hate at dawn. I need you not to assume my every caution is ownership. And I need—this is the hard part—I need you to accept that I will not fully trust your eyes until the season ends and the seal-stone either grounds the work or burns us for trying. That is not fair. It is accurate."
Serenya felt the words land where Maera's accuracy had landed earlier: in the place where dignity and bruise shared a wall. "Then hear mine," she said. "I will not fully trust your orders until I have watched you refuse the song when refusing costs you standing with your clan. Tonight you refused once. Once is not a pattern. It is a beginning. Beginnings are not pledges."
"Agreed," Torven said.
Callen, from the watch-stone, murmured, "If you two agree on anything else, wake me. I want to see the omen."
Despite herself, Serenya huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. Torven's mouth moved under the beard in something that might become a smile in a kinder week.
They slept in shifts, palms apart, dreams leaking anyway.
In Serenya's dream, the dragonfly medallion opened its four wings and flew into her sister's kitchen, landing on a bowl of dried apples. Her sister reached to brush it away and her fingers came away dusty with iron. In Torven's dream—he told her later, reluctantly, because shared lattice made privacy a negotiation—he stood on the overlook again and said sure hit to an empty bow, and the empty bow answered in Serenya's voice, and the valley farms applauded while Vaelith's eyes went dull as coins.