They woke humorless and competent.
By the second day's noon the pines thinned into scrub and the grey sky finally admitted a pale disk of sun, as if reluctantly rubber-stamping the idea of light. Callen's horse cast a real shadow. Serenya's braid dried. The linen on her palm stiffened with old blood. The song under Torven's tongue, he reported, was quieter when they walked and louder when they argued about route.
"We take the river cut," Serenya said. "Faster."
"We take the high switchback," Torven said. "Safer from patrols that like tidy ropes."
"Safer for whom?"
"For the work," he said. "For Vaelith's deferred morning. For your sister's ignorance, if you still want it. For my mother's parchment reaching Highmarsh without becoming a trophy."
She hated that he could stack reasons like cordwood. She hated more that the stack was sound. "High switchback," she said. "If we lose a day, you carry the water."
"I already carry the water."
"Then carry it without commenting on your own virtue."
Callen coughed into his glove. "Competence," he reminded them, cheerful as a man who had decided cheer was a tactical resource. "Orlaeth's word."
They took the high switchback.
On the third switch, they met two valley watchers with short bows and the nervous righteousness of people sent to find a corpse and instead finding a story. Callen showed the sealed parchment. One watcher spat. The other read slowly, lips moving, and looked at Serenya's bracer as if it might bite.
"Dragonfly," the reader said. "My uncle had one. He died smiling after a sure hit on a river serpent. They said it was holy."
"They said wrong," Serenya answered. "Keep your uncle's name if it helps you. Do not keep the holiness."
The watchers let them pass because Maera's seal still meant something and because Vaelith's distant ember, visible even from the switchback as a dull coal on the ridge grass, made argument feel small. As they left, Serenya heard one watcher say to the other, "She didn't glow." It sounded like disappointment. She walked faster.