Chương 74: 30-3.Parlay

The night wind was drier than the day's. The fire was kept small—more for warming hands and boiling water than anything else. Lucas's color was still poor; he drank some hot broth and went to rest early. Alvira took the first half of the night watch. Jessi made pointed remarks about being a delicate woman who required adequate sleep, then took her watch shift without complaint when the time came. Matthews reviewed tomorrow's road one more time and checked the wheel fittings and bindings while he was at it.

I completed my own circuit of the camp, confirmed nothing had been missed, and then noticed that my feet had already carried me toward Olivia without any conscious decision on my part. She was crouched at the edge of the firelight, re-layering the items that needed to be accessible tomorrow. Rough cloth bags on the left, shelf-stable dried provisions at the back, daily-use water within reach, reserves pressed to the inside.

She'd even split the medicine kit into two portions—one for the wagon, one passed to Matthews. I stood beside her for a few seconds before speaking.

"Anything else that needs adjusting?" She didn't look up. She held out a coil of rope.

"Shorten this." I took it and did.

"Which wagon goes in front tomorrow morning?"

"The flat one."

"Behind it?"

"The modified one."

"Not the other carriage?"

"Not unless necessary." A brief pause.

"And even then, not before we're inside." I tightened the knot and pressed it down.

"Anything else?" This time she looked up. The fire was low. Her expression was steady—the same as always. But she'd been working through the whole evening, and a few strands of hair had come loose at her temple, softening that precisely maintained quality she usually carried, just slightly.

"Go sleep," she said.

"You'll need to be present tomorrow."

"What about you?"

"I'm finishing the list."

"There's still a list?"

"Yes." She said it with the tone of someone stating the obvious.

"Who sits in which wagon. Which pack doesn't get opened first. Who will cause problems if they speak. Who needs to stay quiet and when. All of it needs to be accounted for." I was quiet for two seconds. Then I crouched down beside her.

"Give me half." She looked at me. Didn't speak immediately. I'd been expecting something along the lines of you won't be able to follow it—but instead she simply pushed one of the already-sorted dried provision bags toward me, and said, with complete evenness:"Then sort these in the order they'll be needed tomorrow."

"... That's it?"

"What else were you expecting?"

"I thought you'd be harder on me."

"If you want me to be harder on you, I'm not opposed to accommodating that."

"I'll pass." So I stayed crouched there, helping her sort through everything we'd need for tomorrow. Embarrassing to admit, but it wasn't a bad feeling. Not relaxing, exactly. Not some strange sense of comfort either. It was more that all those scattered, headache-inducing problems—the kind that multiplied the moment you looked at them—seemed to find their own order once they passed through her hands. You just followed along, and things clicked back into place one by one.

Like a rope that had been slipping pulled taut again. Like chaos being quietly gathered back into its proper place. And somewhere along the way, I'd started thinking: this is actually fine. By the time we packed away the last bundle, the fire had burned down to almost nothing. The second half of the night passed without incident. The wind stayed dry. The cold stayed cold. The lights of Angel's Gate glowed faintly in the distance, as if to remind us they were still there—and nothing more.

The next morning, the sky had barely started to pale when the entire convoy was already moving. Horses fed first. Water distributed. Fire smothered, traces cleared. The flat wagon in front, the modified carriage behind. Every outer layer rewrapped in unremarkable rough cloth—only what needed to be durable visible on the outside, everything else pressed inward and out of sight. Erina and Olivia had both changed into their new outfits.

Jessi complained loudly, then put on the completely unremarkable dark coat without further incident. Lucas still looked like something the road had chewed up when he climbed aboard, which worked perfectly—he was a very convincing wind-battered bookkeeper. Tonight was my turn for first watch. With the luxury carriage now disguised as a convincing piece of junk, the camp had simplified to match. Three tents total—men in one, women in another, drivers in the third.

Clean, efficient, no unnecessary arrangements for anyone to waste thought on. I settled onto a jutting red rock at the edge of the wasteland with a water skin and a piece of bread hard enough to serve as a blunt weapon. During the day this place wanted to cure you alive. At night, it swung the other way—too quiet, almost oppressively so. The wind still carried residual heat from the afternoon, but overhead, the sky had been scrubbed clean.

A full spread of stars pressed into the dark, and a moon so unreasonably large it looked like someone had hung a white dinner plate directly from the sky's highest point. I was staring up at it, slightly more absorbed than I'd intended, when I heard footsteps behind me. Stolen story; please report.

"Greetings, Lord Cedric. May I sit here?" I nearly crushed the water skin. When I turned around, Olivia was standing there. She had on the dark traveling cloak she'd changed into, and the night had softened her outline—but somehow that only made her presence feel sharper, not less.

"... Please." She sat down beside me, leaving a gap between us that was neither close nor far. I will state, for the record, that I am rarely this unsettled. With Jessi, the worst of it was the initial barrage of pointed commentary, and once you adapted to her particular frequency, it stopped landing. But a genuinely well-bred young lady was something else entirely. She wasn't even doing anything—just sitting there quietly—and I found myself wondering whether my posture was sufficiently correct.

I took a bite of bread and performed the impression of someone with nothing on their mind.

"Something wrong? It's late." Olivia seemed to arrange her words before releasing them.

"I came to apologize, Lord Cedric."

"Apologize?"

"For today." She looked out at the moonlit ground ahead, her voice steady.

"I involved myself too much. You're the one who brought everyone this far, and I took it upon myself to arrange quite a few things. That was... somewhat presumptuous of me." I worked the mouthful of dense bread down and thought about it.

"We don't really have concepts like 'leader' in this group," I said.

"Everyone's here for their own reasons. As long as we keep moving forward, that's enough." A short silence.

"Are you here for your own reasons as well?" she asked.

"Of course." I wasn't going to dress it up.

"I'm a bastard son who got squeezed out of his own house by two legitimate brothers. I can't exactly do nothing about that. If there's a chance to make them understand that pushing me out wasn't the smartest decision they ever made—I'm going to take it." Not a flattering thing to say out loud. But pretending humility right now would have been worse. Olivia listened without speaking. After a moment, she gave a quiet nod.

"I understand." Then she stood, smoothed an almost invisible trace of dust from the hem of her skirt, and said:"Then—at least until you've accomplished what you came to do—please leave the internal affairs to me." I looked up at her.

"... What exactly is this?"

"A division of responsibilities," she answered without hesitation.

"I'm not suited for what you're suited for. But the smaller details within the convoy—I can handle those." She paused, as though something had just occurred to her, and added:"My mother did instruct me to keep a close eye on you." My eyelid twitched.

"May I ask what, precisely, she said about me?" Olivia considered for a moment, then said, with complete composure:"She said that Rosa men are, by and large, accomplished swindlers of women's hearts."

"..." Father. What exactly did you do, that people are still holding it against me all these years later? There's a saying that the sins of the father shouldn't reach the children. In our family, that saying was apparently decorative. The debt didn't stop at the generation—it came straight through and kept collecting interest. Fortunately, Olivia's next sentence brought my blood pressure back down from the ceiling.

"However, so far, I don't believe you're that kind of person." I blinked. Her gaze had settled on the distant lights of Angel's Gate.

"If you were," she said, "it would have shown itself somewhere along this road by now."... That was entirely reasonable. And yet somehow, hearing it from her made it harder to respond to, not easier. I cleared my throat.

"Anyway—having your help has made things considerably less complicated."

"Good." A small nod.

"I'll handle the internal side. The outside will still depend on you." My mouth moved before I could stop it.

"The way you put that, it almost sounds like we're already—" I caught it halfway through. Too late. I snapped the rest of the sentence off, but the damage was done. Olivia had gone very slightly still, and I had immediately redirected my gaze toward the moon with the focused interest of a man who had just discovered astronomy. The night wind passed between us. Silence. The kind that makes your scalp prickle. Catastrophic. I was already running through options for burying the sentence when Olivia spoke first.

"If you meant a division of labor," she said, "then yes, it does rather resemble that." I turned to look at her. She had her eyes lowered, but her voice was steadier than I had any right to expect.

"It's only a matter of sorting out who handles what. The convoy didn't make it this far on any one person's effort." A brief pause.

"... So please don't concern yourself with it." This woman. Even in a moment like this, she found a way to quietly fold the whole thing back into something manageable. I exhaled—but the low, inexplicable restlessness in my chest hadn't entirely dispersed.

"I didn't mean it that way," I said, rubbing the back of my neck.

"My mouth got ahead of me."

"I know." She said it too quickly for me to determine whether I know meant she knew I hadn't meant it, or she knew that my mouth regularly operated ahead of my brain. Either way, she wasn't pressing the point, and I had enough self-preservation instinct not to jump back into the pit myself. I took another bite of the bread instead—too hard, as always—and nearly jarred my back teeth loose. Olivia glanced at me sideways.

"Is that very hard?"

"What do you think?" I said, somewhat muffled.

"Give this thing another two days and it'd be classified as a weapon." She was quiet for half a second. Then she reached into her outer coat and produced a small cloth bundle, which she held out toward me.

"This is for you." I looked down. Inside: two small pieces of dried fruit and half a soft flatbread.

"Where did you get this?"

"I set it aside before dinner." She said it as naturally as commenting on the weather.

"I suspected you wouldn't eat properly during your watch."

"... You planned for that too?"

"It wasn't difficult to anticipate." She said it as though it were obvious, and that matter-of-fact certainty left me with nothing to say. I took the half-flatbread. When my fingers touched the edge of the cloth, I noticed—belatedly—that it was still faintly warm. She'd been carrying it close to her the whole evening. That was the only reason the night air hadn't stripped the warmth out of it entirely. It wasn't anything remarkable.

And yet precisely because it wasn't remarkable—because it was the sort of small, unconsidered thing that doesn't announce itself—it was the kind that left you without words. I looked at the flatbread for a moment, then accepted it properly.

"... Thank you."

"You're welcome." She settled back into her place beside me, and didn't bring up the sentence I'd half-said. She seemed to have decided to let it pass. I ate something that was finally recognizable as food, and after a short silence found myself speaking again without having decided to.

"Tomorrow, once we're inside—do we find lodging first, or secure the last water resupply?" The question was out before I'd thought about it. Olivia answered almost before I'd finished asking.

"Lodging first," she said.

"Water can be purchased anywhere. A good position cannot. If we go in too late, the viable options will already be taken. Secure the base first, and everything else becomes easier to manage." I nodded.

"And if someone tries to probe us for information?"

"Let Matthews speak first. If they ask about cargo, say we're transporting people, not running goods. If anyone shows interest in Erina or myself, redirect toward sick passenger and traveling family." She paused.

"Don't speak first."

"Telling me to stay quiet again?"

"A recommendation."

"Sounds like an order."

"Because that's what tends to work." I laughed—a short, involuntary sound—and noticed only afterward that the tension in my jaw had been gone for some time.

"Fine. I'll follow your lead." The words were out before I'd examined them. Not we'll see or I'll think about it—just a clean, unqualified I'll follow your lead. Olivia had heard it. But she only made a quiet sound of acknowledgment, and didn't make a point of it. The less she said about it, the more it felt like something that had simply been quietly decided. The night was still. Angel's Gate had faded to a thin line of light in the distance.

Wind came in from the direction of the gorges—dry and cold, but not unpleasant. No sound from the tents. Everyone else had probably been asleep for a while. I looked out at the moonlit wasteland ahead and found, unexpectedly, that the night didn't feel so long. After a while, Olivia stood.

"I'll head back, then."

"Mm." She took two steps, then stopped. Turned back.

"Lord Cedric."

"Yes?"

"What you said just now—I won't hold it against you." My spine went rigid. Again? But her expression was entirely calm. There was nothing in it that suggested she intended to pursue the matter.

"However," she said, with perfect composure, "if you're going to stop yourself mid-sentence in the future, I'd suggest choosing a less quiet setting." A brief pause.

"When it's this still, things tend to carry." She gave me a small, unhurried nod, and walked back toward the tents. I sat where I was, half-eaten flatbread in hand, and stared after her for two full seconds.... So she does strike back, occasionally. I looked up at that unreasonably large moon for a long moment, let out a slow breath, and finished the bread. At least one thing was clear to me now. Tomorrow, when we entered the city—if anything complicated came up—I was going to go to her first.

And I wasn't going to pretend I'd only just decided that.