He looked around quickly. His nearest neighbor, still asleep, was a head of long brown hair, half- braided, half-loose, spilling onto another trade blanket. Not Rizcarn, whose hair was raven black. There wasn't a raven hair to be seen in pale light. Rizcarn hadn't returned.
The watch had retired and the camp was stirring. Cha'Tel'Quessir rekindled their fires for breakfast cooking, shook out their clothes, wandered in and out of the bushes, tending their private needs. Bro counted a handful of new faces among them; they numbered forty now, give or take a few. Chayan hadn't been yesterday's only new arrival, though she was the only one he'd noticed.
Thinking of her, Bro pounded his fist against his forehead. Healed or poisoned, he was clearer- headed this morning, and the memories ... What had he been thinking of when she led him out of the camp? Had he truly put his arm around her? Tried to kiss her on the lips?
"Gods curse me for a fool," he muttered, knotting his shirt within his fist, until he remembered it was hers and smoothed it out again. "They were digging Lanig's grave and I was thinking ..."
Bro didn't want to say what he'd been thinking, not even in a whisper. The very morning that she died, his mother had chided him for being too shy and awkward around the Sulalk human girls. Time enough, he'd told himself, when he got back to the Yuirwood.
But barely enough: Chayan was practically the first unspoken-for woman he'd met, and he'd made a fool of himself. Cha'Tel'Quessir grew up as fast as their human cousins, then settled into an almostelven maturity. Bro recalled how shocked he'd been when Shali once told him she was old enough to be Dent's mother. Chayan, who'd fought everywhere with everyone and whose tree-family, SilverBranch, Bro didn't recognize, was almost certainly older than Shali. Age wasn't supposed to be important between men and women in the Yuirwood, but the longer Bro thought about it, the younger and more foolish he felt.
He grabbed the blanket and began folding it, using both arms: he'd sooner die of poison than have Chayan taking care of him a moment longer. It wasn't his blanket anyway; he'd been borrowing blankets or furs each night, as he'd been borrowing everything else since he met up with his father. Two nights ago, he'd borrowed a fur from Lanig...
Bro's hands stopped moving. He hadn't known Lanig well. More than the memory of Lanig's corpse and Dent's and Shali's, it was the number of people who were simply gone that set his hands shaking. His world had turned over so many times, and what was he doing? Folding a blanket, as if it mattered whether blankets got folded, whether he was warm and dry when the dew fell.
Rizcarn went around the Yuirwood carving runes into trees and stones so they wouldn't forget. Bro thought it would have been more useful to carve runes into the Cha'Tel'Quessir themselves so he wouldn't forget who he was, where he'd come from, and what he'd left behind. Shali had a tiny scar on her cheek; for his life, Bro couldn't remember if it had been her right cheek or her left.
He took a deep breath that hurt his right-side ribs and the place he called his heart. Then he put another fold in the blanket, because he was alive, not dead, and he'd have to return the blanket with proper gratefulness. When the blanket was neatly folded in eighths, Bro started to stand, and stopped. The blanket in his hands matched the blanket wrapped around his neighbor, and his nighttime neighbor with the long, brown hair was Chayan.
Chayan, wrapping him in her own blankets, taking care of him because he was too young and foolish to take care of himself.
At least she was still asleep. Carefully, quietly, Bro laid the blanket beside her and tiptoed away. Yongour hailed him as he trudged up from the stream. Had he slept well? Was he feeling better? Would he breakfast at Yongour's fire?
Lanig's death and Rizcarn's continued absence had revitalized the Cha'Tel'Quessir. They gathered like tree-family elders at Yongour's fire, sipping tea and gnawing chunks of yesterday's bread. Bro greeted them all by name; they greeted him as Rizcarn's son and asked him when his father would return.
"The question is, should we wait here, or make our way to the Sunglade," Yongour explained. "I measure that the 'Glade's three days from here, walking fast and alone. We're thirty-eight now, and we can only walk as fast as our slowest legs. Some have to forage as well. If we leave now, all of us will get there. If we wait a day, some won't. If we wait more than a day, like as not, Zandilar will dance without us. Did your father tell you which we should do? Walk or wait?"
Bro wanted to laugh. His father hadn't told him anything. Rizcarn didn't trust his son much more than that son trusted him, but Rizcarn had—unintentionally?—left him with the power to bring thirty- eight Cha'Tel'Quessir to the Sunglade or keep them in this camp until it was too late to dance with Zandilar.
