Bram had not slept properly in six days, and he had stopped pretending otherwise.
He walked the camp before dawn with his hands clasped behind his back, the way he had walked it every morning for thirty years, counting the sentries and the cookfires and the cots.
It was a habit more than a duty now. There was nothing left in the camp that needed guarding except the people in it, and the people were being guarded by creatures he had spent his whole life teaching himself to fear.
That was the thing he could not put down. It followed him from tent to tent like a stone in his boot.
He had watched them for four days now, and he had been watching the way a man watches a card player he is sure is cheating.
Bram had spent most of his life learning to read the thing a person was hiding, and he had looked for it in the elf and in the fox and in the lion, and in the two wolf-kin who hauled water without being asked.
