Barbara uncorked the blue vial and sniffed it. Her nose wrinkled and she stuffed it away. "I'll take first watch," she said. "You dream of all the ways this can go wrong." She kicked her boots off and propped them on the stove, arms crossing behind her head.
Cavendish lay back on the cot. The springs jabbed at his shoulder blades like old debts. He stared at the ceiling, counting each fraying line of the tallow candle until the world shrank to the hiss and pop of the stove, and the pulse in his ears.
He woke to the sound of boiling milk and the faintest streak of gray outside the curtain. Barbara stood by the window, coat already on, silhouetted against the waking fields.
"We'll need to pass through Titan's Landing," she said, all business. "Council wants to see us before we go. Make sure we're not some farmhands looking for a free meal."
Cavendish levered himself upright, bones humming from the cold and the promise of coin. He dressed in silence; Barbara filled the lull with the scrape and pat of her boots, the quiet shing of knife against her palm as she checked the edge. She had a way of moving that turned every room into a dead end.
Outside, the predawn chill stung him awake. Fog crawled from the fields, shrouding the goat pens and rendering his cottage even drabber than usual. He pressed his hat low, trying to look like someone who didn't answer haunted-well bounties as a matter of course.
Barbara tromped past him, whistling nothing Cavendish recognized. He tried to match her pace and nearly slipped on the slick, root-tangled path. She caught him with a sideways look—amusement, sympathy, or pure judgment, he couldn't say—and slowed just enough to let him pretend he'd caught up on his own.
Cavendish blinked hard against the hangover of bad dreams and milk. He forced himself upright, stretching until his back sounded like a tree in a windstorm. His good boots, it turned out, were not good at all—he found only one and the toe was gnawed ragged by something with many teeth and little respect for personal property. He yanked it on anyway, then wrapped the other foot in a scrap of burlap and string.
Barbara had already returned her vials and knives to their hiding places. She watched him from the window, face blank except for that ever-present aura of expectation, and he wondered how she did it—how she made even eating breakfast seem like a test.
He grumbled and splashed water on his face, the cold burn waking up the numb spots behind his eyes. "Titan's Landing, huh?" He ran a hand through what passed for his hair and tried to remember the last time he'd been welcome there.