The Approach to Yartar

The Weight of Silver — Chapter Five

Days nine through twenty out of Helmsblade. The road north, the safe house, and the bridge.

---

Younger Aldric Wenn of the Three Larches and ex lover of Lady Vessa Duskmere

I. The Fire on the First Night

They rode ten leagues that first day out of the hilltop above Mournstar, in silence for most of it, and made camp in a fold of the moor where a small stream came down from the foothills and curved through a stand of black pine. Halric had picked the spot. He had said, looking at it: trees on three sides, water on the fourth, and the wind comes down off the slope so the smoke goes up and not out, and Kael had nodded once and taken the bow up to the rise above the camp without speaking, which was where Kael was sleeping these days.

Iselle slept early. She had ridden the whole day in a kind of glassy alertness that Vessa had been watching with a private concern, and at sundown she had eaten three mouthfuls of the stew Halric had made and then put down the bowl and said, very quietly, I think I need to lie down, and had been asleep within five minutes. Vessa had laid her own cloak over the girl on top of Iselle's and had stood for perhaps half a minute looking down at her with a face Selene had not seen Vessa wear before and could not name, and then Vessa had walked away to the picket without saying anything.

Branwen and Corin and Halric had gone to sleep an hour after that. Vessa was in her bedroll across the fire, breathing slow, although Selene was not certain she was actually asleep. Kael was on the rise.

That left Selene on watch at the fire's edge, with the long sword drawn across her thighs and her left arm — which had come back over the ride, mostly, with only a deep tired ache where the wight's nails had taken her — laid in her lap.

She heard Iselle's breathing change at the fourth bell of the night. She heard the breathing become uneven, in the small catching rhythm of a person beginning to come awake into something they did not want to be awake into, and then she heard the breathing stop, and then she heard the small wet sound of Iselle making no sound at all.

Selene got up. She went round the fire, soft-footed in the bracken. She crouched beside Iselle.

Iselle was awake, lying on her side, with her face turned into the cloak and her hands clenched in front of her chest, and she was crying without sound in the way Selene had cried twice in her life — the first time after Sahar, the second time on a rooftop in Iriaebor for a reason she had never told anyone — which was not the kind of crying that asked anything of anyone in the room. It was just a thing the body was doing because it had to, and the person doing it was holding very still inside it because moving would have made it louder, and louder would have woken the others.

Selene sat down on the bracken next to the bedroll. She did not touch her. She put her sword down across her knees so that Iselle, when she opened her eyes, w…

为什么值得关注

能改变理解方式，而不只是重复常识；符合当前抓取需求；它提供了新的理解或解释，而不只是表面观点

来源：reddit，领域：tech，保留分：0.70