The problem with a habit was that it knew the way home.
Adam had been drilling for three days.
Not full workings — he wasn’t spending Wind on practice, not with the ford two days away and the column’s pace already grinding people down.
He was drilling the motion.
The breath-hold that preceded every gust was, he’d concluded, not the breath itself but the stillness the breath made: his shoulders came down a fraction, his jaw settled, the specific quality of his attention changed from scanning to aimed.
Any of those would do as a tell.
The breath was just the most visible.
What he was learning to do was hide the stillness inside other motions.
A shoulder roll when walking.
A head-turn.
The act of adjusting a strap that didn’t need adjusting.
Things the body did constantly, things an observer’s eye catalogued as noise, not signal.
If he could put the stillness inside those, the tell became invisible.
If he could do it consistently, under pressure, without thinking about it — but that was the part that required more than three days.
He was drilling on the move, which was the only time he had.
The column walked; he walked with it; every thirty paces he ran a sub-breath through one of the cover-motions while maintaining the actual Breath-state, feeling for whether the air answered cleanly.
It mostly did.
Ciri had noticed on the first day.
He hadn’t told her what he was doing.
She’d figured it out by the third iteration and said nothing, which was her version of deciding to be useful about it rather than confrontational.
By the second day she’d moved to walk two steps behind and slightly left, which was the position from which she could see his right shoulder, and had begun a silent tally of which cover-motions worked and which still telegraphed.
She told him in the evenings.
Economically.
The shoulder-roll was clean.
The head-turn worked at walking pace but broke at a stop.
The strap-adjustment was inconsistent — it depended on whether he was thinking about it.
“Stop thinking about it,” she said.
“That’s the problem.”
“No, the problem is you’re thinking about not thinking about it.
There’s a difference.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
He had not, until that moment, considered that there was a difference.
He sat with it for a moment and concluded she was right, which was annoying.
“How do you know that,” he said.
“My grandmother’s sword-master said the same thing about footwork.” She was looking ahead at the column’s back, not at him.
“He said you weren’t doing footwork until you stopped knowing you were doing footwork.
Same thing.”
He filed this.
A child who had been trained by Calanthe’s sword-master from age seven had practical knowledge about physical discipline that he, a burned-out modern-Earth fan who had never done a push-up that mattered, did not.
This was useful and slightly humbling and he was going to use it regardless.
“You’re coaching me,” he said.
“I’m being practical,” she said.
“Same thing.”
She didn’t respond to this, which was her version of accepting it.
The callback he wasn’t naming to her — the specific pain of it — was the rampart.
Three weeks ago, on a rooftop in a city that was now ash, he’d watched a gust move chalk dust across a circle and felt the tell as something he’d noticed but not urgently needed to fix.
It had been a curiosity then.
It had been a problem at the causeway.
It was a survival issue now, and the muscle memory of twenty-three days of every working he’d done was lodged somewhere between his shoulders and his sternum, and it was not interested in being unwound because a thirteen-year-old thought it should.
He was making progress.
That was the honest accounting.
Jaskier appeared at his right shoulder at the fourth hour of walking — he had a gift for appearing at shoulders — and walked in silence for a full thirty seconds, which for Jaskier was geological time.
“You’re doing something with your shoulder,” he said.
Adam said nothing.
“It’s very consistent.
Every — would you say every fifty steps?
Fifty steps, shoulder rolls, very deliberate.
I’ve been counting.” A pause.
“I’m a bard.
We notice rhythm.”
“Road habit,” Adam said.
“The girl behind you nods every time you do it.” Jaskier considered this. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
“She’s timing you.”
“She’s watching her footing.”
“She’s—” Jaskier looked at Ciri, who had with perfect timing looked down at the road at the exact moment Jaskier turned.
He looked back at Adam.
“You know what, I’m writing a song about you.
I’ve decided.
It’s going to be about a boy who’s very strange about his shoulders.”
“That will be a terrible song,” Adam said.
“Most of my best songs started as terrible songs.” Jaskier adjusted his lute case, which he carried with the particular care of a man who understood his lute was more load-bearing than most people in his life.
“The trick is finding the part that isn’t terrible and making it louder.”
He fell back to his position at the column’s edge.
Adam heard him humming something that had, in its structure, a rhythm with a beat every fifty steps.
He let it go and kept drilling.
By evening the shoulder-roll was clean in seven of ten attempts without thinking about it.
The other three he was thinking about.
He would not think about the other three.
He would not think about not thinking about them.
Ciri came and sat across from him at the fire and said, without preamble: “You’re getting better at hiding things.”
She was half-teasing.
Half something else.
The something else was the thing he couldn’t afford to address directly, because addressing it would require acknowledging that she was right in more dimensions than she knew.
He laughed, which surprised him a little, and said: “I’ll work on it.”
She looked at him for a moment with the flat-assessment face that he was starting to be able to read more finely — this one was not the analysis-of-evidence face but the younger version, the face of a kid who’d made a joke that landed and wasn’t going to show she was pleased about it.
She looked back at the fire.
The column around them settled for the night, and somewhere behind them Jaskier was composing a rhythm about shoulders and not complaining about it, which meant he was satisfied, which meant the column was as close to all right as a refugee column in the weeks after a sack could be.
The Tell was a manageable problem now.
Not managed.
Manageable.
He would take it.