Nobody talked for the first hour.
That was fine with Lucius. He had learned early that silence between people told you more than conversation did if you paid attention to the right things, and right now, the silence between the three of them was telling him quite a lot.
Valeria walked three paces behind and to his right. Not close enough to suggest comfort, not far enough to suggest a retreat. A precise, considered distance that she maintained without appearing to think about it, the way someone maintains posture they've had long enough that it stopped requiring effort.
She made no sound when she moved. Her footfalls didn't register even on the packed dirt of the road, and every time Lucius's divine sense swept passively outward, it returned with the same answer.
A gap in the world shaped exactly like a person.
Seraphine walked on his left and said nothing and looked straight ahead, which would have been convincing if she weren't doing it quite so deliberately.
Every twenty or thirty steps, her eyes would cut sideways and back, a brief sharp glance over her shoulder toward Valeria, and then forward again. She wasn't being subtle about it, and he suspected she wasn't trying to be.
Valeria, for her part, seemed to find this genuinely entertaining. The third time Seraphine glanced back, she caught it directly, and something shifted at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile, though.
Something similar, assembled, and then partly disassembled before it completed itself.
Seraphine's jaw tightened visibly, and she looked back at the road.
'Hmmm…'
Lucius said nothing and kept walking.
They stopped midmorning at a stream that crossed under the road through a stone culvert, wide enough to fill the waterskins and cold enough to make the task unpleasant. Lucius crouched at the bank and worked through it quickly, capping the skins and straightening.
Seraphine was filling her own waterskin a few meters upstream. Valeria stood on the road above the bank, not filling anything, just watching the tree line on the far side of the water with the automatic vigilance of someone who had stopped being able to turn it off.
Lucius climbed back up to the road and stopped beside her.
"You're not drinking?," he asked.
"I have water."
"You've been moving since before dawn."
"I'm fine." The words arrived without inflexion, not defensive, just factual. Her eyes hadn't moved from the tree line.
He followed her gaze, but the trees on the far bank were still and ordinary, birds moving in the upper branches, nothing his sense flagged as worth the attention. "What are you looking at?"
"Nothing yet." A pause. "That's when I look."
He watched her for a moment. She had the particular quality of stillness that he'd noticed in the corridor outside the prince's chambers, the kind that wasn't rest but readiness held very quietly.
Seraphine came up the bank behind him, capping her waterskin. She looked at Valeria, then at the tree line, then at Lucius. "Are we moving?"
"Yes," Valeria said, before Lucius could answer.
Seraphine's expression didn't change but something in it cooled by a degree, then she looked at Lucius.
"Yes," he said.
They all moved.
****
The road climbed through the afternoon as the valley narrowed further, the hills steepening on both sides until the sky overhead was reduced to a pale strip running above them like a river viewed from the bottom.
The going was slower here, the road surface rougher, cut through with old ruts that had dried into ridges hard enough to turn an ankle on if you stopped paying attention.
Lucius paid attention, so did Valeria. Seraphine paid attention and also, at intervals, paid attention to Valeria, which Lucius suspected was costing her more energy than the road itself.
Around midafternoon he dropped back half a step, bringing himself briefly level with the space between the two of them.
"She helped me get into the palace," he said quietly, to Seraphine. "Before the sun god."
Seraphine looked at him. "I know what she did."
"She let me go when she didn't have to."
"I know that too." Her voice was low and even. "I also know she spent six years protecting the divine hierarchy that cast me out and called me an apostate and has been actively trying to kill me for the better part of a year." She looked back at the road.
"So I'm being careful. I'm allowed to be careful, aren't I?."
"You are," Lucius said.
"Thank you for the permission," she said, not unkindly but not warmly either.
He fell back into his usual position and said nothing further about it.
Behind him, at her precise and unchanging three paces, Valeria said nothing at all.
***
They made camp where the road widened at the base of a limestone shelf, a natural overhang that cut the wind and provided cover on two sides.
Lucius built the fire while Seraphine managed the rations, dividing what remained of their supplies into three portions without comment, setting Valeria's share down on the flat rock nearest to her without looking at her while she did it.
Valeria picked it up, sat with her back against the limestone, and ate without ceremony.
They ate in silence. The fire was small and well contained, burning down toward coals quickly the way Lucius had built it, useful for warmth without being visible from any distance. The valley above them had gone full dark, the strip of sky between the hills showing stars now, clear and cold.
Lucius was feeding the last of the useful wood into the fire when Valeria spoke.
"They're closer than yesterday."
He looked up.
She was looking at the fire, her portion finished, her hands resting loosely across her knees. Her voice had the same flat quality it always had, no elevation, no urgency. Just information delivered at the pace she chose to deliver it.
"The angels," she said. "Heaven's pursuit team. They've been on your trail since Solara, following the disruption the sun god's death left in the divine current." She paused.
"I've been managing it. Covering the more obvious markers. Scattering the residual solar signature where the road passes through areas with enough ambient divine energy to mask it." Her yes came up to his.
"But they're adapting to the interference. What worked three days ago is working less well now."
The fire crackled between them.
Seraphine had gone still on the other side of it, her food forgotten in her hand, watching Valeria with an expression that had shifted from wariness into something sharper and more attentive.
"How many," Lucius said.
"A scouting unit. Four, maybe five." Valeria's expression shifted slightly. "Not Archangel tier. Heaven doesn't commit heavy resources until a scout team confirms a location. But they're capable and they're methodical and at their current pace they'll have a confirmed position within two days."
"Two days," Seraphine said.
"If I stop interfering, sooner than that." Valeria looked at her directly. "If I continue, then two days, maybe three."
Seraphine held her gaze. "And why would you continue."
"Because I need him to reach Taranis." Her voice remained even. "He can't do that if Heaven corners him on a valley road forty miles from anywhere useful." A pause then she continued. "So I'll keep interfering."
The fire settled, a small collapse of burning wood sending a brief curl of smoke upward into the dark.
Seraphine looked at Lucius. He could read the thing she wasn't saying, 'this is useful and I don't want it to be useful, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.'
"What's do you need from us," Lucius said, turning back to Valeria.
"Keep moving at the pace we set today. Don't use abilities unless you have to, every use of solar output or her corrupted divine energy leaves a signature I have to account for." She glanced briefly at Seraphine when she said the last part, not unkindly.
"The blessed warriors you absorbed on the road yesterday, that also left a mark. I managed it but it cost time." Her eyes came back to Lucius. "Where are we going."
"Hancock," he said. "Two days, maybe less at this pace."
"Someone there you need to see."
"Yes."
She didn't ask who. Didn't ask why. She nodded once, the short precise nod of someone filing information and moving on.
"Then we push earlier tomorrow. Before full light if possible. The mornings are when the scout team tends to cover the most ground."
"Fine," Lucius said.
Valeria settled back against the limestone and closed her eyes with the immediate finality of someone switching off, present one moment and elsewhere the next, her breathing dropping to something slow and even almost instantly.
Seraphine watched her for a moment. Then she looked at Lucius across the fire, her silver eyes catching the low light, her voice dropped to barely above a murmur.
"She's useful," she said.
"Yes."
"I still don't trust her."
"I know."
"Do you?"
Lucius looked at Valeria's still face, the firelight moving across it, and thought about a corridor in a palace in Solara and a hand around his throat and death arriving and then choosing to leave.
"Not fully," he said. "Not yet."
Seraphine nodded once, the same short nod Valeria had used, though he doubted she noticed the similarity. She set her food down, pulled her blanket across her shoulders, and settled in against her pack.
Lucius turned back to the fire and watched it burn down.
The valley was dark and quiet around them. Somewhere behind them on the road, Heaven's scouts were covering ground.
He fed the last branch into the coals and kept watch.