(Alash Vortex POV)
Five minutes.
I had crossed the kingdom twice. I had been on a ridge with something that had no name and too many joints, and stood inside four other people's heads, and gone up two stages in an afternoon without asking to. I had spent the best part of a month being supervised by two of the most stubborn healers alive.
And now there was a building at the end of a courtyard, and a man in it who wanted to talk to me.
I would rather have gone back up the ridge.
I looked at my chest, thoughtfully. It still hurt when I breathed in too far. A man with a chest like that, I reasoned, could quite properly ask for a day's rest before any conversation that mattered.
Then I looked up, and Valerian was standing four feet away, watching me think it.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. I had tried arguments like it on him for five years, and I remembered exactly how every one of them had gone.
"I wasn't going to," I said.
"I know," said Valerian.
***
