The carriage moved east on the longer road, the waystation far enough behind them that it had become the past rather than the present. The landscape was transitioning — frontier terrain giving way to something more traveled, the road widening by degrees, the signs of a kingdom that had a capital at one end and had organized itself accordingly over a very long time.
The party had settled into the rhythm of people who had been through something together and were processing it in their own ways simultaneously.
Halveth was inside the carriage with papers — the administrative reality of a noble who had left Lanjaar with a timeline and watched it get revised twice and was now reconciling the gap between what he'd planned and what had actually happened. The expression of someone doing arithmetic that wasn't coming out the way he wanted.
