They covered the two days the way Varian moved through most things — efficiently, without wasted motion, reading the land the way other people read a sentence. He picked the route around a bog Nyx's map hadn't marked, called a rest an hour before anyone would have admitted to needing one, and said almost nothing that wasn't directly useful, which Vane had come to understand was simply the shape his father's care took when there wasn't time left to take any other shape.
They reached the ridge above Verrin's Landing on the evening of the second day, exactly on schedule, and lay flat along the treeline to look down at the thing they'd crossed a continent to find.
