“Not exactly like sitting cooped up in a library and sneezing over books, is it,” he said wryly. Once upon a time, that might have sounded condescending, patronising—a dig at the scholar for her inexperience—but now Rictor was gruffly supportive, some vestige of the tone he used with Storm. “Your battles so far have been mostly local, aye? In the streets themselves, or within a few minutes of the city?”
Lex gave a nod of her head in affirmation. “A matter I seek to rectify,” she said thoughtfully, and clearly the mage had little intention for this particular outing to be the last of her forays into the great, wider world beyond Emillion. Already had she gained something of a taste for travel (of course, the circumstances before had been quite an exceptional contrast to this, a sombre holy undertaking), and regardless of the challenges and aggravations presented to her earlier in the day, she had yet to find sufficient cause to change her mind on this.
Catching a hint of movement in the periphery of her vision, Lex turned her attention away from Rictor and hoped for a moment that she would catch sight once again of Lionel. She gazed beyond the fire, her thoughts wandering away to a particular topic that she had, perhaps, not given adequate consideration to before this mission (not that she was attempting at all to do anything so foolish as to evade it).
“Do you suppose the others might offer their wisdom on the matter?” Certainly, Lex supposed, the rest of the group had more experience than she, though she hardly knew them all so well.
“What, you wanna get some advice from Black or Quilloran?” Rictor finally sounded amused, cracking through the wall of reservation that seemed to creep up on him when on mission. The other Blades weren’t the Kaplan; he knew Lex wasn’t as close to them as the other mage (though Balder sometimes made the attempt, jovially pestering the arithmetician when he could).
“They’re right over there, if you want a chat.” He nodded towards the other side of the fire, where silver and crimson gleamed. One of the pair looked much more approachable than the other: Violet was a stern and forbidding woman, though Rictor’s hackles had finally relaxed around her, the past year finally developing an ironclad camaraderie and loyalty between Feldwebel and Korporal.
Lex’s gaze wandered over toward the other members of the Blades before traveling back to Rictor. His amused tone seemed to have broken her out of her prior thoughts, her eyes shining with an equal amount of humor. “In a while, perhaps,” she said, as if planning about everything on her own time (and not as if she was avoiding the Feldwebel’s sombre attitude).
“I haven’t quite finished my business here, after all.”
“Really,” he echoed knowingly. Standing at such a far remove from Emillion and its problems, there could even be a familiar hint of mischief in Rictor’s voice (tempered with warmth, affection, perhaps a slight edge of longing that he soon tamped down). He cast Lex another assessing look, mulling over some sort of consideration before he finally said, “There’s food to be had. Not very good rations, but food nonetheless.”
So it would be another in a long line of meals they’d shared together: bland food in the Cathedral refectory; snacks from street vendors; stolen from each others’ platters in a foreign land; an expensive restaurant over white tablecloths; and now one more type, field rations heated over a crackling fire. They found a fallen log on which to sit in quiet conversation—near enough to be touching, but conscientiously avoiding doing so.