Yonca puffed up in girlish offense at Desi's clipped description of her. "Brownish!" she scoffed, calling up after him as he trudged off to find their path up the ridge, "My hair is blonde, thank you. And there is nothing middling about my complexion!" The allusion to her coldheartness seemed, mercifully, to go unnoticed.
When Desiderio looked back at her in suspicion, he found her staring right back at him and radiating a continued air of mild, prideful indignation, her arms crossed over her chest. At least she didn't look likely to do anything rash, but evidently someone's vanity was a little bruised. How fun it promised to be travelling with her for the rest of the day, if she weren't soon soothed.
Here, though, came the true test of trust. Most of the trail up and down to their campsite was concealed from the road by a screen of mossy rock, and at the crest itself one still needed to sit at the cliff's edge and actively look to be able to see the road. Digging amid the pair's possessions for rope would make vigilance difficult.
Yonca was as fully aware of this as Desiderio, even if neither would have expressed at that moment that they guessed the other's thoughts. Once he slipped out of sight, all signs of Yonca's self-absorbed tantrum evaporated. His trust, and compliancy, had slackened a notch in the perpetration of this assault. She did not fail to notice the way he tried to echo her impartiality back toward her, but after even a short time spent in his company it was obvious to Yonca that it was not in his nature to conceal his emotions, nor to understand those who did. If emotion was what he needed from her, then she would make an effort to supply it.
She looked down to regard the prone Templar coolly, but whatever her thoughts on the correct disposal of their problem, she did not again draw her knife. Instead she stepped over him with an air of disdain, crouching beside him with a wary glance before rifling through the rest of the contents of his packs. Letters, ledgers... perhaps the most valuable things he'd carried, after the phylacteries, had simply been these bundles of mundane writing. One could learn so much from even the casual correspondences of one's enemies. If they were lucky, perhaps the papers she thumbed through might even contain orders.