It took them another two hours before the horses were ready between packing their things and washing their clothes and dishes in the nearby river. Neither of them talked much, though on mornings like this Sasha didn't exactly mind. She liked the quiet, more than she might have thought she would, back when they'd first started traveling.

Sasha would not have minded their delay, either, if it weren't for every morning being the same. Waking in the middle of the night, pretending not to hear Rannok scrambling in the dark before going outside. Falling back to sleep. Crawling out of bed hours later to the sound of a crackling fire through the newly-formed daylight.

The shadows under both their eyes.

She shook off the feeling and spurred her horse forward with her heels. The morning light had begun to give way to high noon. It caught in the branches of the fir trees and filtered down in dust motes that stirred as the horses moved. It was beautiful. Some other time she might have appreciated it more, but they were still nowhere near the village she'd hoped to get to. Sasha sighed under her breath.

"Not that much farther, probably," Rannok said from his horse, not meeting her eyes, as if he'd read her mind. She swallowed hard and nodded.

 "Maybe," she said. She shut her eyes and tried not to think, for a moment, but that was impossible with him sitting right next to her and refusing to look at her expression. Refusing to talk, not that she blamed him with what she did know. "Why didn't you sleep last night?"

Silence. Warm, but a little stiff. She watched as Rannok's hands tightened on Patches' reins. When he talked, his voice was slow, like it caught in his throat.

"Same reason as usual," he said, watching the road ahead of them. The wings on his shoulders extended a little. "Nightmares. I can't--"

"--Remember," she finished for him, and he nodded, though she couldn't tell whether or not that was a lie. Some of the time it wasn't, just like when she told him it was okay and that it didn't matter. But sometimes his face stiffened and he refused to look at her and those were the times she questioned whether it really was.

"Sorry," Rannok said, the word shortened like he hadn't intended to say it, as he filed his horse behind her to get through a more narrow patch of trail. She nodded and tried to loosen her shoulders, to shake the tension that surrounded them like a cloud. To melt the cold that had begun to consume all her mornings.

She remembered when she was a little girl, they'd gone on a trip once to the outer edges of the mountains. Her father had roused her and Damien early to make them make lunch and pack the horses. They'd thrown handfuls of mud at one another while they picked hooves and oiled tack, like they were going on some grand adventure. Like it wouldn't end the same way it always ended.

Her father's bellowing had started before they'd even reached the main road out of town.

Sasha would have thought that she'd enjoy quiet, more than shouting and shaking and waiting for the next time there was a fit of rage, like a powder-keg left too close to the fire. She would have thought she'd have forgotten the powder-keg, by now. She would have thought silence would have stopped filling her with dread.

The path began to widen again and the edges began to fill with cobblestones that meant civilization wasn't far. Sasha pulled her horse up next to Rannok's, so they were riding two abreast, so it wasn't as easy to look away. 

"I still think, sometimes..." She paused to catch her breath before she spoke. Rannok turned his head toward her, eyebrows furrowed, like he didn't want to interrupt but had to anyway. 

"--It's okay," he said, eyes flickering back down to his hands.

"I still think he's chasing me," she finished, as if he hadn't interrupted at all. She watched as his shoulders tensed up again. "That's why I don't want to sleep alone. That's how I know you wake up, in the middle of the night."

Rannok closed his eyes and eased up a bit on his horse's face. He shook his head and opened them again. "You don't need to talk about it. I'm not going to make you." He stared straight ahead as if he expected her to just give up and stop talking.

"No, I don't," she said. "But I feel better if I do."

Rannok frowned, the light in his eyes going cold. For a split second, she pictured him coming up over the saddle and clasping his hands around her throat. Shouting. Something terrible happening. She winced in her saddle as he kicked his horse forward. 

She closed her eyes again and let out a single, shaky breath when he managed to pull far enough ahead that he couldn't see. Fine. She was fine. There was no fire and no powder keg. Her hand reached forward without her thinking, toward him.

"I'm sorry," she said, very softly, before letting it drop again. She tried to stifle the fear crawling underneath her skin, but it just brought forth an overwhelming desire to turn her horse around and run in the other direction until she got so far away that no one would ever find her. Until memories of things from years ago stopped chasing her through the mountains.

They were too far out for the dogs to track, even if the townspeople would let her family continue their search. Even if her father's friends hadn't killed him on the way back to Horizon, for what he'd done to her. She knew that like she knew the streets by the docks in Horizon or the smell of her mother's fruit-breads. She knew as well as Rannok did that they were safe.

She tried to quell the shaking of her hands and spurred her horse after him.