The rest of the journey back was quiet.
No one was bracing for trouble anymore. They'd done what they came to do. Now they were just walking.
The night had faded into that grey half-light before true morning, the sky pale at the edges but not yet committed to sunrise. The road ahead was visible enough that they picked up their pace, no longer creeping along like they had on the way out.
Some of the knights were still angry about the young one who'd died.
You could see it in the way they walked, the way they didn't talk about it. That death could have been 100 percent avoided.
They'd gotten their revenge fast though, which closed the immediate account, but a knight dead not too far from home at the end of a successful night didn't stop being dead just because you'd killed the men who did it. The anger would settle eventually. These things did.
Darion walked at the front and thought about something he hadn't thought about before.
