"A thin offering."
"Thicker than anything you have set down tonight."
"You measure generously, so long as the scale is weighing your own portion."
Moses brought his eyes back to him. "I will give you this much, and only because it costs me nothing. What he ordered was not what I rode out expecting. When our lord cut us loose, I took it for the usual work — a border burned back, a rebel house unmade, some buried ruin emptied of whatever had crawled into it. Noise enough to justify the First Squadron. It was none of that."
Caelum took it in without a flicker. "And still it held you three years."
"It held my boys with me. Every last blade of them."
"Then you have given away more than you meant to. Few tasks demand the whole First Squadron and three years out of the world, and fewer end with their captain home and refusing to name them."
Moses's mouth curled. "Keep tugging. You were always at your happiest with a thread caught in your teeth."
