They continued all afternoon in a silence that felt both more companionable and more strained until the sun was low in the sky. They moved off the path to find a likely place to camp for the night. She went, as she did every evening, to bring water from the river while he built a fire and roasted the meat. As she always did, she gave him two oat cakes to her one, and a thick slice of the hard cheese that she never seemed to eat.

He almost refused it. He did not know if she did it out of practicality – for even in his recently starved state he was considerably larger than she was – or out of pity for him. But she did it so naturally and easily that he worried he would offend her further if he refused it now.

After he had smothered the fire and made his bed on the ground, she made one of her gestures to the dog that began their nightly ritual: she would choose a spot within sight of the little camp and wait there in the dark, and the dog would do the same at a spot in the opposite direction. They were silent sentries, keeping vigil while the night fell and then creeping back quietly after a time to sleep. Gryff had spent the last three nights trying not to remember things that the thieves had done to travelers who wandered off the road at night. He would wait, only able to sleep when both girl and dog returned to the camp.

As the dog trotted by him on its way to keep watch, Gryff called out softly. “God grant you a peaceful night, mighty Bran.”

The dog went on to its duty, but Nan stopped where she was. She turned to Gryff, a peevishness in her face he had never seen before.

“He’s named Fuss,” she scowled. “Nor would I never give him such a name as Bran.”

He blinked in surprise that something so insignificant would cause her to speak again. He remembered the strange huffing hiss she used to call the dog. It wasn’t a hiss. It was a word. Fuss.

“Fuss?” he asked, skeptical, and she nodded. “Is not a fitting name for such a steadfast creature. He answers well to Bran.”

Her own look was far more skeptical than his own, with more than a hint of scorn in it.

“You would have us called Nan and Bran?”

She gave a delicate snort of disgust as she walked away in the failing light.

If she had been more good-humored about it, he would have given in to his amusement and laughed. Nan and Bran was no more absurd than Gryff and Tiff, he should have said. But he had somehow managed to annoy her several times in just this one day, from causing her to fall in the mud to misnaming her dog, and he saw no need to antagonize her further.