Fred filled the space differently than the Seer did.
Where she occupied the tent with a kind of settled, deliberate stillness, Fred brought the energy of the outside world in with him.
The camp smell. The cool night air caught in the fabric of his shirt.
The particular alertness of a man who has been waiting outside a door and has spent that time constructing theories about what was happening behind it.
He looked at me first. A quick, assessing sweep.
He was checking, I realized, that I was intact, that nothing had been done to me that he would need to respond to.
There was something involuntary in it, something that sat below the level of strategy.
Whatever Fred was, whatever complicated machinery of rules and group loyalty and packless philosophy ran him, there was something un
