"Much of the time."

Marcus' eye is drawn to the group of Templars, kept separate and apart. In the heat of summer, in this strange truce, they've taken off their helms. Their expressions are still difficult to read, though, especially at a distance, but what can be read is nothing revealing: tension, stoicism, wariness. Waiting for whatever happens next to happen, and not wholly trusting that it won't be violent.

He looks back to Derrica, and some of the hardness his expression had automatically taken just now ekes back out. "Magebane," he says. "It's still doing its work. There was something else too, for the sleeping."

Overkill, perhaps, but as a counterpoint: he doesn't look like he made any of what happened to him easy for anyone else to accomplish.

"I suppose they'll walk, now."

The confirmation that the Templars will be permitted to continue on their way—

No, Marcus does not envision a world where Riftwatch agents would feel moved to kill or punish, somehow, prisoners of war, let alone prisoners of some sort of misunderstanding. It is not based in logic or dashed hopes that he feels some odd dislocation. A sort of abstraction of anger at what feels like injustice, over and over. The way blame deflects as easily as light off a shield. They were doing as ordered.

But Derrica says this next thing, and he draws in a breath, lets it go. Nods. Important, that they unearth these lies.

"I want to finish it," he says. "Find her and finish it."

Marcus closes his hands in hers, feeling the creak of tendon, the twinge of bruising. His eyeline dipping lower, evaluating where skin is rubbed raw, discoloured. A slight push, then, an insisting nudge into her hold that's meant to communicate his permission, that she fix this next thing.

"The letter I received," eventually, touching on something else, something that belongs to him. "Fitcher might have fabricated it, unless she intercepted it instead. Withheld it, had it given to me to set a trap."

He'd had some time to himself to think it through, and now it feels as though it's come together, in some awful way. "If all that, then my—my contacts are somewhere. Migrated, or in danger. Julius said the settlement was abandoned."

He turns his hands in her grasp to watch healing magic repair his skin, the sensation of bruises draining from its surface and leaving behind a comfortable cold. Erasing the scrape of a sword edge dragging across his skin, the persistent friction of the shackles he'd fought, tried to escape from, as if neither thing had ever happened.

Marcus tips his head, neither nod nor shake, still watching their joined hands. "I don't know. By the sounds of it, they've been gone a while."

They'd written, asking him to meet with them. Then he never did. The knowledge of that gnaws, abrades, and much like the whereabouts of one Madame Fitcher, there's precious little he can do of it in the moment.

He draws his focus back up. "Did you know her? Fitcher."

These names filed away, something to grasp onto. To do something with, perhaps.

Even if in this moment, it feels a little like floating driftwood in an ocean. Marcus has never enjoyed standing around and making plans without immediate ability to enact them, and after feeling particularly stupid and helpless for the better part of a week, it's a hard mood to shake.

He admits, "I didn't know her well," as he explains, "But she assisted me. After Naegle, after the Abomination, I was tracking missing letters, evidence of more forgeries. It was dating back longer than Naegle, and after him as well. But she assisted me. She's the fucking clerk."

And if he thinks back, to the little biting comments here and there (I suppose they don't teach children in Circles to say please)—well, there will be plenty of time on the way back, and in his recovery, to catalogue those too. Here, in the sun, by the road, Marcus is still speaking quietly, but tensely, as if unable to totally part top and bottom back teeth with bridled anger. His hands are relaxed in Derrica's, despite this.

He might have to apologise later. He would prefer, ideally, to keep his composure to those who are kind to him.

Maybe he can derive some satisfaction that perhaps he'd been circling closer and closer, and that is why this happened. Derive satisfaction that her hand has been shown in the process. Perhaps he would, if Julius hadn't been hurt or Tsenka forced to reveal herself (and, less selflessly, if this particular ego-injury did not feel like it cut as deeply as it does).

Derrica steps in nearer, holding his hands, makes her reassurances and promises, and perhaps if it were anyone else, Marcus would give into his current mood and shake free from soft grasp and placation. Makes a conscious effort, instead, to not do that.

Nods, and then slips a hand from hers to touch his palm to her cheek, a mutely grateful gesture for more than only her rescue and healing.