Chapter 29
They found a spot suitable for a camp two hours past the harpy ambush.
Kern spotted it first, as usual. A depression hid in the mountainside where two ridges converged, creating a natural windbreak.
The snow was thinner here, scoured to a crust by the crosswinds, and a rock overhang provided something close to a roof.
No warmth nor comfort awaited them there.
But it was the closest thing to shelter they’d seen since the shelf.
“We camp here,” Arleria decided. It wasn’t up for a discussion.
They reached the depression and dropped their backpacks. Malick arranged a fire pit from loose stones with ease. Derell unpacked rations, his movements slow and stiff as he favored his shoulder. Kern disappeared upslope.
Alsen sat against the rock wall and let the cold settle into him.
His improvised heating spell had been running for hours, a constant low drain on his mana that he barely noticed anymore.
The harpy screams had left a residual ache behind his eyes, a dull pressure that pulsed when he blinked. Not dangerous. Just annoying.
The fire caught. Malick fed it carefully, shielding the flame from the wind with his body until it steadied. It produced thin, orange light, but also some blessed heat.
They ate in silence. Dried meat, hard bread, water that tasted like the waterskin. Every meal on this mountain reminded Alsen of meals he’d rather be eating. Even Luna’s burnt goat suddenly felt like an upgrade.
Arleria sat beside him, her cloak wrapped tight, her hands extended toward the fire.
She shivered from cold. She hid it well, but the tension in her jaw and the way she curled her fingers told him enough.
Her heating enchantments were woven into her cloak, but they had limits, and the altitude proved to be more than the design could handle.
“We should rest for a few hours,” she said. “Then continue before dawn. If the nest is in that cave system, I’d rather approach it with everyone sharp.”
Derell grunted in agreement. Malick was already half-asleep, his warhammer across his knees, chin dropping toward his chest.
Alsen waited.
He waited until the fire burned low and Derell took first watch, positioning himself at the camp’s edge with his sword across his knees.
He waited until Arleria’s breathing softened beside him, her body leaning into his shoulder the way it always did when sleep took her.
He waited until Malick’s snoring began, a low, steady rumble that blended with the wind.
Then he pushed a scan.
He swept the terrain ahead first. Routine. The harpy signatures pulsed in the distance, clustered and cold, a nest of overlapping rhythms that made his teeth itch. Then he swept the flanks. Rock. Snow. Wind.
Then east.
Half a mile out, he detected Luna. His subconsciousness automatically assigned her name to the signature.
Excellent.
She didn’t abandon him, and instead, camped close enough for him to find her.
He eased himself away from Arleria, the same careful extraction he’d practiced the night before. She murmured, shifted, and settled against the rock wall. He arranged his pack behind her head.
Kern materialized at the camp’s edge. He’d returned from wherever he’d been, his bow across his back, snow dusting his shoulders. His eyes found Alsen in the dark.
“Going to check the eastern approach,” Alsen said.
Kern’s eyebrows performed a maneuver that translated roughly to you checked the eastern approach with your scan thirty seconds ago and found nothing threatening, so this is obviously not about the eastern approach.
Alsen said nothing. He pulled on his power, lifted off the ground, and flew east.
The mountain at night felt like a different beast than by day.
The wind died in pockets, creating wells of silence so complete that Alsen could hear his own heartbeat.
The snow glowed faintly under starlight, a blue-white carpet that stretched between dark spurs of rock.
The sky above stretched, vast and merciless, stars scattered across it in patterns he still hadn’t learned to read.
He followed her signature, and found her on a ledge.
A natural platform, maybe twenty feet across, tucked into a fold of the mountain where two rock faces met at an angle.
A small fire burned in a pit she’d dug into the snow, the flames low and controlled, nearly smokeless.
The smoke that did escape hugged the rock face and dissipated before it could rise above the ridge.
Luna sat cross-legged by the fire, roasting a mountain goat on a spit she’d fashioned from green wood.
The animal was large, easily enough meat for several days.
Fat dripped into the flames, hissing and spitting, filling the air with a smell that made Alsen’s stomach clench with sudden, violent hunger.
She wore a coat he’d never seen before. Mountain goat fur, pale gray with darker streaks, stitched together with what looked like sinew.
It was rough work, clearly made in haste, but functional.
It covered her from neck to mid-calves, the fur turned inward for warmth.
Her hair spilled over the collar, dark against the pale hide.
She looked up when he landed, forming a toothy grin. “Did you miss me?”
He sat down across the fire from her. The warmth hit him immediately, real warmth, not the thin magical approximation he’d been sustaining for hours. He let his heating spell drop, and the relief was immediate, like setting down a weight he’d forgotten he was carrying. “I very much have.”
She turned the spit a quarter rotation. The goat’s skin had crisped to a golden brown, cracking along the score marks she’d cut into it. “Why don’t you tell me all about it? You must have had quite a day, given you took one of the worst routes up the mountain.”
Well, she did get ahead of them easily. “I figured it wasn’t the best route.
We got ambushed by frost harpies, who happen to be really annoying to deal with for spellcasters.
Especially when they manage to pull the ambush off, because none of us noticed them before they were on top of us.
Also, the cold is a lot worse than what Arleria expected, so we’re frozen to the bone even with my heating spell.
And the pre-dried food is a lot worse in the cold. ”
“Oh, poor you.” She tore a leg off the goat, and bit into it. The burnt layer crunched, and blood trickled out. “This should help.” She handed him the leg.
It was most certainly going to. He bit into it. Burnt and bleeding, her usual. It felt almost nostalgic at this point.
Luna took the other leg for herself.
They ate in silence for a while. The fire crackled. The wind moaned above them, passing over the ledge without reaching them. Luna had picked the spot well. The two rock faces created a funnel that redirected the wind overhead, leaving the platform in relative calm.
“And how was your day?” he asked when he stopped gobbling down the meat.
“Kind of boring. I took the easy path up the mountain, from the eastern face. I got too far ahead, met some ice whatevers that grossly misjudged their position on the food chain. Then, I realized you were going the wrong way, so I went back to see where you were. You were hours behind, so I hunted a goat, and have been waiting since. Which reminds me…”
Luna stood. She walked to the far edge of the ledge, where the rock face formed a shallow alcove. She reached into it and pulled out something bulky, pale, folded roughly.
She tossed it at him.
He caught it. Mountain goat fur, same as what she wore.
A coat, larger than hers, cut wider in the shoulders.
The stitching was the same rough sinew work, tight and functional if not pretty.
The fur was thick, the hide scraped clean on the outside.
When he held it up, it unfolded into something that would cover him from his neck to his knees.
“Thanks. Really, thanks.” He put it on. The spell wasn’t bad, but a thick fur coat was going to be of tremendous help.
The fur settled against him, heavy and warm, smelling of smoke and animal and the particular sharpness of mountain air.
It fit well enough, the sleeves a touch short, but the body generous.
“It seems to mostly fit.”
He looked at her. She continued devouring the goat leg as if nothing happened. Alsen took a moment to think. Last night, he’d played with her, teased her, gotten information out of her, and then left. She’d called him an asshole. But then she’d spent the next day making him a coat.
He understood the signal. It wasn’t complicated. She liked what happened last night, and wanted more of it. She apparently found it easier to make him a coat than to articulate an emotion.
Fair enough.
“Thank you,” he said. He meant it.
“Stop making it weird. It’s just a coat.”
Right. She wasn’t high enough. To speak about herself. That also was a pattern he had finally picked up on. Shame he was too tired to play any games with her tonight. Instead, his mind wandered to spells.
He had to deal with more frost harpies tomorrow, and he didn’t have a spell for that. All his spells had a problem. They either caused too much area damage or were imprecise or required hand-spell coordination, which interacted poorly at best with the screams.
Not to mention his defense, where his shield was too large to use in close quarters and the scream could shoot him down. He had to come up with something new.
The problem was that any spell that caused damage would necessarily be a form of a blast. If forward or to the sides didn’t work, he had to let the energy release differently.
A grin spread over his face.
He got just the right idea.
“What’s with the smile?” Luna asked. “Don’t tell me I’ve inspired you.”
Not her directly, but the comfort of being able to ignore reality, and focus on a spell did. With the rest of the group, he always had to think of the present, so theorizing spells was out of the question.