Chapter seven
Jessica
I wake up before my alarm, which never happens, and for a second I don't know where I am.
Then the light catches the stone of the wall, and I remember.
I'm in a castle. In the Alps. I pad over in my socks and lean into the cold air, and there they are again, the mountains, looking even more impossible in daylight than they did under the moon.
Somewhere down the corridor, in whatever room Jon's turned into a temporary reptile hotel, Pickles is either thriving or plotting his revenge, no in-between. I'll go check on him after breakfast.
I realize that I have not felt this rested in a very long time.
Breakfast is in a smaller room off the great hall, and it's about as far from a school cafeteria as you can get — long table, mismatched crockery, baskets of bread and pastry and a huge pot of coffee. The other five are already there, and the noise of them hits me before I'm through the door.
"— and then," Sophia is saying, both hands going, coffee sloshing, "the owl does it again, right over my head, and Renzo screams —"
"I did not scream," Renzo says, with enormous dignity, sliding two extra pastries off the communal basket onto his plate in a move so smooth I almost miss it. "I expressed alarm, with some volume."
"You screamed," Freya says, not looking up from the window, where she's watching something. "Redstart," she adds, to no one, apparently identifying a bird. "And a pair of nutcrackers in the pine."
"See, this is what I mean," Torres says, dropping into a seat. "Freya's out here doing ornithology at seven a.m. and Renzo's committing pastry theft."
"They were going to go to waste," Renzo says.
"They were not remotely going to go to waste."
Declan, without a word, gathers three empty plates from the far end and carries them to the sideboard, because he's apparently incapable of sitting near a mess. I catch it, and I file it away with everything else I'm learning about these people.
And I realize, wrapping my hands around a mug of coffee, that I'm actually excited to spend the whole day with them. A week ago I'd have told you my ideal day involved a trail and precisely zero other humans.
"Okay," Sophia says, rounding on me, because Sophia cannot let a lull live. "My sister. Older, terrifying, currently ignoring my texts. Guess her sign, oh great astrologer."
"Ooh." I sit up, delighted, because this is my favorite game. I think about it — the terrifying-older-sister energy, the ignored texts. "Scorpio. Definitely Scorpio. Broody, holds a grudge, would absolutely fake her own death to win an argument."
Sophia stares at me. "She's an Aquarius."
"…Ah."
"She's an Aquarius, Jessica."
"That's a completely different vibe," Renzo says helpfully.
"I'm aware of the vibe, Renzo, thank you."
Sophia points at me with a piece of bread. "Your psychic powers need serious work."
"Even astrologers have off days," I say, with all the wounded dignity I can muster, and Torres laughs so hard he has to put his coffee down, and the whole table's still needling me about it when a staff member leans in to tell us Jon's waiting in the courtyard.
Jon's standing in the middle of the gravel courtyard with a pack at his feet, sleeves rolled up, damn him. He waits for us to gather, then doesn't tell us what to do. He asks us a question.
"What do you think today's about?"
"Survival," Renzo says immediately. "I've made my peace. I'll be the first to go."
"Fitness test," Declan offers, quieter.
"Neither." Jon shakes his head. "This isn't survival school.
It isn't military training, whatever the guards at the gate led you to imagine.
It's leadership. And leadership doesn't start with being the strongest person on the mountain, or the fastest, or the one who talks the most." He looks around the six of us.
"It starts with paying attention. Communicating.
Noticing what the people around you need before they have to ask.
Trusting each other enough to let someone else be good at the thing you're bad at. "
He hitches the pack onto his shoulders. "Every exercise today has more than one right answer.
I'm not timing you. I don't care who reaches the end first. I care how you get there together.
That's the whole test, and I'll tell you now so you don't waste energy trying to impress me — the group that finishes last but finishes whole has done better than the group that leaves someone behind to win. "
I mean to be listening. I am, mostly. But somewhere in there I catch myself just — watching him.
The way he never raises his voice and somehow the whole courtyard has gone quiet around him anyway.
The way he asks instead of tells. He's the most in-tune-with-himself person I've ever met, and there's something magnetic about it that has nothing to do with the forearms and everything to do with the fact that when he talks, you want to be worth his attention.
He's an excellent teacher, I tell myself. That's all this is. I'm noticing good teaching.
I'm almost sure that's all it is.
We hike into the forest, and the conversation comes as easy as the trail.
It turns out putting six people on a mountain path is the fastest way to learn who they are.
Sophia mourns, at length and with feeling, the coffee of her Thessaloniki café ("you people call this coffee, it's brown water").
Freya, it seems, has spent literal seasons alone in the Swedish wilderness and talks about it the way I talk about my Peak District trails.
Declan grew up surrounded by mountains in Kerry and keeps quietly naming the ways these are different.
"Italian mountains are prettier," Renzo announces.
"You haven't looked at these mountains once," Freya says. "You've been looking at your feet since we left the gate."
"I can feel that they're less pretty. It's a spiritual knowing."
"Mountains are mountains," Torres says, ambling along beside Declan, "unless one of them's actively trying to kill you. Then you develop opinions." He says it light, throwaway, but there's a flicker of something real underneath it, the sense of a guy who's had a mountain or two try.
Jon walks at the back, letting us lead, occasionally pointing out a plant or a track in the mud or a distant ridge with a name I immediately forget.
It doesn't feel like a class. It feels like an adventure with a very smart friend who happens to know everything, and I laugh more in that first hour than I think I have in months.
The exercises, when we get to them, are the kind of thing I'm usually pretty good at.
There's navigation, which Freya just — solves, taking the map and the odd little compass and orienting us with a calm certainty that makes Renzo declare he will follow her and only her.
There's a shelter to build, which Declan turns into a masterclass in load-bearing branches.
There's a stream crossing that has Sophia shrieking and everyone getting at least one boot wet.
There are problem-solving puzzles — ropes and planks and a "lava" clearing we're not allowed to touch — the kind of thing that turns grown adults back into eleven-year-olds.
And here's the thing I figure out about myself, somewhere around the third exercise: I'm not the best at any single one of them.
But I'm passable at all of them. I'm the one who notices when Declan's had an idea he's too polite to push, and asks him to say it out loud.
I'm the one who catches Freya solving the whole navigation problem in her head while everyone talks over her, and says hang on, Freya's got something.
I keep the loud ones from steamrolling the quiet ones.
I keep us laughing when the rope puzzle makes us want to strangle each other.
Nobody appointed me to do it. It's just where I keep ending up.
Torres does his own version of it, I notice — but quieter. He's beside Sophia the instant before she loses her footing on the stream rocks. He hands Renzo the exact branch he's reaching for without being asked. He reads the group like it's a language he was raised speaking.
And Jon watches. All morning, he watches, never stepping in, never correcting, just present at the edge of things with an unreadable expression, occasionally writing something in a small notebook and never once telling us what.
We eat lunch on an outcrop with the whole range laid out in front of us, passing around bread and cheese and the kind of hunger you only get from a morning of doing hard things outdoors.
"Can I ask you something?" I say to Torres, who's dropped down beside me with his back against a rock. "Why'd you do it? The exchange. Leave your school, come all the way out here for a year."
He shrugs, easy. "Needed a change."
"That's a very small answer for a very big move," Renzo observes, because Renzo has no filter and I'm grateful for it.
Torres is quiet a second, turning a heel of bread over in his scarred hands.
"There was a girl," he says finally. "Back at Frosthaven.
Alex." He says the name without any weight on it.
"I liked her. Liked her a lot, actually.
She didn't feel the same." He lifts a shoulder.
"No hard feelings. She was honest about it, and that's — that's better than the alternative.
But it stops being fun, watching someone you're into build a life that isn't with you.
" He looks out at the mountains. "Seemed like a good time to go find my own adventure instead of hanging around the edges of hers. "
Nobody makes it weird. Sophia makes a soft sympathetic noise, Declan nods like he understands, and then Renzo says something about how Alex clearly has terrible taste and the moment moves on.
But I sit with it, quietly. There was no bitterness in it. No she'll regret it, no self-pity, no making himself the wronged party. Just a guy who'd wanted something, didn't get it, wished her well, and made a choice about his own life instead of stewing in it. It’s frankly refreshing.