Chapter 12
The storehouse smelled of salted meat and frost-rotted wood.
I stood just inside the door as the soldiers moved past me, their boots pounding loudly on the stone floor. So loud that I flinched with every step. Every sound in Skallfen felt off, amplified in a way that made my teeth ache.
The hollow pull in my chest had shifted. Closer now, lower, pressing up through the ground beneath my feet rather than moving through the air. I breathed through it slowly and said nothing.
“Here.” Baxley had already found the dry stores. He tossed a sack to Larana without looking. “Mostly grain. That’s some dried fish.”
“How much?” Nicco asked from the doorway. He hadn't come fully inside. He was watching the street, his back to us, one hand resting loose at his side near his blade.
“Enough.”
“Take it.”
The soldiers moved efficiently. I'd give them that. Whatever else Captain Marson's men were, they'd done this before. The quick, practiced stripping of supplies, without ceremony or waste. I watched them work and kept my breathing even and my attention on the feeling beneath my feet.
It was patient. Whatever it was, it was very, very patient. I tried to remember what I knew about the Frosttaken.
The name seemed simple at first, as if the person who gave it lacked imagination.
Taken by frost, frost taken, meaning claimed, stolen, hollowed out.
That was exactly what that man had looked like.
Like the heat drained from their victims, the monster moved slowly, something that was once alive but wasn't anymore in any normal sense.
They weren’t predators. They were absence wearing a body.
It made sense why Skallfen was the way it was, and the town wasn't dead. It had been stilled. The Frosttaken weren't killing people. They were draining them into a suspended, almost death-like state.
Which was so much worse.
I wanted to send my magic out, test it, and see what would come back. But the risk… the risk was so high. What if magic attracted the Frosttaken?
Or worse, revealed my secret to the humans around me. Their reactions could be the end of me.
My decision was made. Don't use your magic. Don't try to reach.
I pressed my nails into my palm instead and focused on what I could see, hear, and smell. Salted meat. Frost. The distant sound of nothing.
“Amarya.”
I looked up. Nicco hadn't turned around. “Stop thinking so loudly,” he said, his voice gruff.
I didn't ask how he knew. “We need to move soon.”
“I know.”
“I mean, soon, Nicco.” I glanced at the horses behind us. “The longer we linger, the worse it will be.” I looked at the dead soldier. “We need to leave him.” My gaze flicked to the horses. “They were supposed to stay, too.”
He turned then, just slightly, enough to look at me over his shoulder. That dark, assessing gaze never quite felt like anything as simple as a look. “I know. So stop talking and help them carry.”
I bit my tongue to keep from telling him I didn’t take orders from him. With a huff, I walked farther into the storehouse, and then my frustration was with the soldiers more than with the delay.
“We can’t carry all of this,” I said to no one and everyone.
There were eight soldiers still healthy, if you wanted to term any of us as healthy at this point.
Two were still carrying bumps and scrapes from the Hulgrim.
One looked like he was barely hanging on, but he was still hanging on.
“The horses won’t make it much further, so only take what you can carry. ”
Captain Marson looked back at me and the food collected. “We’ll manage.”
“And if the townsfolk are still here, or beyond the wall, hiding? You want to leave them with nothing to come back to?”
“Do you think there are any in this place that still live?” he asked me quietly.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I only remember stories about the Frosttaken from my childhood…
I didn’t know…” I looked back over my shoulder.
Nicco hadn’t moved, but I knew he was listening.
I cleared my throat. “There could be survivors. We can’t let them survive that, and then starve because we took their food. ”
Baxley sniffed in the quiet. “Agreed. We have a long way to go, so cut the portions. We don’t need two sacks of grain. I sure as shades ain’t grinding it to flour later on.”
He met my look and gave a slight nod, which I returned quickly, grateful for an ally.
Larana watched our exchange, her blue eyes fixed on mine for longer than I liked.
“Trailfinder,” she said eventually. “This is your share.”
I walked over, hesitant. I never knew whether she wanted to talk to me or stab me.
I examined the pouches of food, dried meat, fish, fruit, and seeds. I noticed she had split the supplies into four. Wordlessly, I collected mine, not commenting on the fact that they had already taken only what they needed.
Why hadn’t they spoken up? Why wait for me to say something? To see if I would?
“Was that a test?” I asked her quietly as I straightened after filling my pack.
Larana smiled widely. “Life is a test, Trailfinder. I thought you knew that.” She clapped me on the back as she walked outside to join Nicco.
They were the strangest mercenaries I’d ever met.
After that, we were outside.
The cold hit differently after the storehouse, sharper, more deliberate, as though the air itself had rearranged while we were inside.
I fell into step beside Nicco without being told.
He didn't comment. Baxley took the rear, Larana the left flank, and the soldiers between us formed a cluster that was too tight for comfort and too spread for discipline.
Captain Marson joined us, and I felt a pang of guilt for not asking him… anything really. When had I started migrating to the mercenaries instead of him?
It had been what? Three days? Four? It felt like a lifetime.
“There’s another gate,” I said quietly. “It’s hard to get to and usually heavily guarded.” I looked around at the empty streets. “I don’t think that will be an issue today.”
“You're sure?” Nicco asked, ignoring the fact that the captain was beside us.
“No.” I pulled my cloak tighter. “But it avoids the other gate where the Drift Wolves could be, and it means we don’t pass that house again.”
He accepted that without argument. I wasn't sure if that was trust or pragmatism, and I didn't look at it too closely.
We found them just before we reached the gate.
They were gathered not far from the market, exactly where some part of me had already known they would be. Thirty, perhaps forty people — men, women, the very old and the very small — gathered in the snow against the wall as though they'd walked there together and simply... stopped.
Some were standing. Some were seated in the snow. One woman had her arms raised slightly, halfway through a gesture she would never finish. A man near the front still held a lantern. The flame had long since died, but his grip hadn't loosened.
They were breathing. I could see the faint mist of it in the cold air.
They were breathing and facing inward. All of them. Toward the town. Toward wherever the Frosttaken had made its center.
A boy near the edge was holding a carved wooden horse. His fingers were white around it.
I felt the grip on my heart as I saw how young he was.
I kept walking, trying not to look at them. I pulled open the gate, not surprised that it swung easily inward. I ducked through the low gate and headed out into the area beyond the wall.
I wanted to turn around and see if any of the townsfolk had turned at the sound, but I already knew they wouldn’t have.
The Frosttaken had them in its — their? — thrall.
That hollow pull surged, sudden and sickening, and then I heard it. Not close. Not yet. But unmistakable.
The sound Drift Wolves made when they scented living prey on still air.
Low. Rhythmic. Almost gentle, if you didn't know it was the sound of death that carried on the wind.
“Wolves,” Larana said flatly, already drawing her blade.
“No.” The word came out before I'd decided to say it. I stopped walking. “Don't.”
“They’ll be waiting for—”
“For them.” I didn't look at her. I was watching the curve of the town wall to our south, where the sound was coming from. “Not us. They can't smell us yet. We move north now. We'll be downwind.”
“Keep the gate open.” Nicco’s voice was low but steady, saying the words I hadn’t been able to say myself.
The heaviness of the silence meant everyone understood, and no one wanted to.
We moved fast and low, hugging the wall as we cleared the gate. Behind us, the first sounds of the Drift Wolves reaching the townspeople, not violence, not yet, just the soft, investigative sounds of animals that couldn't understand why their prey wasn't running.
I kept my eyes forward.
The snow outside the walls was untouched.
Clean, the kind of clean that showed nothing had passed through it in days.
Our boots broke the surface in a series of dark holes heading north, and I watched them appear one after another, my hand tight around my staff, trying not to think about what we were leaving behind.
Then the ripple came.
I turned automatically, not even thinking of my actions.
A slow, glassy spread moved outward from the town walls, thin as a skin of new ice, passing under the gate and across the snow in a wide, widening ring.
It reached for us gently, without force or threat, just... awareness.
It knew we were leaving.
I held my breath.
The ripple slowed, stopped, then pulled back.
I waited, my heart thumping in my chest, to see whether the Frosttaken had decided we were worth the cold it would spend to catch us.
“Keep moving,” Nicco said quietly, just behind my shoulder.
I was already doing that. I’d been taking small steps back as the ripple spread.
The sound from inside Skallfen changed as we put distance between ourselves and the walls. The wolves were louder now, and beneath that… nothing.
No screaming, or the sound of voices. Just the wolves, and the silence underneath them, patient and permanent.
“We need to move now,” I said with determination. “Quietly. With as much speed as possible. And we don't stop.”
“We can't just—” one of the soldiers started.
“We can't fight the Drift Wolves and whatever is in that town.” Nicco turned to look at him then, and whatever was on his face was enough to stop any further protests. The soldier closed his mouth.
“If we draw the pack's attention, we're the easier prey. We're warm, we're moving, and we're not… that.” I looked back at the gate where the townspeople remained beyond. Remembering the boy with the carved horse. “They won't feel it.”
I hated that I knew that. I hated that it was a mercy to leave them to the Drift Wolves.
“Move,” Nicco said.
It wasn’t open for debate, or a vote. Just the flat certainty of a man who had made decisions like this before and learned to live with them.
I went. Because I had no better answer, and I hated him a little for the fact that he was as merciless in his actions as I had been in my words.
I didn’t want to be like him. Think like him.
We cleared the town at a pace that wasn't quite running, but it was quick, deliberate, and controlled. The Drift Wolves sounded behind us. Closer to the walls now, their hunger being sated by a prey that would never run.
I didn't look back, but I thanked the gods we wouldn’t have to hear their screams.
The snow opened up ahead. The trail north stretched pale and empty under the flat gray sky, and the cold came in from all sides like a held breath finally released.
I didn't feel the Frosttaken anymore.
That was either because we were far enough away or because it had decided we weren't worth following.
Or maybe it was full.
I didn't know which possibility was less comforting, but I knew the last one made me want to throw up.
Behind me, I heard one of the soldiers exhale. A shaky, ragged sound he probably didn't mean to make.
Nicco fell back until he was level with me. He said nothing for a long moment, just matched my stride, his breath even, his expression closed.
“The thing in the town,” he said finally. “You knew what it was before we went in?”
It wasn't a question.
“I had a theory,” I said carefully. “A memory from an old tale, told around a campfire.”
“And now?”
I thought about the ripple in the snow. The pull in my chest. The way the townspeople's faces had all turned inward, patient and empty and waiting, like candles left burning in a window for someone who was never coming home.
“Now I'm certain,” I said.
He looked at me sideways. “Frosttaken?”
“Yes. The stories say they don’t need to hunt, not like predators need to,” I said. “It just needs to wait.”
He was quiet for a moment. “That's not comforting, Trailfinder.”
“No,” I agreed. “It's not.”
“When was the last time any were seen?” he asked me.
“I didn’t know they were real. I don’t know anyone who’s seen one.”
He didn't push any further. I didn't offer any more. We moved north into the gray, and Skallfen fell behind us, silent, as it had never been — holding its people, its secrets, and its patient, waiting death.
I didn't look back.
Some things are better kept hidden deep down and never thought of again.