Chapter 15
The skarveld broke as those storms always did, abruptly and without apology.
For a moment, the world was white, howling, and utterly merciless.
Then the wind stopped. The silence that followed was so deep it felt unnatural, like something had been lost rather than gained.
Snow continued to fall, but now it was gentle, no longer the ice that had tried to cut us down mere moments before.
The gray sky above us looked almost peaceful compared to what it had been just moments earlier.
Nobody moved for a moment. We simply stood there, a huddle of cold, damp, and exhausted people blinking at a world that had chosen to let us live in it again.
“Captain?” Nicco prompted.
It was the trigger Captain Marson needed. He seemed to snap to attention. “Sound off,” he barked sharply.
The soldiers went down the line. All present. One private — the young one, the one who'd held his friend down for me — was pressing his right hand to his chest, and his jaw was clenched in that specific way of someone managing pain they hadn't yet decided to mention.
“Your hand,” I said, moving toward him. “Let me see it.”
He looked up. “It's fine.”
“It's not fine. Let me see it.”
He held it out with the resigned look of someone who knew the argument was already lost. The fingers on his right hand were waxy and white at the tips, the skin hard to the touch. It wasn’t frostbite yet, but close enough to be a problem if we didn't move.
“Keep them moving,” I told him. “All of them. Don't stop flexing until the feeling returns. When it does, it's going to hurt, but that's good. That means they're still yours.”
He nodded, already curling and uncurling his fingers with grim determination.
I looked around, knowing they could all hear me. “All of you, I know you're numb. Keep everything moving, wiggle it, shake it. You need to move the blood in your body. It needs to remember to flow. Encourage it. Wiggle.”
“We need to keep moving,” Nicco said, and nobody argued. He turned to look over his shoulder. “The horses are gone.”
A statement of fact and nothing else.
“We do need to move,” I agreed. “But we also need to drink first.” I looked around at us all. “Which one of you has a pot handy?” I asked, not caring to look to see who it was, just that we had it.
I quickly cleared a small area in the snow. With speed and familiarity, I built a small fire. In no time, I was melting snow and asking each person to hand me their cup.
“You need the warmth inside as well as out,” I told them as I poured lukewarm water into cups. Not much, just two gulps if that, but it would help. It would also keep the arms and legs moving. I hadn’t been lighthearted when I told them they needed to wiggle.
Once we’d all had a warm drink, I tidied up my makeshift fire, smothering it with snow and stealing a tiny bit of its warmth into my body. The glyph I made with my fingers looked like I was merely covering the fire with snow.
Nothing more.
I didn’t feel guilty about using my magic on myself instead of others. The soldiers had each other. I watched them check on themselves, making sure their captain and sergeant were fit and able. A few were still flexing their fingers, and I was pleased they listened.
The mercenaries stood apart, each facing a different direction, eager to move forward. Yet they remained together, standing apart but in their group, leaning on each other without even realizing it.
I only had myself. The only person I could rely on for my survival was me. Yes, Baxley wrapped me in his cloak during the storm, but that was a one-time thing.
So I would take the residual heat from the fire and warm my bones. The others had their own source of warmth.
“Okay,” I told them, straightening up. “Time to walk.”
The road north grew more difficult after the skarveld. The storm had reshaped the landscape in a way only Crystallese storms could, erasing the landmarks I’d used for navigation, covering the markers left by the last animal, and hiding everything useful beneath an identical layer of white.
I pulled out my lodestone and let it point north, then checked my landmarks against what was still visible. The tree line to the east was slightly denser. The shape of the ridge ahead matched what I remembered from when I was last this distance from Skallfen.
I started walking.
Nicco fell into step beside me, close enough that our boots overlapped in the fresh snow, but not close enough to touch.
He didn’t ask if I knew where we were going, and I didn’t offer the information.
We moved in the silence of two people who had reached an unspoken agreement that it was better not to talk unless we had something worth saying to each other.
I used the quiet time to watch. Not the snow ahead. I could read the trail with half my attention. I watched them. The three of them. The unknowns.
Baxley was behind us. I knew because I'd checked twice already, an old habit, knowing who was at my back.
He'd dropped back without anyone asking him to, settling into the position just behind the youngest soldiers, matching their pace when it slowed, adjusting his stride so seamlessly that you'd have to be looking for it to notice. He'd done this before, and I’d noticed it then, too. He didn’t fall in with them in a soldier's way.
He did it as someone who understood that exhausted people moved faster when they didn't feel like they were failing.
That wasn't mercenary instinct. Mercenaries looked out for themselves and each other, and occasionally for whoever was paying them. What Baxley was doing was quieter than that.
Something more careful.
Larana was on the left flank. She took that position as we started moving, and no one asked her to go there.
She just appeared, blade at her hip, eyes slowly sweeping the tree line.
Not the sky or the road. Just the tree line, always at a certain height, watching for something that seemed vividly clear in her mind.
I had been a trailfinder long enough to know the difference between general vigilance and specific vigilance. Larana was watching for something she'd seen before. I just didn’t know what it was.
“How long have you three worked together?”
The question came out casually. I had been waiting for the trail's rhythm to settle after the storm last night, so conversation would feel natural rather than forced.
Nicco's eyes flicked sideways, briefly, before he answered. “A while.”
“That's not very specific.”
“No,” he agreed. “It's not.”
I waited, but he didn't elaborate. I tried a different approach. “Where are you from?”
“South.”
This time, I looked at him. “Everywhere is south of where we are right now.”
“Yes.” The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, and not a smirk. “It is.”
I recognized the technique because I used it myself, answering just enough to be polite but not enough to be helpful. It was a specific kind of deflection that took practice to master, one that didn't feel like a lie because nothing you said was technically false.
It made me equally more curious and more cautious, and I decided not to push it. We kept walking, and we didn’t speak again.
That evening, as we made camp and at least three soldiers asked me if the skarveld was likely to come back, I had to explain that it was a storm, and not a monster.
I don’t think they believed me. But Baxley had been listening, and while the soldiers whispered between themselves, I tried to get information from Baxley.
He was the one who gathered the wood and built the fire with the natural confidence of someone who didn't need instructions. I sat nearby, pretending to warm my hands, and waited until the others had spread out enough for the conversation to feel private.
“You and Larana,” I said. “You've known each other a long time.”
He glanced at me. “What makes you say that?”
“The way you stand close to each other. Not like people who are being cautious around each other. Like people who trust each other because they know what the other is going to do.”
“Huh. Maybe we do.” He was quiet for a moment, poking at the fire. “You notice a lot.”
“Trailfinder,” I said. “It's what I do.”
He smiled at that. A small, genuine one that briefly softened his face. “Aye, I guess we have. Long time.”
“And Nicco?”
The smile faded slightly. He wasn’t uncomfortable with the question; he was contemplating it, weighing how much to give me. “Long enough.”
“He's not from Crystallese.”
“No.”
“Neither are you.”
“No.”
“Larana said she’s from Cinderia.” He didn’t react, just watched me patiently. It was slightly unnerving. I looked at the fire. “What are you doing this far north?”
Baxley set the stick he had been using as a poker down and looked at me properly for the first time in the conversation. His eyes were steady, not unkind, and completely unreadable. “Same as you,” he said. “Following the gold.”
Then he stood, and the conversation ended in the usual way when the person walking away was too large and too confident to be called back.
I sat by the fire, watching the flames and thinking about what I knew — almost nothing — and what I suspected — quite a lot — and what I was going to do about the gap between them.
And the most important question of all, how would it affect me?
Across the camp, Larana sat apart from the soldiers, sharpening her blade with the focused patience I was beginning to recognize as her version of silence. She looked up once, directly at me, not as someone who had just noticed me. Instead, it was as if she had been aware of me the whole time.
I didn't look away. That felt somehow important, not being the first to look away.
She looked back down at her blade, expressionless.
She didn't acknowledge it, but she didn't seem bothered by it either.
Which, I was beginning to understand, was the closest thing to progress I was likely to get with Larana.
That and stories about scantily clad women.