Chapter 17
Vorn's settlement smelled of woodsmoke, animal fat, and survival.
It wasn't exactly unpleasant. It was the smell of people who had stripped everything down to what mattered and stopped apologizing for how they lived. I recognized it the way you recognize a dialect — not your own, but close enough to understand.
He led me to a shelter near the center of the settlement. Low-roofed, half-buried in the frozen ground, it had a small, efficient fire that wasted nothing. He motioned for me to sit, and I sat down. For a while, neither of us spoke.
That was fine. I understood silence as a language.
I kept looking at the single bedroll on the floor and finally looked up at him. “You mention shared body heat, and I’ll slit your throat.”
He laughed as he unwrapped his outside clothes. Which was his cloak, and his neck warmer. Everything else he kept on. Thank the gods.
Vorn was somewhere between thirty and weathered, broad across the chest as if he'd never once considered stopping work. He wasn’t old, but his face resembled the land itself — wind-scraped, frost-marked, always hardened against softness.
Not cruel. Just stripped of anything unnecessary.
Dark-haired, he had pale, washed-out blue eyes. He was... handsome in his own way.
“You came from Skallfen,” he said eventually.
“We passed by it.”
“Passed by.” He turned the words over. “Passed by or passed through?”
There was no point in lying. “We went through,” I told him. “Though there wasn't much left to pass through.”
He looked at me steadily. “Meaning what?”
I wasn’t sure how much to tell him, but I answered anyway. “I don’t think many are left alive.”
He watched me closely. “Them?” He jerked his chin to the entrance of the tent.
I shook my head quickly. “No. Worse.” I suddenly felt sure he’d laugh at me if I told him. “Frosttaken.”
Vorn searched my eyes for any sign of deceit. He looked away, his sniff loud. “They said they’d walk again before the winter months had passed.”
I leaned forward. “They? Who’s they?”
He sat down on a low stool across from me. “Elders. One has the sight, she says.”
I nodded. I knew of a few of them but avoided them mostly. “She’s seen the Frosttaken?”
He nodded slowly. “She claims it’s what blinded her when she was younger.”
I sat back. “What?”
“She claims they seek the Chosen.” His lips curled in a sneer. “Fucking Verei Kahn bitches, it would be a monster that a monster sought.”
“She’s Verei Kahn?” I asked him, feeling panic rise in my chest.
He snorted. “Nah, just an old woman with a little sight of the Chances.” He scratched his beard. “She did say they were wakening again,” he mused. “All of the town gone?”
I didn’t need to answer for him to see the truth in my face. He nodded once, slowly, as if this confirmed something he'd suspected for a while.
“We lost four people. Three months ago, maybe more. They went south to trade and didn't come back.” He paused. “I think I knew, but you’ve confirmed it.”
“I'm sorry.” I swallowed.
He shrugged, not callously, just practically. It was the shrug of a man who had made peace with what the land took because the alternative was madness. “You really heading to Iskaeld?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody goes to Iskaeld.”
“Somebody wants them to go.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Who?”
I shrugged. “I’m a trailfinder. I don’t ask too many questions.”
He accepted that, many wouldn’t, but Vorn did. “They’re King’s Guard. The Darysian King sent them?”
I didn't reply because I didn't know the answer, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
“How long were you following us?”
Vorn leaned forward and poked at the fire once. The flames shifted and steadied. “Went south a little, was going to look for my people. Saw a frozen horse that was too fancy for the likes of a Crystallesian.”
So two days at most. That wasn’t too bad. “We lost it the night of the skarveld.”
He nodded. “Not had one that bad for a few weeks.”
He spoke as if it were a bad snowstorm, not the force of the underworld screaming in our ear.
The Darysians were right, we were mad to stay in this country.
Vorn was focused on his fire. “You agreed to sleep here tonight. Your people are in the other shelters.” He glanced at me sideways. “The Darysian with the calculating eyes. Who is he?”
“Nicco.”
“He a problem?”
“Frequently.”
Something tugged at the corner of his mouth. “He watches you.”
“He watches everyone,” I said. “It's what he does.”
“No.” Vorn shook his head slightly. “Not the same way.”
I had no response to that, and I didn't want one, so I let the fire fill the silence.
Vorn stood, grabbing his cloak. “He tries to be a hero, and he’ll learn he isn’t one.”
I looked up at Vorn. “There are many things Nicco is, hero isn’t one of them.”
“Stay here, eat your rations. Leave the tent... well, don’t leave the tent, Amarya.”
“Of course.”
He left me in his tent, and I did what anyone would do in that situation. I got comfortable. I knew I couldn’t go outside, and I knew to stay away from the others. I didn’t want to antagonize anyone.
I ate a handful of nuts and a strip of dried beef. I helped myself to some of Vorn’s water. He hadn’t told me not to.
He returned some time later, saw that I had made myself comfortable, and simply stripped off a few layers before lying down to sleep. There was no more conversation, and I welcomed the silence.
I lay on the ground, wrapped in my cloak, using my pack as a pillow, just as I would on the trail. Only this time, there was a source of warmth, and the tent kept the snow and wind from my face. Still, I was not comfortable, and sleep eluded me.
It was much later, after the settlement had quieted and the fire had dwindled to embers, that I heard it. A sound from the shelter next to ours. Not exactly a voice. More like the careful quiet of someone deliberately staying very still.
I waited.
It came again. The distinct silence of someone trying not to exist.
I knew that silence. I had practiced it myself for years.
I quietly rose and moved to the shelter's entrance. The cold struck immediately, sharp and clear after the smokiness inside. I paused, letting my eyes adjust.
The nearby shelter was smaller, set slightly apart from the others. I hadn't noticed it when we arrived because it blended so seamlessly into the landscape, with a lower roof, no smoke coming from inside, dark.
I moved toward it.
“Trailfinder.”
I stopped. Vorn was behind me, and I hadn't heard him move, which meant he'd been awake and waiting for exactly this.
“Who's in there?” I asked without turning.
“Not your concern.”
I turned then. His face was unreadable in the dark, but his posture wasn't. He was blocking the path without appearing to. Deliberate and practiced.
“Vorn.”
“Leave it.”
I looked at the shelter. Then back at him. I hated knowing what was in that shelter. “Is she alright?”
The pause before he answered was a fraction too long and made my stomach roil. “She's fed, and she's warm.”
I clenched my fists. “That's not what I asked.”
He looked at me steadily. “She’s ours. She came from a merchant caravan. Payment for passage through our territory.” His voice was flat and completely without apology. “She stays until the debt is paid.”
Bastards.
I stood very still. “And when is the debt paid?”
“When I say it is.”
I hated that answer as I knew I would.
The fire from the main shelter cast just enough light to see his face clearly.
He wasn't cruel. I could see that. He wasn't enjoying this, like some men would.
He was a man who managed a settlement of thirty or more people in one of the deadliest landscapes on the continent, and he understood what was needed to keep them alive.
Even if providing that balance was at the cost of another.
I understood the mathematics of this equation. I had run those numbers myself in different forms for years. What did you need to sacrifice of yourself to come to a livable conclusion?
That was the problem. That I understood it.
But that didn’t make it right. It would never be right.
However, I had ten people in two shelters here who were being shown the camp's hospitality. That hospitality would turn bloody very quickly if I said anything. That was my sacrifice at this moment. To keep them safe, that was my cost.
“Alright,” I said.
Vorn looked at me, his eyes narrowed fractionally. “Alright?”
“She's fed, and she's warm,” I repeated his words back to him without inflection. “That's more than some.”
He studied me for a moment longer, then nodded once and moved back toward the main shelter.
“Come back to bed. You’ll catch a chill in this cold,” he said gruffly, ducking back into his shelter.
The whole fucking kingdom was cold. I closed my eyes as I heard her move again, a whisper of movement that seemed to scream loudly in the silence.
I stood in the cold after he'd gone, wrestling with my decision to remain silent.
When I finally turned back, I saw him. Just a shape in the dark at the edge of the other shelter, still, arms crossed, watching the adjacent tent with the same flat expression he turned on everything.
Nicco.
He had seen her too, or at least knew about her. His posture showed he'd been standing there long enough to form his judgment and reach his conclusion.
He turned his head slightly, and our eyes met across the darkness.
He said nothing. I said nothing.
He went back inside.
I stood there thinking about what I'd just agreed to — what we'd both just agreed to, without a single word passing between us — and I waited for the feeling of it to settle into something I recognized.
I knew it never would.
I went back inside, lay down by the fire, stared at the embers, and knew sleep wouldn’t come for a long time.
Tomorrow we would leave. The woman would still be here when we did. And neither Nicco nor I would say a word. I told myself that was practical. It was what needed to happen to avoid bloodshed.
I almost believed it was worth the cost.