Page 65 of Winter's Echo
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 hadreached 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 watchedthem. The three of them. Theunknowns.
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 andspecificvigilance. 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. “Everywhereis 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.”
