Page 8 of Orc’s Moon

She studies me a beat too long for the answer to have satisfied her, then huddles deeper into a cloak that smells like me now. I watch her do it and don’t look away, and don’t bother pretending to myself that I want to.

Real warmth sits under the needling, the kind that isn’t looking for a fight. “You’re very serious for a man who just admitted to giving away his own coat in a blizzard for no better reason than because. Do you ever say more than one sentence unless someone’s actively dying?”

“Rarely.”

“That must make courting a nightmare.”

“Never tried it.” Which is true, flat and quiet in a way that gives away more than the words themselves do, and earns me a look from her that says she’s heard exactly what I didn’t say along with what I did.

“No?” She tips her head, firelight catching the gold in eyes that don’t look away from mine the way everyone else in that fortress learned to. “Hard to believe. You’ve got a whole brooding-Warden-guards-forbidden-ruins thing working for you. Someone should have snapped that up years ago.”

“Should they.”

“I’m just saying. Seems like a waste.”

“And you?” I ask, not entirely sure I want the answer. “Kings and chancellors aside. Anyone waiting on that map of yours to come home?”

“An empty flat and a landlord who hates me. That’s the full accounting.” Her tone stays light. The flatness underneath it doesn’t, and she covers the gap by prodding the fire with a stick that’s doing nothing useful. “History doesn’t leave much room for anything that isn’t history. I stopped minding a long time ago.”

“You’re lying.”

“A little.” Something sly crosses her face, daring me to push further. I don’t. Some doors a man learns not to open on a first night, even when he wants to.

I’ve got nothing sharp enough to send back, and I’m aware, watching her tuck her knees up under my cloak as the firelight moves gold through her hair, that the silence stretching between us isn’t the kind I usually let sit this long. It isn’t uncomfortable. That’s the part I can’t work out. My training taught me silence as a weapon, a wall, a way of making men talk faster so they can leave faster. This is neither. This is just two people, a fire, and a storm outside loud enough to make conversation feel optional instead of necessary, and I find myself in no hurry at all to fill it.

“Get some sleep,” I tell her instead, because it’s easier than examining why I don’t want to. “I’ll take first watch.”

“There’s nothing out here in this.”

“There’s always something out here.” I bank the fire lower, angle myself toward the door out of habit older than either of us. “Sleep. I’ll wake you at the turn.”

She doesn’t argue. She’s asleep within minutes, curled small under a cloak too big for her, and I sit awake through half the night listening to wind try to find a way through stone that’s held for a hundred years, and telling myself the reason I can’t stop looking at her has everything to do with duty and nothing at all to do with the way firelight moves across her face when she isn’t performing composure for anyone.

I don’t convince myself. Not even a little.

FOUR

LYESSA

The storm burns itself out sometime before dawn, and by the time we’re back on the trail the sky’s gone that hard, clean blue that only shows up after weather’s finished proving a point. My legs ache in places I didn’t know could ache. I don’t mention it. Vorren’s cloak is folded and returned, and I already miss its weight more than I’ve got any business admitting before I’ve had coffee that doesn’t exist anywhere on this mountain.

The cliff path narrows around midmorning, barely wide enough for one body at a time, ice-slicked stone dropping into a ravine deep enough that I don’t look down twice. Vorren’s ahead of me here, shoulders nearly brushing rock on either side, and I catch myself watching the set of his back instead of the sigils I came up this mountain to find — the way he pauses at every blind curve half a breath longer than the terrain requires, his hand never straying far from Nightfall’s grip even when nothing’s moved but wind.

I’m reading the rock face instead — more of those six-pointed markers, more proof that this whole mountain’s been quietly speaking Covenant for a thousand years to anyone who bothered learning the language — when the first wolf comes off the ridge above us in dead silence.

Wrong silence. Wolves don’t hunt like that, don’t move like that — low and fluid and utterly without sound, eyes catching a color that has no business existing in anything born of blood and fur. There are four of them, then five, spreading along the path in a formation too deliberate for animal instinct, and every hair on my arms goes up at once because I know, in the same part of my brain that reads discrepancies in old maps, that whatever’s wrong with these wolves isn’t the kind of wrong nature does on its own.

“Vorren.”

“I see them.” Grim, flat, moving before he finishes saying it. “Shadow wolves. Don’t let one get behind you — they hunt in threes when they can manage it, and that thing in front is just the one they want you watching.”

No panic in his voice regardless. Nightfall’s already clearing its sheath, and he’s angling his body between me and the widest gap in their line without seeming to think about it at all — the same instinct that put him between me and a collapsing archway, between me and an arrow through a council chamber window, like protecting me has become a reflex his body performs before his mind gets a vote.

The path is too narrow for him to fight five of them at once without one slipping past to my blind side, and I am not about to become the reason he loses this fight.

I drop to a crouch and drive my boot heel into the ice-cracked lip of stone at the path’s edge, hard, twice, until a section the size of a doorway gives way and slides into the ravine — narrowing the approach to a gap barely wide enough for one wolf at a time, funneling them straight into the killing ground instead of letting them spread. It isn’t elegant. It’s exactly the kind of solution seven years of climbing through collapsed ruins teaches a person who’s never had the luxury of being rescued.

“Now,” I shout, and he doesn’t ask why I trust the ice under my own boots, doesn’t waste breath questioning it. He simply uses it.