“Well, I’m not standing here for fun.” My tartness was met with silence. Followed with a sigh.
“Should be a good day,” he murmured as he walked past.
I watched him move ahead without looking back, hood up, pace already set, doing his normal thing, which was to assume the world would fall in behind him. The infuriating part was that as far as I could see, it worked, which made it even more infuriating.
I exchanged a look with Baxley, who rolled his eyes as he pulled up his neck warmer over his mouth and nose. He playfully nudged me with his elbow as he passed, and I smiled despite myself. It was so easy with Baxley. He didn't watch me the way Nicco did, didn't assess my every move, and didn't make me feel like I was losing an argument I didn’t know I was having.
Baxley justwas. Present, warm once he decided he liked you, and took up space without making you feel its weight.
There should be more Baxley’s, I decided.
I fell into step behind them both, took my place in the formation, and let my body do what it knew how. Read the snow, read the sky, and find the trail south.
Nicco was three paces ahead, and the distance felt deliberate.
I let it be.
Two days later, we found them. Or rather, Larana found us. I heard her before I saw her — a presence rather than a sound.
She came from the south along the same trail we were on, moving fast. When she rounded the edge of a rock formation and stopped in front of us, I had the impression she'd been looking for us for longer than a day and had not enjoyed the search.
She was fine. Physically, clearly, entirely fine. Her stride had been fast and certain, and she'd come through the storm's aftermath without apparent difficulty. But her face, as much of it as was visible above her wrappings, showed that she was pissed off.
Worse.
She was angry.
Not the cold fury of the standoff with Vorn’s men. Something more personal than that. Something that had been living in her chest for days had decided it was done waiting.
She looked at Nicco, then at Baxley, then at me. “You're alive,” she said to me.
“I am.”
“Good.” She crossed to me in four strides, and I held my ground. She stopped close enough that I could see her eyes clearly over the wrappings, sharp, dark, moving, assessing, and missing nothing. “Don't,” she said. “Do that again.”
“I didn't exactly?—”
“I know.” Her voice was perfectly even. “You thought you were protecting us, protecting me. You made a call. I understand all of that.” A pause. “Don't do it again.”
I held her gaze. “Alright.”
She held mine for one more breath. Then she stepped back and looked at Nicco with an expression that suggested she had things to say to him, too, and had decided to save them.
“The soldiers,” she said. “Are two leagues south. Marson is moving them well. They lost one more on the way back.” She looked at me briefly. “Not the cold. One of the injuries from those snow people reopened.”
“The Hulgrim?”
She nodded once. I thought about the soldier whose name I'd never learned. About the cost of decisions made in the cold.
“Larana—”
“I'm not finished being angry,” she said, without looking at me. “I'll tell you when I am.”
From somewhere behind me, Baxley made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a cough. She fixed him with a look. He arranged his face into something more appropriate with the practiced speed of a man who had survived her moods before.
“All done?” Nicco asked dryly. When she didn’t answer, he nodded. “Then let’s keep moving.”
Larana pulled her face wrappings back up without ceremony and turned to look south. Whatever she'd needed to say, she'd said it. Whatever she'd needed to feel, she'd felt it on the trail coming north and wasn't going to perform it for an audience.
