When it hit, blinding us all, I found them by touch in the whiteout, and when they realized what I needed, they followed almost instinctively. Hands grabbed cloaks, shoulders pressed together, the soldiers closing ranks with the knowledge that alone in this, they wouldn’t survive. Someone gripped my arm. I gripped back without looking to see whose hand it was.
I’d formed them into a shape, and they moved easily, backs outward, bodies inward, each person leaning slightly into the center where the combined heat of us made the air a little less deadly.
The wind seemed to come from all directions at once, tearing through the gaps between us and searching for a way in.
I stood with my shoulder pressed against Nicco's arm and my back against one of the soldiers, focusing only on staying upright. The cold wasn't truly cold anymore. It had become a force, something with purpose, reaching into the spaces between our bodies.
The skill was to give it nothing.
We crouched there — eight soldiers, three mercenaries, and one trailfinder — breathing each other's air and sharing the only warmth in the world, waiting for the skarveld to finish with us.
“We can't hold like this without turning,” I said loudly enough to be heard over the wind. “We need to switch with the outside. They’re going to lose feeling in their extremities, and that's when we start losing people.”
Captain Marson turned his head to look at me, and I saw both incredulity and understanding in his expression.
“Rotate,” Marson yelled simply, and without argument, the outer ring began to shift inward, the inner moving out to take the brunt of it. No fuss. Little protest. Just people who trusted the man giving the order enough to follow without question.
I was making my way to the outside when I got shoved back into the center.
“Not you, bunny,” Nicco growled close to my ear. “You’re the one leading us, and you’re also the smallest. Stay there. Don’t die.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Baxley moved, and suddenly, I was inside his cloak.
Like a child.
As I grappled with my indignation, I realized one thing. I was warm, and I resented it.Greatly.
Baxley's cloak was enormous and smelled like woodsmoke and something peppery, and he'd wrapped it around us both without ceremony, his arm a heavy, unapologetic weight across my shoulders.
He said nothing. Made no joke about it. Just held the cloak closed against the wind and stared at the storm like it had personally offended him.
Outside our huddle, the skarveld screamed.
Through the space in the cloak, I could see Nicco on the outer ring through the gap between others’ shoulders.
He had taken the worst position without discussion, the one directly facing the wind, and he stood with his head down andshoulders set like a wall. His face was wrapped, only his eyes exposed, and they were closed as the wind lashed against us.
Snow collected on him in layers. He didn't move or flinch. He just absorbed it, as he seemed to absorb everything, without complaint or acknowledgment, as if suffering were something that happened to other people while he stood in it, waiting for it to be over.
I watched him longer than I should have.
“He does that,” Baxley said quietly, close to my ear.
I didn't ask what he meant. “Does it work?” I asked instead.
Baxley was quiet for a moment. Outside, the wind hit a pitch that made my ears ache. “Hasn't killed him yet.”
That wasn't an answer. Or maybe it was an answer, and I just didn't like what it meant.
I stopped watching Nicco and looked at the snow instead. Identical, both of them. Cold, relentless, and entirely without mercy.But he pushed me back inside. I didn’t linger on that either. Now was not the time to think about Nicco and his actions.
The rotate came not long after. Longer than it should have been, the cold having had its way with everyone's sense of time. When Nicco entered from the outer ring, he moved past me without looking, taking up a position two bodies away. Snow chipped off his shoulders as he moved. His jaw was clenched. His eyes were fixed on nothing.
He didn't shiver.
I filed it away the same way he did — quietly, without deciding what it meant yet.
Larana had rotated without being asked or pushed back into the center like I had. I was trying not to let that annoy me.
