Page 285 of Salt Between the Wolves

They rode south without speaking much as the landscape gradually narrowed into a winding road between dark cliffs. Visibility came and went with the snowfall, one moment clear and the next hidden behind drifting white.

An hour passed, then another, until one of the warriors lifted a hand at movement ahead. Soren slowed his horse, and the others did the same.

At first he saw only shapes—dark figures emerging through falling snow. Riders, a small group with no formation suggesting battle, no scouts spreading outward, and no attempt to hide. Strange.

The distance between them slowly narrowed—one hundred yards, eighty, sixty—as Soren's horse shifted beneath him while the riders ahead continued forward at a steady pace.

Then one of them moved slightly ahead of the others, a familiar posture that felt too familiar. Soren frowned.

The snowfall thickened briefly, obscuring everything, but then the wind changed and the curtain of white lifted.

And he saw her.

For a moment nothing happened—no surprise, no disbelief, only certainty, as if some part of him had recognized her long before his eyes did.

Silver hair, a dark riding cloak, straight-backed in the saddle despite days on the road.

Eira.

The world seemed to narrow around a single impossible fact: she was here.

The distance between them continued to close, and neither looked away or spoke. For the first time in nine days, White Pass no longer felt like the center of the world.

The distance between them continued to disappear, shrinking from forty yards to thirty, then twenty, while neither group slowed immediately.

Snow drifted between them in thin white sheets, and the mountains stood silent on either side of the road.

Soren found himself studying details he had no reason to notice: the dark cloak, the frost gathered along the edge of her gloves, the way she sat her horse, and the exhaustion she tried to hide.

Three days, perhaps more, of hard riding across northern roads in winter weather.

The irritation arrived before anything else, predictable, unwelcome, and entirely familiar.

She should never have made this journey, not now, not through a mountain pass occupied by two armies waiting for an excuse to become enemies.

And yet she had, of course she had.

The realization settled with the same certainty as everything else connected to Eira: she had seen a problem and decided to face it, no matter how unreasonable the cost.

The riders finally came to a halt, and silence settled over the road as no one reached for a weapon and no one spoke.

For a moment there was only snowfall and the sound of restless horses.

Eira looked exactly as he remembered, and not at all.

Something had changed, not her face or her posture, but something quieter, harder to name.

The distance between Silverwake and White Pass suddenly felt very real, and she had crossed it anyway.

Soren became aware of the bond then, not because it surged or demanded attention, but because it stopped being empty.

For days he had trained himself not to notice its absence, not to reach toward silence, not to look for something that was no longer there.

Now the absence was gone, simple as that, like stepping inside after standing in winter wind for too long.

There was no dramatic revelation, only the quiet correction of something that had been wrong.

Eira's gaze remained fixed on him, steady and unflinching, as if she were measuring the same distance he was.