CHAPTER 29

Nobody moved for a long moment. Then Callum tilted his head slightly, listening to something the rest of us couldn’t hear.

“It isn’t hunting,” he said quietly. “No change in its breathing. No shift in weight toward a charge. It’s just cataloging us.”

“You can hear its breathing from here?” Lisa asked.

“I can hear everything from here. That’s rather the point of me.”

“Useful,” Priya said. “What’s it waiting for?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s waiting to see if we’re a threat, or the kind that just needs avoiding.”

“Let us leave it be for now,” I said.

We backed away slowly, one careful step at a time. The creature let us go without so much as shifting its weight, watching until the treeline swallowed it from view.

“That was unsettling,” Priya said, once we had put real distance behind us. “Good kind of unsettling, I think. The kind where it decided we weren’t worth the effort.”

“Let us hope it was the first one,” Lisa said.

We kept moving, deeper into a whiteness that showed no sign of ending.

Callum kept adjusting our path in stages too small to notice individually, correcting for thin ice and sudden drops in the snow before the rest of us noticed them.

“How does he do that,” Lisa murmured, close enough that only I could hear it.

“Same way Nox did. Just paying attention to things the rest of us don’t think to check.”

“Nox used to do it quieter,” she said. “You’d only notice after the fact, when you realized how many times you should have fallen and hadn’t.”

“Callum is doing the same thing. Just without anyone needing to notice, because he’s telling us as he goes.”

“That isn’t better. That’s just louder about the same skill.”

“It feels a little better from where I’m standing.”

Priya fell back to walk alongside us a while later.

“He has been doing that the whole way,” she said, nodding ahead at Callum. “Sorry if it’s a lot to watch. I know it can feel like showing off, even when it isn’t meant that way.”

“It isn’t showing off,” I said. “It’s just better than what we’ve got right now.”

“You’ll get there,” Priya said. “Whatever gap you’re both feeling closes faster than you think. Ours did.”

“Encouraging,” Lisa said, in a tone that suggested otherwise.

Priya smiled, unbothered, and drifted back up toward Callum with the easy confidence of someone who had never wondered whether people liked her.

There was something grinding about watching a stranger fill the gap so cleanly. For him it barely counted as a gap. For us it was just a reminder of how much we missed Nox.

By the time Priya called a stop for the night, my legs had stopped complaining.

There shouldn’t have been a night. That was the thing nobody said aloud while the fire got built.

A D-rank standard was a walk-out-before-lunch job. We were bedding down in it with no sign of a floor or an exit.

The gate had quietly become a place we lived now, and none of us had agreed to move in.

The two camps settled a short distance apart, close enough for safety, far enough for privacy.

Callum took the first watch and I took it with him, which neither of us discussed.

He sat with his back to the fire and his eyes on the white, and after about ten minutes he said, without turning round, “You’ve been trying to work out how I do it.”

“I have.”

“It’s not a talent. That’s the annoying answer and it’s the true one.” He tipped his head slightly, listening to something out past the light. “I was rubbish for two years. Owen carried me through a D-rank that should have killed all three of us, and afterwards he didn’t say a word about it, which was worse than if he had.”

“What changed.”

“I stopped trying to be useful in the fight and started being useful before it.” He shrugged. “There’s no glory in the before. Priya gets the write-ups. I get to know where the ice is thin.”

Something moved a long way off, and both of us stopped talking until it stopped moving.

“Your man,” Callum said. “The quiet one who isn’t here.”

“Nox.”

“He does the same job, doesn’t he. Without saying any of it out loud.”

“He does.”

“Then you’ve got the harder version and you don’t know it.” Callum finally looked round. “Mine tells you where the ice is thin. Yours just walks you round it and lets you think you chose the route.”

I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. I spent the rest of the watch doing exactly that.

Lisa waited until the fire had burned down before she spoke.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. “About the book.”

“Okay.”

I looked at the thing in her lap. Something settled into place that had been sitting half-formed since the main hall: the battered cover she carried everywhere, the same book Finn had called demonic in front of the entire roster. I had watched her carry it for weeks without once asking what it was.

“That’s the one your brother meant,” I said.

“I know you’ve been wondering,” she said, turning it over in her hands without opening it. “Ever since Finn opened his mouth about it. I kept telling myself I’d explain when the moment was right. Then I kept deciding the moment wasn’t right yet, over and over, until I realized I’d do that forever unless I made myself stop.”

“You don’t owe me a timeline on it.”

“I know. I’d still rather you heard it from me than worked it out sideways later.” She took a small, tired breath. “So. Now, I suppose. Before I talk myself out of it again.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now.”

“Not all of it,” she went on. “Just the parts I actually know for certain.”

She turned the cover over once more in her hands, still not opening it. “Morgana Ambrose. Three hundred years dead, give or take. My family remembers her as the reason we don’t get invited to certain dinners anymore.”

“What actually happened?”

“Officially, she spread a plague across half of Europe. Deliberately. A necromantic wonder-kid who decided to kill thousands of people sounded like an interesting use of her gift.”

Lisa’s voice stayed level, reciting rather than feeling it. She had likely said it to herself a hundred times before saying it aloud.

“She was convicted and executed by a coalition her own family helped organize.”

“You don’t believe the official version.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She was quiet for a moment, watching the fire instead of me.

“I think she was framed,” she said finally. “I think someone she trusted turned on her, and the plague was either an accident pinned on her deliberately, or something that was never her doing at all.”

She looked down at the leather. “I think the family closed ranks around whatever version made them look least involved, and three hundred years was long enough for that version to become the truth everyone agreed on.”

“What makes you think that?”

“The book. Which isn’t evidence. I know it isn’t evidence, and I’ve had that argument with myself.”

“But you read a woman’s handwriting for six years and you start noticing things,” Lisa said. “The person in the histories and the person in the margins aren’t the same woman. One of them complains about the cold. The other is a monster in a document written by the people who killed her.”

She stopped, then started again.

“She wrote a recipe in it. Somewhere in the middle of the necromantic theory, there’s a recipe for a barley dish with leeks. It’s a bad recipe, and she’s wrong about how long to cook the barley. Mass murderers don’t do that. I’ve thought about it more than I want to admit, and I keep coming back to the barley.”

She looked up.

“She split part of herself into this book before they executed her. Hoping someone down the line would listen, instead of just inheriting the crime along with the name. Everyone in my family managed that for three hundred years, including me, until I was nineteen and bored and opened it.”

I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“That’s a heavy thing to carry,” I said instead.

“It’s.”

The fire popped, and neither of us filled the gap it left.

She looked at me a moment longer than necessary. “You went quiet in a specific way just now, and it wasn’t your usual quiet.”

“Long day.”

“That isn’t what that was.”

“Maybe not. It’s still what I’ve got to offer tonight.”

She dropped it, filing it away rather than pushing. “Fair enough. Whatever it is, I am not going anywhere.”

“I know.”

“Good. Get some sleep. Callum’s watch starts in an hour, which means ours should have started twenty minutes ago.”

You could have said something.

Azazel spoke once she had settled and the fire had dropped to embers.

Maybe. It wasn’t the night for it.

Meaning it was her turn to be heard, and you did not want to spend it on yourself.

Something like that. Making it about me the second she finished would have taken something from her. She needed to say it on her own terms.

That is a generous read of your own quiet.

Maybe. It is still true.

I did not say it was untrue. I said it was generous. Both can hold at once.

I lay back against the packed snow, staring up at a sky the wrong color entirely.

I didn’t sleep for a long time after that. Her story kept turning over long after the fire died, closer to my own history than I wanted to look at directly.