Willow

Chapter Eight: Thin Trail

Willow woke to an empty camp and didn't reach for her knife.

That alone told her something about how far the last week had carried her — six days ago, waking to find herself alone anywhere would have had her upright and armed before her eyes had finished adjusting to the light. Now she simply lay still a moment, taking stock of the morning the way she always did, and noticed what was missing before she noticed what wasn't there to worry about. Reyna's blanket, folded rather than abandoned. The waterskins, both of them, gone from where they'd hung on a branch overnight. Reyna's boots — Willow's spare boots, technically, though she'd stopped thinking of them that way somewhere around day three — absent from beside the dead fire.

Water run, then. Simple as that.

She lay a moment longer, staring up at the pale morning sky through the gap in the boulders, turning over the strange, quiet fact of how easily she'd trusted the conclusion. Two years alone had trained her to assume the worst first and ask questions after, to treat every absence as a potential threat until proven otherwise. Somewhere over the last week that reflex had softened, just slightly, just enough that she'd woken to an empty camp and thought water run before she'd thought anything sharper. She wasn't sure yet whether that softening was a comfort or a liability. Maybe it could be both at once, the way most things about traveling with someone else seemed to be.

Willow sat up slowly, testing the stiffness in her bandaged forearm, relieved to find the pain had settled into something manageable overnight rather than worsening the way a bad infection might have threatened. She checked the wrapping Reyna had applied with such fierce concentration the night before — clean, tight, competent work for someone four days into learning any of this. Another small thing to be grateful for, filed away alongside everything else these last days had taught her about the woman she'd pulled off an axle in a draw that already felt like it belonged to some earlier, simpler version of this journey.

She built the fire back up from the coals, more out of habit than immediate need, and turned her attention to the growing problem she'd been putting off since the ruined camp — her quiver, which had thinned considerably faster than she liked over the last week between the raiders, the practice shots, the grouse and rabbit and the deer that had fed them so well the day before. Four true arrows remained, fletched properly and trusted at range. The rest were scavenged rough work from the camp's ruins, serviceable but unreliable past thirty yards, the kind of arrows that might fly true or might curve wide depending on factors she couldn't fully predict.

Not good enough, not for what waited ahead of them.

She dug into her pack for the small bundle of straight-grained saplings she'd cut and set aside two days back, along with the flint knife, sinew, and the handful of grouse feathers she'd saved rather than discarded after the previous day's kill. Old habits, these — her father's hands guiding hers through this exact process a hundred times over before she'd ever trusted herself to do it alone, and she fell into the familiar rhythm of it now without needing to think much past her fingers' own memory. Shave the shaft round and true first, testing it against the light for any hidden warp the eye might otherwise miss. Notch the nock end clean, deep enough to seat a string without splitting under the tension. Split the feather quills and bind them in careful thirds, spaced even along the shaft's back end, sinew wound tight and finished with a small dab of pitch to hold everything fast against weather and use.

She was three shafts into the work, shaving the first sapling smooth and straight with slow, even strokes of the blade, when she heard Reyna's footsteps returning through the brush — not trying particularly hard to be quiet, which told Willow the other woman had either grown comfortable enough with the terrain to relax a little, or was excited about something and forgetting her lessons in the process. Given what came into view a moment later, Willow suspected the latter.

Reyna emerged from the tree line with both waterskins full and slung over one shoulder, and in her other hand, held up with unmistakable pride despite the slight awkwardness of the grip, a rabbit.

"Don't say anything yet," Reyna said, breathless, cheeks flushed with more than just the cool morning air. "Let me tell it properly first."

Willow set down the half-finished arrow shaft, allowing herself a small, genuine smile at the sight. "Go on, then."

"I was filling the skins at the stream, and I heard something in the brush, and I remembered what you said about not looking straight at it, and I just — " Reyna held the rabbit up higher, as if it might not be believed otherwise. "I had the bow slung on my back out of habit, since you made me start carrying it everywhere even to go get water, and I just did it. Nocked, drew, waited for it to stop moving the way you showed me, and I actually hit it. First try. Well — first try today. Doesn't count all the misses from yesterday, obviously, but still."

"Still counts plenty." Willow rose to inspect the kill, turning it over with an approving eye. Clean shot, through the chest rather than some lucky graze — the kind of placement that spoke of instinct starting to take root rather than pure accident. "That's a good shot. Better than good, for four days in."

"I might have also nearly fallen in the stream doing it," Reyna admitted, some of the pride deflating into sheepish honesty. "Got excited, forgot to watch my footing on the bank. Recovered before I actually went in, though, so I'm counting that as a win too."

"I'll allow it." Willow's dry humor had crept fully back by now, easy as it had ever been despite the healing wounds along her arm. "Rabbit and fish and one deer stalk in five days. You're building yourself quite a resume."

Reyna set the rabbit down near the fire, settling onto a flat rock across from where Willow had resumed her work on the arrow shafts, watching with open curiosity as Willow's hands moved through the familiar motions — shaving, straightening, testing the flex of each shaft against her palm before setting it aside to notch the fletching groove. "You're making new ones. Because of the ones you used yesterday? The wolf, I mean."

"Partly that. Partly I've been low a while now and just hadn't had the quiet to sit and do it properly." Willow held up one nearly finished shaft, sighting down its length to check the straightness. "Good arrows take time. Rushed ones fly wrong when you need them most, which is usually the worst possible moment to find out."

"Can you teach me? The making, not just the shooting?"

"Eventually. Not today — we've got ground to cover, and this isn't something you learn in an afternoon between one camp and the next." Willow set the finished shaft aside with the others, three now laid neat in a row, and reached for a fourth sapling. "But yes. Eventually."

Reyna nodded, satisfied with that, and busied herself skinning the rabbit with hands that had grown noticeably steadier over the last five days, less hesitant with the blade than she'd been even yesterday morning. They worked in companionable silence for a while, the fire crackling low between them, morning light strengthening slowly overhead as the sun cleared the ridge to the east.

It was Willow who broke the quiet eventually, setting aside the arrow shaft in her hands and fixing Reyna with the kind of look that told the other woman a harder conversation was coming.

"We need to talk about the trail," Willow said, "before we walk much farther on it."

Reyna's hands stilled over the rabbit, some of the morning's lightness draining from her expression. "What about it?"

"We've had one set of cart tracks to follow since we left your camp. Just the one. No side trails branching off, no second party's sign crossing it, nothing to tell us if this cart split off from a larger group somewhere or joined up with one further ahead." Willow kept her voice level, careful, the tone she'd use laying out ground before a hunt rather than delivering bad news outright. "Ground's gotten rockier the last half day too. Harder to read tracks in stone and thin soil than it was in that soft valley floor back near your camp. If this trail thins out entirely, or crosses ground we can't read, we could lose it."

"Lose it how? Like — lose it and not find it again?" Reyna's voice had gone tight, the rabbit forgotten in her hands.

"Could happen. I won't pretend it couldn't." Willow held her gaze steady, unflinching but not unkind. "I'm not saying that to scare you. I'm saying it because you deserve the truth of what we're walking into, same as I'd want it if our places were reversed. Hope's fine. I told you that back at your camp. But hope that isn't honest about the ground underneath it gets people hurt worse than the disappointment would've, if they'd just known going in."

Reyna was quiet a long moment, jaw working, visibly fighting down whatever panic wanted to rise up at the thought of the trail simply vanishing beneath them. "So what do we do? If it does thin out?"

"Few things." Willow held up a finger, counting them off the way she'd counted survival lessons days before, methodical, grounding. "First, we read everything we can while the tracks are still readable — depth, spacing, how the wheels sat in turns, so if the trail does split later we've got a baseline to match pieces of it against. Second, we watch for anything besides tracks. Smoke, cleared ground, worn paths that suggest regular traffic rather than a one-time cart. Broken Wheel's got to be moving people and supplies regular enough that they'll have left more sign than just this one trail, somewhere ahead. Third—" she paused, softening slightly, "if we do lose it entirely, we don't panic and just wander blind hoping to stumble onto something. We find high ground, we look for smoke or structures, we ask if there's anyone left alive out here who might know more than we do. There's always a third option. Giving up isn't the only alternative to a trail that's easy to follow."

Some of the tightness eased out of Reyna's shoulders at that, not fully, but enough that Willow could see the words had landed the way she'd intended — honest, not comforting for comfort's own sake, but not hopeless either. "You really think we can find them. Even if the trail goes cold."

"I think it's harder than either of us would like. I think it's not impossible." Willow held her gaze, deliberate. "I've tracked wounded game through worse country than this, days after the trail should've gone cold by any reasonable measure, and found it anyway because I kept my eyes open and didn't quit just because the easy signs ran out. This isn't so different. Harder, because the stakes are worse and the ground's less familiar. But not different in the ways that matter most."

Reyna nodded slowly, absorbing that, some of the fear in her expression settling into something more like grim resolve. "Okay. Then we watch everything. Every sign, every little thing, so we don't miss whatever's there to find."

"That's the idea." Willow allowed a small, approving smile, gathering the finished arrows and slotting them carefully into her quiver alongside the salvaged ones, a little more confident in her supply now than she'd been an hour before. "We'll eat, break camp, and get moving. Slower pace today, I think — more time spent actually reading the ground than covering distance fast. Better to move careful and stay on the trail than move quick and lose it entirely chasing speed we don't actually need yet."

Reyna finished with the rabbit, spitting it over the fire to cook while Willow packed away her arrow-making tools, and for a while neither of them spoke, the quiet comfortable again despite the weight of the conversation just passed. The rabbit cooked slow, fat crackling into the coals, and Reyna watched the cart ruts leading north from where she sat, jaw set with the particular determination of someone who'd decided, fully now, that whatever the trail demanded of her, she intended to give it.

"Willow," she said eventually, breaking the quiet. "Whatever happens — however this goes. I'm glad it's you doing this with me. I don't think I say that enough."

"You say it plenty." Willow's dry tone returned, gentle rather than deflecting this time. "But I hear it, every time. Same goes both ways, for what it's worth."

They ate as the sun climbed fully clear of the ridge, the rabbit good and simple, seasoned with nothing more than the last of the salt Willow had salvaged from the ruined camp's toolshed, and for a while the meal passed in the easy, companionable quiet that had become familiar between them over the last handful of days. Reyna picked the bones cleaner than she needed to, the particular thoroughness of someone who'd learned already, this early into the wandering life, not to waste anything that had cost effort to catch.

"Can I ask you something practical?" Reyna said, wiping her hands on her thigh once the meal was finished. "Not about the trail. About after. If we find them — if there's people left to find — what happens then? Do we bring them back south? Rebuild somewhere? I haven't let myself think that far ahead, but I probably should."

Willow considered the question while she finished packing away the last of the arrow-making tools, tucking flint and sinew back into the worn leather roll she carried them in. "That's not really mine to answer. Your people, your camp, your choice what comes next for them." She paused, weighing how much more to offer. "But if you're asking what I'd do, in your place — I wouldn't decide anything until I knew what was actually left to decide about. No sense planning a rebuild around people who might not be there to rebuild with."

"Fair." Reyna nodded slowly, some of the anxious energy in the question settling now that it had been given room to breathe rather than fester unspoken. "I just keep needing something to plan toward. Makes the walking easier, having a shape to put on the other side of it."

"Then plan toward finding out. That's shape enough for now." Willow shouldered her quiver, newly heavy with the finished arrows, testing the balance of it against her back with quiet satisfaction. "Rest sorts itself out once we're not just guessing anymore."

They broke camp not long after, packs settled and bows slung, moving out together into the rocky, uncertain ground ahead where the cart ruts waited to see whether they'd hold their secrets or finally start giving them up. Willow led at a slower pace than the days before, eyes tracking the ground with a patience that had nothing to do with tiredness and everything to do with not wanting to miss the one detail that might make the difference between a trail followed and a trail lost entirely, and behind her, a half step back and watching everything Willow watched with her own steadily sharpening eyes, Reyna matched the pace without complaint, the rabbit and the water and the hard conversation all settling into her like ballast, steadying rather than weighing her down.