Willow

Chapter Three: North

The fog burned off by midmorning, leaving the sky a hard, pale blue that gave no cover at all. Willow didn't like days like this. Clear skies meant clear sightlines, and clear sightlines cut both ways — she could see farther, but so could anyone else with eyes and a reason to use them. She kept to the tree line where she could, skirting the open meadows instead of crossing them straight, even though it cost time neither of them had much spare of.

Reyna kept pace well enough for someone who'd spent the better part of a week tied to an axle, though Willow noticed the careful way she favored her ribs on the uneven ground, the small hitch in her breath whenever the trail dropped or climbed sharp. She didn't say anything about it. Reyna hadn't asked for coddling, and Willow figured a woman who'd survived what she had wouldn't thank her for pointing out the obvious.

They'd been walking maybe two hours, the sun climbing slow behind them, when Reyna finally broke the quiet that had settled between them since they'd left the cold fire pit behind.

"So where are you from?" she asked, casual, like she was working up to it slowly. "Originally, I mean. Before all the wandering."

Willow's eyes stayed on the tree line ahead, tracking a break in the brush that could've been a game trail or could've been something else entirely. "West of here. Higher up, mostly."

"That's not really an answer."

"It's the one I've got." Willow said it without heat, just flat fact, the same tone she'd use to note the wind direction or the time of day.

Reyna huffed something between a laugh and a sigh, adjusting the strap of the pack Willow had lent her. "Fair enough. Let me guess differently, then. You're not from around the valley proper — I'd have heard of a woman who shoots like you if you were. People talk. Word travels between camps even out here, especially about somebody worth talking about." She glanced sideways, testing. "Most folks who wander this deep into Flathead country either came from Kalispell way originally, or they're passing through from somewhere east, over the passes. You've got neither look. Too comfortable out here. Too much like the land raised you instead of a town."

Willow's mouth twitched, not quite amused, not quite annoyed. Reyna wasn't wrong, and there was something almost impressive in how quickly she'd pieced that much together from a day and a half of company. "Land did raise me, more or less. Kalispell's not where I started, no."

"So where'd you start?"

"Does it matter?"

"Not really." Reyna shrugged, wincing slightly at the motion. "I'm just tired of the quiet. Figured talking about something would make the walking go faster. You don't have to tell me your life story. I just like knowing who I'm walking two days with."

Willow considered that while she stepped over a fallen branch, testing it first with the toe of her boot out of habit before trusting her full weight to the ground beyond it. There was something fair in the request, even if it sat uneasy in her chest the way most personal questions did after two years of nobody asking them.

"Grew up further into the mountains," she said finally. "Higher and rougher than this. My parents picked a spot nobody else wanted because nobody else could work it. No settlement, no neighbors. Just us and whatever we could hunt, fish, or grow." She paused, watching a hawk cut lazy circles overhead, the same unhurried patience she'd seen the day before over the lakebed. "I've been wandering about two years now. Valley's not home. Nowhere's really home anymore. Just places I pass through."

"Why leave, if you had a spot nobody else wanted and it worked?"

That question landed closer to the bone than the others, and Willow felt it land, a small tightening behind her ribs that had nothing to do with the pace of the walk. "Wasn't much reason to stay once it stopped being the three of us," she said, and left it there, flat and final in a way that closed the door on the topic more clearly than any words could have.

Reyna caught the tone and didn't push further, which Willow noted with something like gratitude, though she didn't say so. Instead the other woman fell quiet for a stretch, matching Willow's pace, both of them listening to the wind work through the pines and the distant, directionless call of some bird neither of them bothered naming.

They crossed a shallow creek an hour later, cold enough that Reyna hissed through her teeth wading through it in Willow's spare boots, water climbing past the ankle in the deeper channel. Willow crossed without comment, scanning the far bank before she committed to it, eyes moving over the brush line the way they'd been moving all morning — not paranoid, exactly, just thorough, the habit of someone who'd learned the hard way that the difference between paranoid and careful was usually measured in how long you lived.

They hadn't gone another quarter mile past the creek when Willow's hand came up, flat and sudden, the universal signal for stop that needed no explanation. Reyna froze mid-step, breath catching, eyes going wide as she scanned the brush for whatever Willow had seen.

It took Reyna a moment to spot it — a black bear, young by the look of it, maybe two years old and still building the bulk it would need for winter, working over a rotted log thirty yards off the trail, utterly absorbed in whatever grubs it was digging free. Willow held still, reading the animal's posture the way she'd read a hundred bears before it: ears forward, body loose, no huffing or false charges, nothing that spoke of a mother nearby or a temperament looking for trouble. Just a young bear filling its belly before the cold really set in, same as everything else out here trying to survive the coming months.

"Don't run," Willow said, barely above a breath, eyes still on the animal. "Don't look away either. Just back up slow, same way we came."

Reyna obeyed without question, moving backward with careful, measured steps, and Willow matched her, bow still slack in her hand but ready, an arrow's draw away from nocked if the bear's mood changed in the next several seconds. It didn't. The bear lifted its head once, caught their scent or their movement, considered them with the mild disinterest of something that had already decided they weren't worth the trouble, and went back to its log.

They gave it a wide half circle through the trees, adding twenty minutes to the walk that neither of them complained about, and once they'd put enough distance behind them that the tension had drained back out of Reyna's shoulders, she let out a shaky breath that turned into something like a laugh.

"I've seen bears before," she admitted, "just never that close, and never without a fence between us."

"Fences make people forgetful." Willow's voice carried the faintest note of dry humor, checking the wind direction out of old habit even as they walked on. "Out here there's no fence. Just knowing what a body's about to do before it does it. Bear wasn't looking for trouble. Most things aren't, if you don't go looking for it first."

"And the ones that are looking for it?"

"Different problem entirely." Willow didn't elaborate further, and Reyna didn't ask her to, the moment settling back into the rhythm of walking, boots on packed dirt, wind combing through branches overhead.

"You always this quiet when you're walking?" Reyna asked once they were both across, wringing water from the hem of her borrowed shirt.

"When I'm walking somewhere I don't know, yes." Willow's gaze didn't leave the tree line even as she answered. "Don't know what's between here and your camp. Don't know what's left of your camp either, for that matter. Man who isn't watching the ground he's walking on usually finds out the hard way what he missed."

"That a warning or just how you talk?"

"Bit of both." A small, dry note crept into Willow's voice despite herself, and Reyna caught it, some of the tension in her shoulders easing slightly at the sound of something like humor returning to the conversation.

They walked on, the terrain climbing gently as the morning wore toward noon, pine giving way in patches to stands of aspen that had gone gold early this year, leaves trembling in a wind that carried the first real bite of the coming season. Willow marked the landscape as she went, the way she always did, filing away landmarks without meaning to — a split boulder here, a dead snag struck by lightning there, the particular bend of a dry creek bed that would flood come spring melt. Habits she'd never bothered to name, just things her father's voice had drilled into her early enough that they'd become instinct rather than instruction.

"Can I ask you something else?" Reyna said, after they'd gone another silent stretch, this one comfortable rather than tense.

"You're going to whether I say yes or no."

"Probably." Reyna almost smiled at that, the expression sitting strange and rusty on a face still mapped with bruises. "Are you scared? About what we might find. You don't have to be brave about it just because you're the one with the bow."

Willow considered the question honestly, turning it over the way she turned over most things before answering. "Scared's not quite the word. I've seen what men do to a place when they want it bad enough. Seen it more than once, different valleys, different years." Her jaw set slightly, eyes still tracking the tree line out of pure habit now, muscle memory more than active alertness. "I'm not scared of what we'll find. I'm careful about it. Difference matters, where we're headed."

"What's the difference?"

"Scared makes you freeze, or run, or do something stupid because your body's ahead of your head." Willow's voice was even, instructional almost, the tone of someone repeating a lesson she'd been taught rather than one she'd invented herself. "Careful just means you go in with your eyes open and don't expect anything good until you've seen it for yourself. Hope's fine. Just don't let it get ahead of what your eyes are telling you."

Reyna was quiet for a moment, absorbing that. "Your father teach you that too?"

"Most things I know, he taught me one way or another." Willow's tone didn't invite more on the subject, and Reyna let it drop again, though something had shifted subtly between them in the exchange — less the wariness of strangers thrown together by circumstance, more the beginning shape of something that might, given enough miles, start to resemble trust.

They made camp that first night in a shallow rock shelter Willow found tucked into a hillside, good cover from wind and mostly hidden from anyone passing at a distance. She built the fire smaller than the night before, more out of habit than any specific threat she'd seen, and they ate the last of what she'd managed to snare that afternoon — a pair of grouse, stringy but filling, roasted quick over the coals.

Reyna slept hard again, exhaustion outweighing whatever nerves tomorrow's uncertainty might have stirred up, and Willow took first watch as she had the night before, back against cold stone, bow across her knees, eyes on a darkness that told her nothing new.

The second day started colder, frost silvering the grass in the shadowed hollows, breath fogging in front of both their faces as they broke camp before the sun had properly cleared the ridgeline. Willow chewed on a strip of dried meat as they walked, saving what little remained for Reyna, whose appetite had started coming back stronger now that a day and a half of food and rest had done its work on her.

The terrain grew rougher as they climbed toward higher ground, following landmarks Reyna half-remembered from a flight in the dark days before. A rocky spine of ridge that looked, Reyna said, uncertain, a little like one she'd passed running the other direction. A creek that might have been the same creek, or might not — she couldn't be sure, and Willow didn't press her on it, understanding well enough what memory did to a person running for their life in the dark. Fear had a way of scrambling landmarks, turning a straight run into a blur of trees and panic that made no sense in hindsight.

They stopped briefly at midday to eat and let Reyna's ribs rest, sitting on a fallen log with a view down into a shallow valley below, the land rolling out gold and green and gray in the early autumn light. From here Willow could see the country changing character the farther north it stretched — the pine giving way to stands of birch and aspen, the ground growing rockier, more broken, the kind of terrain that offered plenty of cover but also plenty of places for something to hide unseen.

"How much farther, you think?" Willow asked, studying the horizon with the same patient attention she gave everything.

Reyna followed her gaze, chewing slow on a strip of jerky, brow furrowed in concentration. "Half a day, maybe less, if that ridge is the one I think it is." She pointed with her chin toward a long gray spine of rock cutting across the horizon to the northeast. "Camp sits in a hollow just past it, along a stream that never freezes all the way even in deep winter. Spring-fed, real deep. That's half of why we picked the spot."

"Smart place to build, if the water holds."

"It held twelve years." Reyna's voice caught faintly on the number again, same as it had the night before, and Willow let the silence sit a moment before standing, offering a hand to help the other woman up from the log.

By midafternoon the land had started to feel different in a way Willow couldn't quite name yet, but trusted anyway, the particular unease of terrain that had seen recent violence, though she couldn't have said what tipped her off exactly — quieter birdsong, maybe, or the absence of the small animal traffic she'd have expected this deep into good cover. No squirrels chattering warnings from the branches. No deer sign fresh enough to matter. Just a stillness that sat wrong against everything her instincts had learned to expect from healthy ground. She slowed their pace without announcing why, eyes sweeping wider arcs across the tree line, hand resting a little more ready near her quiver than it had been that morning.

A hundred yards on, she found the first sign that told her plainly something here had gone badly wrong — a scorched patch of ground off the trail, blackened grass radiating out from a center that had burned hot enough to char the bark on a nearby pine trunk. Not lightning. Lightning didn't burn in tidy, deliberate circles like that. Someone had set a fire here, recently enough that the smell of char still clung faint to the air when the wind shifted right.

Reyna's breath caught audibly at the sight of it, one hand coming up to press against her mouth, and Willow reached back without looking, closing two fingers briefly around the other woman's wrist — not quite comfort, but something adjacent to it, an anchor offered without words.

"Could be nothing," Willow said, low, though she didn't fully believe it herself. "Could be somebody clearing brush. Doesn't mean camp."

"It's close to camp." Reyna's voice had gone thin, stretched taut over something close to panic. "Too close."

"Then we go slower, not faster." Willow kept her voice level, deliberately calm, the way she might have gentled a spooked animal. "Panicking gets people killed out here quicker than almost anything else. We look. We don't guess."

"We're close," Reyna said, voice dropping to something barely above a whisper, some old instinct of her own kicking in to match the shift in Willow's bearing. "I don't know how I know. I just do."

Willow nodded once, slow, and didn't say what she was thinking — that she felt it too, that particular held-breath quality the land got right before it showed you something you couldn't unsee. Whatever waited past the next ridge, camp or ashes, sixteen people or none at all, they were close enough now that guessing would only cost them the advantage of arriving with eyes open instead of hearts already breaking.

"Stay behind me from here," Willow said quietly, adjusting her grip on the bow, feeling the familiar weight of it settle into readiness. "Whatever's up there, we look before we walk into it."

Reyna nodded, jaw tight, and fell in a half step behind, and together they moved the last stretch toward the ridge in a silence that had nothing comfortable left in it at all.