Willow

Chapter Six: New Ground

By midafternoon they'd walked longer than either of them had spoken, the cart ruts leading them steadily north and upward through country that grew stranger the farther they climbed. Willow noticed it first in the trees — the pine giving way gradually to stands of spruce and fir she didn't recognize by shape, needles darker, denser, growing in a kind of tangled understory that spoke of ground rarely walked by anything on two legs. The air itself had changed too, thinner and colder, carrying a mineral edge that reminded her faintly of stone recently split open.

"Never been this far north," Reyna admitted, breath fogging as she studied the terrain with open curiosity despite the ache Willow could see settling deeper into her shoulders with every mile. "Camp elders used to talk about the mountains up this way. Said there used to be a road cut right through them, before. Something with a name like it belonged in a story."

"Going-to-the-Sun," Willow said, surprising herself with the memory. "My father mentioned it once. Said it used to be something people drove up just to look at the view. Whole road cut along a cliff face, snow at the top even in summer."

Reyna's eyes went wide, tracking upward toward the distant peaks visible now through gaps in the canopy, jagged and pale with old, permanent snow clinging to their crowns despite the season. "That's it, up there? The mountains he meant?"

"Maybe. Can't say for certain." Willow followed her gaze, something almost wistful moving through her chest at the sight of peaks that had stood through the bombs and everything after, unmoved and indifferent to what had happened at their feet. "Whole world used to drive up mountains for fun. Now it's just something to walk around because it's in our way."

"Funny how that works." Reyna's voice carried a note of dark amusement, the kind that had started showing up more often the farther they got from her ruined camp, grief making room, slowly, for other things to breathe alongside it. "The stuff they used to do for fun is exactly the stuff that'll kill us now if we're not careful."

"Pretty much sums up the whole old world, from what I've heard of it."

They walked on, the ground growing rockier, dotted here and there with wildflowers Willow didn't have names for, clinging stubborn to slopes that shouldn't have supported much of anything. At one point they passed the rusted husk of something Willow guessed had once been a small aircraft, wings long gone, fuselage half-swallowed by moss and creeping vine, and both women slowed without meaning to, studying it in a silence that held more awe than fear.

"You ever seen one of those fly?" Reyna asked, voice hushed, like the wreck deserved quiet the way a grave did.

"No. Heard stories. Father said the sky used to be full of them, once. Hard to picture." Willow studied the twisted metal a moment longer, trying and failing to imagine it whole and airborne, then shook the thought loose and nodded them onward. Wonder was a fine thing to feel, but it didn't put anything in their stomachs, and the sun wasn't going to wait around for either of them to finish marveling at scraps of a world neither had ever truly known.

Not long after, Willow's hand rose again, this time slower, more deliberate, and she sank low into a crouch that Reyna mirrored a half-beat late, still learning the rhythm of it. Ahead, through a gap in the spruce, a mule deer buck stood grazing at the edge of a small clearing, antlers still in velvet, unaware or unconcerned by their presence at this distance.

"This one's mine," Willow murmured, barely a breath of sound. "Watch how I close the ground. Might need this yourself someday, and rabbits won't teach you the patience a deer requires."

She moved forward in stages, freezing each time the buck's head lifted, advancing again only once it dropped back to grazing, an agonizingly slow process that Reyna watched with rapt attention, understanding for the first time just how much discipline lived underneath what had looked, back at that first ridge four days ago, like effortless skill. It took the better part of twenty minutes to close the distance to something Willow trusted, and when she finally drew and loosed, the buck dropped in a single clean motion, barely a stagger before its legs folded.

"That's twenty minutes for one shot," Reyna said, equal parts impressed and daunted, as they approached the fallen animal. "I don't know if I have that kind of patience in me."

"Nobody's born with it. You build it the same way you build calluses — slow, and it hurts a little at first, and then one day you don't notice it anymore." Willow set to field-dressing the buck with efficient, practiced hands, showing Reyna each cut as she made it, naming the organs and the reasons for taking care with each one. "This'll feed us four or five days if we smoke half of it tonight. Good buck. Good ground for finding one, too — remember that clearing shape. Deer like the edges between open and cover, not the middle of either."

Reyna nodded, filing the lesson away with the same careful attention she'd been giving everything since morning, and helped where Willow showed her how, hands growing steadier with the unfamiliar work as the minutes passed.

The rabbit appeared an hour later, freezing mid-hop in a patch of low scrub not thirty feet off the trail, one ear swiveled toward them, weighing whether they were worth the energy of fleeing.

Willow's hand shot out, catching Reyna's arm, stopping her mid-stride. "There," she breathed, barely audible. "Nock an arrow. Slow. Don't look at it directly if you can help it — peripheral vision spooks them less than a hard stare."

Reyna fumbled the arrow from her quiver with hands gone suddenly clumsy, nerves overriding whatever steadiness the morning's practice had built. "I'm going to miss," she whispered.

"Probably," Willow agreed, entirely unbothered. "Draw anyway."

Reyna drew, arms trembling with the effort and the tension both, and loosed a half-second too early, the arrow skittering wide into the brush a full three feet from where the rabbit had been sitting a heartbeat before it bolted for cover, vanishing into the scrub in a single fluid bound.

"Well." Reyna lowered the bow, cheeks flushing despite the cold. "That was humiliating."

"That was your third day holding a bow." Willow retrieved the lost arrow, checking the fletching for damage before tucking it back into Reyna's quiver. "You want to know how many rabbits I missed my third day?"

"How many?"

"All of them. Every single one, for about two months." Willow allowed herself a small, dry smile at the memory, old enough now to be almost fond rather than frustrating. "Rabbits are quick and they know it. Don't judge yourself against a deer standard on a rabbit's timeline. Different animal, different patience required."

"You're very calm about me being terrible at this."

"You're not terrible. You're new." Willow shrugged, already moving them forward again, scanning the tree line out of habit even mid-conversation. "Terrible would be if you gave up because the first one didn't work out. That'd actually worry me."

Reyna huffed something that might've been a laugh, shouldering her bow again with slightly less discouragement than a moment before. "You know, for someone who talks like she doesn't have a lot of practice being nice to people, you're doing a decent job at it."

"Don't get used to it. Limited supply." The dryness in Willow's voice carried just enough warmth underneath it that Reyna caught the joke fully this time, laughing outright, a real laugh, brief but genuine, the first Willow had heard out of her since they'd met.

The grouse came an hour after that, flushed from a thicket by their own footsteps rather than any deliberate stalking, exploding upward in a startling burst of wings that made both women jump before Willow's instincts caught up faster than her surprise. She had an arrow nocked and loosed before conscious thought fully arrived, taking the bird clean out of its low, panicked flight.

"Show-off," Reyna muttered, though there was real admiration buried under the complaint.

"That one wasn't a lesson. That one was dinner." Willow retrieved the bird, checking the kill with quick, practiced hands. "Next one that flushes, you're taking the shot, ready or not. Grouse don't wait around for you to compose yourself."

"Comforting."

"Life rarely waits for anybody to feel ready." Willow tucked the grouse into her pack, already scanning ahead for the next stretch of terrain. "Best lesson I can give you, honestly. Feeling ready's a luxury. Being ready's the only thing that actually matters."

They found the stream not long after, cutting clear and cold through a shallow ravine, fed by snowmelt from the high peaks that had impressed Reyna so thoroughly earlier in the day. Willow crouched at the bank, studying the water's flow, the way it pooled slow and deep beneath an overhanging rock shelf on the far side.

"Fish'll be holding there," she said, pointing toward the shadowed pool. "Slower water, cover from above. Come on. Time for a different kind of patience."

She showed Reyna how to fashion a simple line from cordage in her pack, hook whittled crude from bone salvaged back at the ruined camp, baited with a grub dug from beneath a rotted log nearby. "Fishing's not like the bow," Willow explained, settling onto a flat rock at the water's edge. "Bow's about the moment. This is about waiting the moment out until it comes to you instead."

Reyna settled beside her, line dropped into the pool, and for a long while neither of them spoke, content to let the stream fill the silence with its steady, indifferent rush over stone. The quiet stretched comfortable rather than tense, the first time all day it had done so without either of them working to fill it.

"Can I ask you something without you going all flat and closed-off on me?" Reyna said eventually, eyes on the water.

"Depends what it is."

"Do you ever get lonely? Out here, before me, I mean. Two years is a long time to only talk to yourself."

Willow considered the question honestly, watching her own line for the telltale twitch of a bite. "Talked to myself plenty. Talked to my father too, sometimes, even knowing he wasn't there to hear it. Didn't feel lonely, exactly. Felt like the correct amount of alone for a while." She paused, feeling the truth of the next part settle into her chest before she said it aloud. "Started feeling different toward the end of it. Harder to say if that was loneliness or just tired of my own company."

"And now?"

"Now I've got someone catching arrows in bushes instead of rabbits, so I'd call that an improvement." The dryness returned to Willow's voice, deliberate, deflecting some of the honesty back into safer territory, but Reyna caught the deeper truth underneath it anyway and let it sit without pushing further.

Reyna's line jerked suddenly, hard enough to nearly pull the cordage from her fingers, and she yelped in surprise, scrambling to keep hold of it. "It's — it's actually — Willow, what do I—"

"Steady pull, don't yank it." Willow's hands came up to guide without taking over, patient the same way she'd been all day despite the missed rabbit and the fumbled bow grip. "Let it tire itself out fighting the line before you bring it in. Rushing just loses you the fish."

Reyna followed the instruction, breath coming quick with excitement now rather than nerves, and after a short, clumsy struggle she hauled a modest trout up onto the bank, flopping and silver in the afternoon light. She stared at it like she'd personally reinvented fire.

"I did it. I actually did it." She looked up at Willow, grinning despite the healing split still visible in her lip, an expression that transformed her whole face, bruises and exhaustion briefly forgotten under the simple, uncomplicated pride of the moment.

"You did." Willow allowed the smile to show fully this time, something warm moving behind her usual reserve. "Dinner's officially better than I expected tonight. Good work."

"I want that acknowledged in some official capacity. First fish. Historic moment."

"I'll mention it to absolutely no one, same as everything else out here." But there was no real bite in it, just the easy back-and-forth of two people settling, mile by mile, into something that hadn't existed between them four days ago and now felt, against every hard fact of the world they were walking through, a little bit like the beginning of an actual friendship.

They cleaned the fish together as the light began its long slide toward evening, kneeling side by side at the bank while the water ran cold over their hands, and Willow found herself, without quite deciding to, telling Reyna about the time she'd fallen through thin ice chasing a duck she never even caught, her father's laughter carrying across a frozen pond louder than she'd ever heard it before or since. Reyna laughed so hard at the image that it turned into a wince and a hand pressed to her still-healing ribs, and even that only made her laugh harder once the wince passed, both of them dissolving into the kind of laughter that came easier after a hard day than it ever seemed like it should.

They made camp that night in a shallow hollow ringed by boulders, the smoked venison and pan-fried trout together making the best meal either of them had eaten in longer than Willow cared to count. Reyna ate with the particular hunger of someone whose body had finally started trusting that more food was coming, color returning to her face in a way it hadn't quite managed even after two full days of rest and regular meals.

"Best fish I've ever caught," Reyna said around a mouthful, entirely serious despite the joke of it being her only fish.

"High bar, considering the field." Willow's dry tone had softened somewhere over the course of the day into something that carried genuine warmth beneath it now, less armor and more simple ease.

"Don't ruin it for me. I'm allowed to be proud of my one accomplishment."

"You had three today. Fire-starting, fish, and not falling in the stream while catching it." Willow counted them off on her fingers with mock seriousness. "That's a good day's work, by most standards out here."

Reyna smiled at that, tired but genuine, firelight catching the healing bruises along her cheek in a way that made them look less like wounds and more like the ordinary marks of a hard week finally beginning to fade. "Thank you," she said, quieter now, the humor settling into something more sincere. "Not just for today. For all of it. I know I said it back at the camp, but I don't think I said it right."

"You said it fine." Willow poked at the fire, unused to sitting easily with gratitude, but not deflecting it either, letting it land the way she was slowly learning to let most things about this arrangement land. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow's another day of new ground, and I've got a feeling it won't stay this easy for long."

It wasn't much, measured against Broken Wheel and cart ruts and whatever waited at the end of this trail. But for one afternoon, walking new ground under mountains older than anything either of them fully understood, it was enough.