Chapter 10: What the Frost Left Behind
956 Words
Saoirse P.O.V
My hands were shaking, and a wave of nausea rolled through me, a wash of cost that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with what I had just spent.
'Saoirse.'
Cadryn's voice was low, tight with urgency. His hands closed around my shoulders, steadying me before I realized I was losing my balance. 'Saoirse, look at me.'
'I'm alright.' I knew I wasn't, but the words came out anyway.
'I only wanted him to walk away,' I said quietly, still trying to make sense of it. 'The rest... I don't understand what happened.'
'I know.' Something in Cadryn's expression tightened, relief giving way almost immediately to troubled concentration, as though what had just happened refused to fit into any explanation he trusted.
'Something moved,' he said quietly, more to himself than to me. 'Just now. I felt... something. I don't know what.'
'What does that mean?'
'I don't know.' His gaze lingered on the place where the frost had been. 'But whatever happened wasn't nothing.' He nodded toward it. 'Neither was that.'
'It's fine. I'm fine.'
'You're not fine, and I'm not leaving you sitting on exposed granite until you are steady.' He said it with a flatness that told me the decision was already made.
Before I could argue, he'd pulled us both back off the ridge line entirely, toward a lower stand of pine. Adding the better part of an hour to our route.
An hour we did not have to spare with Brael's clock now running.
—
'That cost us time we needed,' I said, once my vision had steadied and my legs felt solid enough to trust again.
'I'm aware of exactly what it cost us.' His voice had an edge I hadn't heard from him before, directed entirely inward. 'I made the decision anyway, and I'd make it again, and I am furious with myself for how easily I made it.'
'Cadryn…’
'I know what I'm supposed to say.' His voice lowered, the sharpness fading into exhaustion. 'The mission comes first. The objective matters more than one person. I have believed that my entire life.'
I reached for his hand without deciding to, and felt him let me, some of the tightness easing at the simple fact of contact.
'Then we adapt,' I said quietly. 'That is what we do.'
A pause.
'Forty-eight hours, a scout who almost saw us, and an ability I don't fully control yet. We adjust. The same as always.'
'The same as always,' he agreed, but the unease hadn't left him. It had simply settled deeper, hidden beneath the discipline he wore so well, waiting for the next impossible choice.
We moved on before the light could drain completely from the pines. The ridge slipped behind us one careful step at a time, but I glanced back once all the same.
Dennet was long gone.
Even so, I couldn't shake the uneasy certainty that I'd done more than convince him to keep walking. Whatever I'd reached for in that desperate moment had left a mark I couldn't see, one I didn't yet understand.
We covered another stretch of ground before I spoke again.
'What happened to you back there?'
Cadryn looked across at me.
'When I used... whatever that was.' I didn't know what to name it. 'You reacted before the frost appeared. What did you feel?'
He was quiet for several strides.
'A pulse,' he said at last. 'Not pain. More like the moment before a held breath finally leaves your lungs. Except it wasn't mine to release.'
His gaze remained on the narrow game trail ahead.
'It came from somewhere I haven't felt anything in eleven months.'
The words settled heavily between us.
'Has that ever happened before?'
'Not since before the trial.'
He answered without looking at me.
'I spent the last eleven months believing that part of my life was gone for good. I learned not to expect otherwise.'
I watched him in silence.
'And now?'
He let out a slow breath.
'Now I don't know what to believe.'
We walked without speaking for several minutes, the forest gradually changing around us. The black-pines of the Riftlands gave way to taller evergreens whose branches knitted together high above the trail, swallowing more of the afternoon light.
I found myself replaying the encounter on the ridge instead.
The compression. Dennet walking away. The impossible frost. Cadryn's reaction.
None of it felt like separate events anymore. It felt like pieces of something larger, fitting together according to rules neither of us understood.
The silence finally broke when Cadryn slowed.
I almost walked into him.
'What is it?'
He didn't answer immediately. His attention was fixed beyond the trees.
Following his gaze, I picked out a line of weathered stone markers half-hidden beneath moss. A wolf's crest had been carved into its face long ago, softened by years of rain.
His attention wasn't on the marker itself.
It was on the freshly cut posts standing beyond it.
He took a slow step forward, studying the ground instead of the timber.
'This wasn't here before,' he said quietly.
'You know these markers?' He nodded once.
'I crossed this border more times than I can count.'
His eyes swept the trees beyond it, measuring distances, searching patterns I couldn't yet see.
'They've shortened the patrol intervals.'
A cold knot settled in my stomach.
'How can you tell?
'
'Because there should be one marker every half mile.' He pointed deeper into the forest.
Another stone stood barely two hundred yards ahead.
Then another beyond that. His expression hardened.
'They have tightened Virenmoor's border security.' His gaze lifted toward the darkening forest beyond the markers.
'Getting into Duskfen just became much harder.’
- Writer
