They shivered into the open with the brittle dignity of men who suspected the joke to be on them, but had not yet been told its punchline.
Even the good boots weren't armored for this sort of cold, wind that slotted knives down the line of your spine and left your ears humming like tuning forks.
Soren flexed his fingers inside the new gloves, feeling the burn of motion in every cut and scar, then cinched the cloak tighter around his throat.
It smelled of woodsmoke, talc, and underneath, the faintest memory of wet animal, like the skin had lain for months in a kennel ring before they'd boiled the color in.
The other three, Tavren, Rhain, plus a haystack kid called Orsell, lagged until the quartermaster's glare pressed them forward.
Above, the sun was little more than a white smudge behind the clouds, and the city wall, once they'd crossed the outer cluster of blocks, shrank fast into a memory.
Soren tried not to watch it recede.
"Feels wrong," Tavren muttered, once they'd breached the first pasture gate. "City's supposed to follow you. Or at least send a song, even if it's curses."
No one answered. There was nothing to answer with.
Every step stretched the line of their convoy farther from the world as Soren knew it and deeper into a white expanse he'd only ever admired from rooftops, untouchable, unowned.
They kept to the spill of the old river road, a path two men wide, the snow tamped hard in the center and loose in the margins.
Drifts leaned up against the fenceposts, taller than Soren in places, so that every hundred paces they had to shoulder into it, fists and knees churning to keep forward.
His feet soaked through quick. The wet felt good for the first hour, then evolved into something personal.
They were meant to join the grain-seller at the Bonewell fork.
The instructions, spoken and then again written in a block script Soren could barely read, were simple: arrive before dusk.
Stay with the merchant until relieved by the city's next patrol. Soren recited it under his breath, not for reassurance, but to keep the wind's voice out of his head.
At the fork, the world seemed to flatten and gather itself, as if the land had paused to listen.
The Bonewell stood half-buried by snow, a fat stone ring set in the ground. Someone had carved a face on the capstone, wide mouth, crimped eyes, though time had half-melted the expression until it looked both terrified and hugely amused.
A wagon waited on the path, its upper frame tarped in a quilt of patched hide, the horses hitched and steaming out their own small, urgent clouds.
The merchant, short, wrapped in velvet the color of dried blood, watched them with a predator's patience.
Face round, hands skinned to a deep-creased red. His eyes were glassy, the kind Soren recognized from drinking men who never paid their tabs.
"You the Ashgard?" he asked.
"We're the extant," Tavren replied, proud of the word. "You the grain?"
The man eyed Tavren, then Soren, then the others. "I'm whatever keeps to the road and stays breathing. Let's load up and move, if you don't fancy explaining to the farmer sons why their spring bread's short."
They distributed themselves as instructed: Soren to the side, covering the blind angle; Tavren and Orsell to the rear, near the tailgate and walking in the wagon's wake; Rhain assigned to the front, cursing under his breath each time the wagon jounced and the wind dumped a white hand of powder down his collar.
The first mile passed in silence, save the deep grind of cartwheels and the slap of leather on horsehide.
Soren found his thoughts bouncing, untethered, between the back of the merchant's fat head, and the slow, ritual warmth at his chest, steady as a heartbeat, hidden under coat and shirt, close as a secret.
It was different, now that he was outside the wall. If within Nordhav the memory had been a low fire, here it was an optic nerve flashing with afterimages.
Every so often, Soren blinked and felt himself both on the road and slightly off to the side, vision doubled and stuttered, the snow and sky briefly tinged with the colorless blue he'd seen in the sword's old dreams.
He kept pace, boots crunching, eyes raking the white for shape or movement.
There'd been stories, even in the street schools, about what haunted the fields: scavenger bands, Mage pickets, the rare beast gone mad from hunger and from the war's old leavings.
But mostly, it was the stories themselves, that if you passed the Bonewell after sunset, your tongue would blacken by morning; that the snow remembered every footstep and could call you back, years later, to account for how you'd trespassed.
Tavren yawned, loud but fake. "If you get to choose, would you rather die gutted, or freeze to death?"
"Gutted," Orsell said. "Quicker."
Rhain, up front, didn't turn. "Depends who's doing the gutting."
The merchant grunted. "You girls chatter this much inside the city, or is it just nerves when the wall's behind you?"
Soren said nothing. The cold had climbed past discomfort into a level of numb where each movement felt stylized, as if his arms were props manned by an eccentric puppeteer.
With each breath the Remnant pulsed, the echo of blue flickering at the edge of his vision, insistent and, this far from city stone, much less interested in hiding itself.
It was three hours to the relay marker, a hardstand of broken brick topped by a bell caged in corroded brass. The merchant called a halt. Soren fanned out to check the nearby drifts.
Nothing moved, nothing but the wind. They circled the wagon, hands tucked, trading glances out of habit rather than suspicion.
Soren leaned against the cold brick, feeling the city in his body but not in the landscape.
It struck him that for the first time, if only for a league or two, he was not actively being watched by a hierarchy of jeering boys or the godless gaze of House Ashgard.
Only the Remnant seemed to have an audience for his heart.
He waited. The assignment was to escort, not to think. Yet the memory of last night, or three nights ago, hard to tell, in the chronology of dreams, stitched on him the urge to ask, even if only in his own head:
'What are you, really?'
The answer did not come as a voice. It was a repetition of the same drab scene, overlaid with slices of color and impossible memory: the grain wagon, but older, the wood charred, sky blown open with stars and the world's border gone to glass.
Instead of three horses, a team of armored men pulled the cart, their faces gaunt and streaked with runes, a sabbath of the dead. Not a hallucination, Soren thought. A rehearsal.
He stood up, stretched, then blinked until the world aligned again.
Rhain padded over, eyes darting. "You all right?"
Soren nodded. "Just cold."
Rhain's face, pale with blue splotches, pinched. "When we get back, you heard what they said? That if we made it clean, we get first pick of the real weapons. Maybe even the blue."
Soren glanced at him, not understanding.
"The blue," Rhain insisted. "Mage-steel. Oathkeeper's offcuts, sometimes. They save it for officers, but…"
He trailed off, noticed Soren's lack of reaction, then shrugged. "Maybe it's nothing."
He walked away, embarrassment shrugged off along with the rest of his city self.
The merchant barked that they'd lingered long enough. They loaded up. The road ran for another hour in the darkening light.
Past the markers, the snow peeled away in strips, the ground struck flat and mean by decades of war. Soren saw, far off, the ribs of a house snapped open, its black timbers making a mockery of the city's regular lines.
He squinted. Something in the silhouette suggested a flag, but more likely it was a sheet of torn canvas, clicking in the wind. He kept walking.
Behind him, Tavren and Orsell had begun to talk low, voices pressed to a whisper when they thought no one could hear.
Soren caught only the odd phrase: "Heard they eat the horses first," and a laugh, then, "Not if you're already gone." He let the words pass through him. Everything cold, everything private.
Near twilight, they passed a set of iron nails staked in a crossroads pattern, the metal gone to orange with rust.
Soren felt his heart flex tighter, the pressure, if not painful, then at least keenly alive.
He put his hand to the hidden shard, as if to hold it in place. At his touch, the sensation spiked, a slow pour of warmth sliding up the tendons of his arm, into the meat of his shoulder.
He almost expected Valenna to speak. But she didn't. Instead, the sense of audience grew, then split; Soren traced the feeling outward, all the way to the edge of the snow where two figures, darker than the wind, waited.
He hissed, "Stop."
The wagon slowed. Rhain tensed; Tavren, too, though not so much as to give away a real fear. The merchant muttered a curse and reached for the club lashed under his seat.
The figures stepped into the open. Coats black as a salt cask, hats slung low, both armed.
The taller one had a face like a spade, narrow, sharp, everything chewed down to the essence of suspicion.
The other, barely out of boyhood, only stared, the kind of stare that added not a thing to the world except the certainty that this moment would repeat, again and again, for as long as someone else's memory endured.
Soren's hand drifted toward his belt; the knife there was third-rate, the Remnant a last resort. Tavren muttered, "Bandits. Or worse, cousins with a grudge."
The taller one spoke. "Evening. It's cold for the road."
The merchant hunched, unconvinced. "We're on House escort. Move on."
The man's eyes flicked from Soren to each of the others, then to the wagon. "Heard there was a bounty on westbound grain. Not worth much, but…" He looked at the snow, then back up. "But even gutter-boys get hungry."
No movement. No threat uttered. The threat, Soren felt, was in the patience, in the discipline of two men willing to freeze a sundown waiting to see how the other would blink.
The shard, under his coat, set up a vibration that made Soren's teeth ache. He tried to focus, to be, if not Valenna, then at least someone who could fake her memory.
The air thinned. No one spoke for a full minute.
The taller one moved first, hands free of weapons but loose at the sides. "We'll walk past," he said, to no one. "No need for mess."
They did. Soren watched the two figures march off, never once looking back. When the wagon started again, the merchant exhaled so hard Soren could see it billow, like the afterburn of some great machine.
They made camp that night not at the next marker, but in the lee of a ruined fence that cut the wind into smaller, less intelligent pieces.
Soren drew first watch, sat cross-legged behind the wagon, and waited for the cold to stop thinking about him.
He expected Tavren to snipe a joke, or for Orsell to start snoring. He expected, more than anything, a word from Valenna, some sharp-edged advice or rebuke. Instead, the voice that reached him was his own. It said: "You don't belong here, and you never did."
He trusted it enough to keep awake through the entire night.