Night deadened the air to glass. For an hour, Soren watched frost spread in spiderbones across the edge of his boot, crackling with the expansion of each shallow breath.
The sky, blacker now, the clouds strained paper-thin, hung like a threat no one had time to mutter.
Camp was a huddle behind the crippled wagon, four youth and the merchant, waiting out dusk and the less-predictable dangers that arrived after.
Nobody argued; even Tavren, always the first to provoke, settled for tossing splinters into the wedge-frozen fire, each pop a rebuke to the notion that any of them could still feel their hands.
Fatigue was the only warmth. Rhain rolled a coin between his fingers, the old, nervous habit fighting hard to outlive the cold.
Orsell, soaked through from the slip at noon, hunched, shaking so hard it made his teeth sound like icicles rattling in the city's bonewind chimes.
The merchant, legs tucked under a scrap of horse blanket, stared out past the dead reach of the road as if what waited there might decide to pass them by, once it saw how meager the haul really was.
Soren waited for hunger to kill the shaking. It was the city way: after a while, even fear starved to a manageable whine.
He didn't sleep, though he drifted, head on knees, listening past the fire for wind or footfall.
Even the Remnant at his chest, usually a comfort, now felt urgent: a knot of heat twisting, then untwisting, at the center of his breastbone.
He pressed it through his jacket, half-hoping to coax a word, even one of Valenna's black-edged jests.
Nothing. Just the thud, faint but doubling at intervals. Not a heartbeat, he'd learned that difference, but something more like a twitch in the muscle of memory.
Orsell's head jerked up once, wide-eyed, so sudden Rhain nearly dropped his coin.
Soren caught the look and followed it. Nothing. The dark offered only the flat sameness of snow and the slow, cold breath of wind. Orsell exhaled, tried to laugh, but it came out a slosh of snot.
Tavren muttered, "Should've burned the wagon for heat."
The merchant, without looking, said, "Break the axle for fire and you drag it the rest of the way on your own backs. We're not dead yet."
"Doesn't mean they won't try," Tavren said, meaning more than wolves.
He unwrapped a crust of bread and began gnawing, jaw working with the deliberate menace of someone rehearsing how to bite the future.
Soren counted the seconds between the pulses at his chest. Seven. Then five. Each time, a little sharper.
Past the wagon, the night split. Not with a sound, but a motion, a single, unbroken slice of dark against the horizon. Soren's eyes trained quick, and he saw them: two, no, three men, spreading out with the cautious arrogance of men who had found the trick and were about to use it.
Tavren saw them next. "Shit," he whispered, and the word fogged and froze before it reached the ground.
Rhain's coin stopped. Orsell twitched, then folded in. Soren felt the shard, no, Valenna, ignite in his ribs, a pressure that pinched the air until it rang.
The others waited for a signal. There wasn't one.
The three strangers advanced, two with spears, one holding a bundled something that Soren recognized: crossbow, cheap and heavy, the kind that fired twice before shattering in your hands.
Their steps, measured and loose, suggested careful, practiced hunger. Soren let the panic build, then numb itself.
His own blade, barely worth the name, a factory offcut dulled on both sides, suddenly felt like a relic he'd stolen but never quite earned.
The merchant spoke first, voice brittle. "We're with House," he lied, loud enough for the fire to catch every syllable.
The crossbowman grinned, just enough teeth to see in the dark. "House don't matter out here," he replied. "What matters is what's in the wagon. Which of you wants to live?"
Tavren spat onto the fire. "Depends how you plan on asking."
Soren tensed. The Remnant's pulse now rode the length of his arm, heat bubbling through the cold like a fever.
He shifted, put himself forward just as the crossbowman took aim. There was no warning, no build of tension. The bandit fired.
The bolt split the air and caught Orsell mid-breath. He didn't scream; just made a noise like a cork pulled fast from a bottle, and then he was on the ground, face buried in the drift. Soren's mind blanked for a beat, then hyper-sped:
Left. Rhain. On his knees, trembling, but alive.
Right. Tavren, coiled, teeth bare, not moving yet.
The merchant, already gone. Soren didn't see when he'd bolted, but the vacant patch on the tarp told the story.
A second volley whined past Tavren, nipped his shoulder. The two with spears closed in, boots crunching with an authority that, for Soren, confirmed everything he'd ever hated about men in groups.
He gripped the blade. No voice told him what to do, but his hands understood. His feet, too. He advanced, sloppy, cold, desperate, and the first spear tip flicked at his face, missing by the width of a coin.
A sudden memory overlay happened of Valenna's trials, the tight geometry of her war. Not a suggestion, but an order snapping in Soren's bones.
"Duck. Cut low. Again."
He ducked, and the blade sunk into the meat of the bandit's thigh, through fabric, into muscle.
The man screamed, a chorus instead of a note, and dropped the spear to clutch at his leg. Soren didn't watch him fall; he pivoted, using the momentum, and caught sight of Tavren wrestling with the other spearman.
The bandit was bigger, but Tavren had the city's gift: he went for the eyes, the ears, the edge of every soft thing you couldn't armor.
In the scuffle, Soren lost the thread. His own hands were wet, the sword, too, though he didn't process what it meant until the air filled with a hot, metallic stink that fogged the memory.
For a second, he felt sick; then the shard at his heart pummeled the feeling out, replacing it with the imperative to move.
The crossbowman had reloaded. Soren saw the flick of motion, the setting of jaw. He dove sideways, trying to hex the flight of the bolt by sheer will. It struck the snow, closer than he'd wanted.
He advanced, but the crossbowman was ready, swinging the weapon like a club. Soren's arm took the brunt, and the world rang with the bright, narcotic clarity of impact.
"Now. Up. Angle the point."
He did as told, and the blade, his body, found the hollow under the man's chin, the place Thorne had never studied but which Valenna, in her memory, knew perfectly.
The blade didn't stick; it slipped free and the crossbowman, mouth a red tremor, toppled backward, never even finding the time to scream.
The spearman Tavren fought was down, face crumpled under a boot. Rhain, frozen, watched Soren wipe at the blood pooling in the crease of his knuckle.
Another man, hidden until now, lurched from behind the wagon. He was younger, though his face was too starved to hold age.
He saw Orsell on the ground, and the scream was not of pain, but insult. He charged Rhain, who simply dropped, hands over his head, and let the bandit trip over his body.
Soren finished it. Not for glory, or even survival. Just because, by then, the Remnant, Valenna, had forced the sequence into his veins.
"A slice, an elbow, the foot pressed into the throat until the noise stops."
When it ended, the fire was low, the snow splattered and churned, the air thick with the afterlife smell of blood.
Soren looked at his hands, then at Rhain, who was leaking from a graze along the jaw but otherwise intact.
Tavren stood over a body, breathing through his mouth, eyes locked on nothing.
The merchant reappeared from the darkness, empty-handed except for a knife still capped in its sheath.
He looked at Soren, then the carnage, and gave a nod, not of thanks, exactly, but of recognition. He regarded the dead, then began the work of rifling pockets, as if the event had been scheduled in advance.
No one spoke for the better part of an hour. Soren cleaned his blade on the inside of his coat, the cold numb enough now to make the act seem ordinary.
At some point, the snow started again, fresh and greedy, intent on covering the night's memory for the next unlucky soul to pass.
As Rhain tried to bind his own wound, Soren settled himself, let the pulse of the Remnant slow, and for the first time since the fight, felt the presence settle, no longer sharp, but almost content.
Valenna's voice, when it came, was mellow and near enough to hear only in the teeth:
"Now you've bled for the lesson. Don't waste it."