By morning, the fire had lost. Everything beyond its radius welled blue and black, the color of last bruises. Orsell was, Soren found himself unable to finish the sentence, even inside his head.
The body was Orsell shaped, curled on itself, rime climbing every fold of the old city coat, as if the cold were still working to reshape him into something less offensive to the snow. Soren knelt by it.
His first impulse was to brush the ice from Orsell's hair, but it didn't seem right to touch him now. The merchant, emerging from his fleeces, fixed the scene with a hard glance and said, "Don't look. Let it."
They left him wrapped and uncrowded, at the far edge of what the fire dared to warm. Tavren didn't move during the entire preparation, just sat cross-legged, eyes on the dead boy, biting at the web of flesh between thumb and forefinger.
Rhain worked with small, exacting motions to tie new cloth around the wound on his arm. Soren didn't remember seeing him get hit. Maybe he hadn't, not really.
They buried Orsell in the just-soft ground behind the wagon, a shallow slot among the roots of a white willow.
Rhain and Soren dug together, alternating as the blood left their hands. Tavren found a flat stone and etched Orsell's name with the tip of a knife, though by the time he placed it, the letters were already blurred by melting snow and the gray-frozen moment.
No words, not even the gutter's joke about a home at last. They sat together for a while. The fire spat embers and went ugly, refusing to die until it shamed them.
The merchant insisted on leaving before dawn. "Wolves'll nose the trail for a league," he said, "and there's more than wolves, if you hear the stories."
Soren waited for the others to refuse, but didn't. Maybe none of them wanted to stay where Orsell's shape was still visible, pressed into the page of snow like something had tried and failed to erase him.
They walked fast. At first, the cold bit harder than Soren could remember from any winter inside Nordhav's walls.
His feet went from stinging, to pulsing, to not-there, and then the rhythm of the march took over.
The world thinned itself to a corridor between two urgent blues, the sky above, harder-edged and inhuman, and the snow, which took the wind and made it feel like knives ground from glass. He watched Tavren from behind: the boots, the hollowed shoulders.
Tavren's brawny outline looked less like a person than a puppet strung by the need to stay upright.
Rhain checked his bandage every few hundred steps, fingers delicate even through the gloves.
He wasn't bleeding, but the cloth showed a halo of brown-black that got neither larger nor smaller, which Soren decided was maybe its own kind of victory.
The Remnant's throb didn't mute, exactly, but pulsed in a new way, lower, more patient, as if unwilling to draw attention until Soren had worked out what to do with his own hurt.
Even Valenna, the old voice, said nothing. Soren wondered if grief could silence the dead as well as the living.
Once, a mile out, Soren saw abandoned equipment half-swallowed by snow: a rusted pike, splintered, wedged upright into the dirt as if making a last stand against the world's white wash.
Farther on, a tree that had been hacked off at shoulder height, years ago, but someone had nailed a sword through the trunk, blade and all.
The sword was notched dull and slagging off rust, but the hilt still bore the grip wrapping, a single blue thread woven through the black. He motioned at the others to see, but nobody did, so Soren shouldered the memory for himself.
The checkpoint was not a tower or fort as he'd expected, but a squat, one-story runnel of stone and iron, barely taller than a wagon.
The roof had collapsed in the center so it gathered snow like a dead mouth. Out front, a single figure waited astride a white-chestnut horse: a Knight, black cloak hitched against the wind, sword scabbard a vertical line over the spine.
His face, Soren double-checked because it was hard to tell under the helmet, looked less a face than something constructed for the sole purpose of fitting inside a helmet. Deep lines, eyes set like river stones, mouth bloodless.
The Knight did not speak until they were close enough for spittle to freeze between them.
"What happened?" His voice was not cruel, but devoid of any other option.
The merchant gestured at the boys. "Bandits. Three, maybe more. Orsell—" He gestured behind him, then stopped. "Didn't make it. These held the line."
The Knight's eyes slid over Soren and the others. He lingered on the stains at Soren's coat, the line of dried blood on Tavren's cheek, the crusted black where Rhain's bandage leaked through.
Then the sword at Soren's belt, which still wore the discoloration of last night.
"Show it," the Knight said.
Soren drew the blade, careful. He'd wiped it, but only once, and the polish was poor enough that the edge wore a visible filigree of dried blood.
The Knight took the weapon, passed a thumb along its length. Blood for the test. He handed it back.
"Who killed them?" the Knight asked, no accusation in the words.
"Nobody," Tavren said. "We all just tried not to die."
The Knight took this in. He surveyed the horizon, the colorless sprawl behind them. Then he swung a leg and dismounted more gracefully than Soren thought possible in heavy armor.
He motioned them forward, toward the ruined checkpoint. As they approached, Soren saw the building in more detail: the old sign nailed to the archway, script half-legible, something about Law and Passage, etched over with a line of black paint.
The entrance was pitted from where, for a hundred years, hands had knocked.
Inside, the Knight told them to stand in the light. He lit a small fire from a prearranged pyramid of sticks.
The room had one chair and several iron hooks in the wall, for which Soren could imagine a hundred utilitarian uses, none good for the person being hooked.
The Knight squinted. "You'll need to sign the ledger," he said. "Proof of service. House Ashgard expects a record."
He produced a battered book. Soren signed, hand trembling. Rhain and Tavren did too, though Tavren's handwriting was worse than Soren had ever seen it. The merchant pressed an oily thumbprint into the spot where his name had once lived.
The Knight checked the register, then looked at Orsell's blank. "What of the other?" he asked.
Soren said, "Gone. Buried."
For a while, no one spoke. The wind outside made its own case, gnawing through the mortar of the old checkpoint. Soren's fingers still hurt from the digging. He flexed them, saw that two nails had gone black at the beds.
The Knight wrapped the book, set it in his saddlebag. Just before closing the cover, he said, "Do you know what the Codex says about surviving when others do not?"
Soren shook his head.
"It says: 'Those who cannot bury the dead, cannot claim their own breath.' And more than that, it says: 'The sin is not in living on. The sin is in failing to account for it.'"
He let the implication settle cold in the stone room.
Soren found that he wanted to cry, but could not, so he bit the skin at the base of his thumb until the feeling passed.
The Knight nodded to the door, meaning they were dismissed.
The merchant slapped his hands together, as if nothing had happened except a delay in the schedule, and led them out to the wagon.
Rhain and Tavren followed, Rhain clutching the thin sheaf of bread the Knight had given as "medicinal ration." Soren paused at the door, then turned back.
The Knight was staring at the wall, at a notch in the stone where, Soren realized, a name had been carved and then scrubbed out. He stared at the mark for a while.
Outside, Soren walked the line between trail and snow, not because he wanted to leave a record, but because he needed to feel the difference. With every step, Valenna's silence pressed in. He finally pressed the Remnant shard to his chest, so tight it drew blood.
At last, the voice returned. Not loud, not clever, not even present enough to sound as if it cared.
"Practice," it said.
Soren did not answer. He walked until his feet numbed, then walked farther, and for the first time since the city, the quiet felt not like an absence, but a weight he would have to carry until the world found a way to take it off him.