They buried the dead in silence. Not for mercy, the Frostborne had earned none but to keep scavenger beasts from following their trail. The snow swallowed the bodies greedily, hiding the violence beneath a pristine sheet of white.
Seraphira worked with her dagger, chipping frozen earth where the snow was thin. Her breath misted in the air, and every motion made the cold bite deeper into her fingers. Kaelreth, by contrast, seemed untouched by the chill, his cloak unmoving in the wind, as though the cold feared him.
When the last mound was smoothed over, she caught sight of something on the fallen leader's gauntlet, an etching, almost invisible beneath frost. She crouched, brushing away ice with her thumb.
A crest. Not the jagged sigil of the Frostborne, but another, far older. Two serpents twined around a crown of thorns.
Her heart lurched. She'd seen that mark before once, in a hidden book in her father's private study. It belonged to a house long thought destroyed in the Wars of Sundering.
But before she could speak, Kaelreth was there beside her, his shadow falling across the symbol. "Do not touch it."
She looked up sharply. "You know what this is?"
His jaw tightened, eyes fixed on the mark. "It's a summons. Frostborne do not carry it unless they serve a greater master."
Her stomach knotted. "Then someone sent them. For me."
He didn't answer and his silence was worse than confirmation. He straightened, tearing the gauntlet free from the corpse with a sharp, precise motion. The crest caught the light one last time before he clenched it in his hand.
The metal hissed. Smoke curled between his fingers. When he opened his palm again, the gauntlet was nothing but twisted black ash.
"You're destroying evidence," she said, frowning.
"I'm destroying a trail," he corrected. "One you cannot afford to leave behind."
Something in his tone made her hesitate. She wanted to argue, to demand the truth, who could have found her out, what the crest truly meant but the look in his eyes told her she would get no answers now.
They walked on, leaving the graves behind, the mountain wind erasing their footprints almost as fast as they made them. But the mark burned in her thoughts, coiling in her mind like a serpent awaiting the right moment to strike.
And though Kaelreth did not speak of it again, she caught him glancing over his shoulder more than once, as if expecting the snow itself to rise up and take form.