For a long moment Cael couldn’t do anything at all.
The White Walker’s eyes held his, patient and endless, and every instinct screaming through Cael’s body told him the same thing at once, over and over, in no particular order.
Run.
Move.
He’s still looking at you.
His pulse hammered in his own ears loud enough to drown out the wind, his hands curling into fists at his sides without him deciding to move them.
His gaze dropped, helpless, back to Vesper, to the wrongness of his neck, to the stillness that had replaced a man who’d been arguing with him about spear thrusts only the day before.
He’s dead.
The thought arrived and then caught on something before it could finish landing.
Unless the blood works.
He didn’t let himself finish the first thought properly.
There wasn’t time to, and some cold, clear-eyed part of him already knew there might not need to be.
Neither the White Walker nor the ring of dead behind him moved.
They simply watched, the silence stretching one heartbeat, then another, long enough that some part of Cael’s mind—the part still capable of noticing things—registered how wrong that stillness was.
Something in him broke loose before the rest of him caught up.
He was on his feet with the spear already in his hand, and he drove it forward with everything he had, a raw, wordless sound tearing out of his throat that didn’t feel like it belonged to him.
The point struck the White Walker square in the chest.
Frost exploded across the steel.
The spearhead cracked with a sharp, brittle snap before bursting apart into glittering shards of ice and metal.
The wooden shaft jerked violently in Cael’s hands, the force splitting it halfway down its length.
The White Walker didn’t so much as flinch.
Cael stood there with a broken shaft and nothing else, and understanding hit him colder than anything the wind had managed all morning.
Ordinary steel can’t touch him.
Nothing I have can touch him.
The White Walker’s mouth curved, slow and satisfied, and he raised one hand.
The wights surged forward as one, the whole silent mass of them breaking into a dead sprint, snow exploding beneath rotted feet.
Cael didn’t wait to see how close they’d get.
He scooped Vesper up off the snow—the weight of him lighter than it should have been, wrong in the same way his neck was wrong—and ran.
He didn’t hold back this time.
The forest dissolved around him into streaks of white and green, trees blurring past too fast to register, and within a few strides the sound of the horde chasing him had already begun to fall away behind, swallowed by distance faster than it could close it.
He didn’t need to look back to know the White Walker himself hadn’t bothered to follow at all—the dead could run themselves ragged trying; nothing walking on two legs was going to catch him carrying Vesper on his back.
Why send them at all, then?
The question chased him through the trees faster than his own feet could carry him, no answer waiting anywhere behind it.
He wasn’t looking at Vesper.
He was looking at me, from the very first second, like he already knew exactly who I was.
Or what I was.
That should have been a relief, outrunning them so easily.
It wasn’t.
It felt like being tested—like the chase itself hadn’t been about catching him at all, only about learning how fast he could go.
He didn’t stop until the forest had swallowed every trace of the clearing behind him, until his own senses could no longer find so much as an echo of the army he’d left there.
Only then did he let himself slow, and lower Vesper carefully onto a bare patch of ground beneath a stand of pines thick enough to blot out what little gray sky remained.
He already knew.
He’d known since the wrongness of it had registered beneath his own hands back in the clearing.
But he checked anyway—two fingers beneath the jaw, then flat against his chest—and found precisely the nothing he’d braced for.
Broken neck.
No pulse.
No breath.
For one bare second Cael let it be true, one hand resting over a heart that wasn’t moving.
Then the second thought shoved the first one aside, sharper and far more useful.
Last night.
He drank from me.
The memory arrived all at once—the Shadow Cat’s teeth, the wound in Vesper’s throat, his own blood forced past Vesper’s lips to close it.
He’d forgotten it entirely in the chaos since, and now it sat in his chest like a held breath finally released.
He remembered enough of the show to know what that meant.
A man who died with vampire blood still working through his system didn’t simply stay dead.
He hung suspended somewhere just past it, caught on the edge of something that could still be finished—if it was finished right.
He isn’t gone.
Not yet.
He needed a source of human blood, and he needed it soon.
He didn’t know exactly how long he had.
If the stories held any truth at all, a day, perhaps, before whatever hung unfinished in Vesper either completed itself or didn’t.
He’d never had reason to memorize the fine print of a plot device he’d assumed he would never need, and he wasn’t going to find out the answer by kneeling here.
He made himself think it through the way Vesper would have, instead of simply running on instinct.
There were only two places in this entire miserable stretch of world where he had any real hope of finding blood before that window closed.
The Wall itself, days behind them now even at a walking pace—too far, even for him, not with Vesper slung across his back the whole way and no guarantee of what waited once he arrived.
Or the Wildling camp, close enough to reach within the hour, ruined as it was.
He turned the fight over in his mind again, searching the ranks of the dead for faces he might have missed.
A sentry’s cloak.
Guards and hunters he’d only ever glimpsed from a distance during his masked visits.
But not Nessa.
Not Wick.
Not the craftsman.
He hadn’t seen them among the wights, and that was the only thread he had to pull.
The camp it is.
He had nothing left to work with except the satchel still hanging at his side and the body slung across his back.
None of the things he’d lost mattered now.
If there were survivors, there would be blood.
If there weren’t…
He refused to finish that thought.
He lifted Vesper higher onto his back and ran.
The wind had begun to die by the time the ruined Wildling camp came into view, its fury spending itself into a low, mournful hiss through collapsed tents and drifting ash.
Smoke still curled thin and gray from the wreckage, catching in Cael’s throat, thick with the stink of burned leather and old blood.
There were still no bodies.
Only the wide, dark stains where they’d fallen, and the long drag marks tracing away toward the treeline, and the eerie, total silence of a place that had held hundreds of people the night before and now held none of them at all.
He found the least damaged shelter near the camp’s edge, its frame still mostly standing, and laid Vesper down inside it.
I’ll trust it the way I’ve had to trust everything else about this.
He made himself leave.
Standing here wouldn’t find him what Vesper needed.
Only searching would.
He closed his eyes at the center of the ruined camp and let his senses stretch as wide as he could push them.
Smoke first, thick and stinging.
Beneath it, the coppery weight of old blood, soaked so deep into the snow that he doubted a real thaw would ever fully clear it.
Burnt wood, sharp and bitter.
Cold, clean snow over all of it, indifferent to everything that had happened here.
He listened.
Wind.
Only wind, sighing through torn canvas and broken poles, empty in a way that made his chest tighten.
He held perfectly still and let the silence stretch, and for a long, sinking moment it didn’t give him anything back.
A fresh dread crept in—that he’d read the missing bodies wrong, that he’d wasted precious minutes of Vesper’s window chasing nothing at all.
Then, just as he was about to give up on the silence entirely, something moved beneath it.
Faint.
Distant.
Human voices, hushed almost to nothing, threading in from somewhere near the camp’s far edge.
He froze, straining after them, absurdly afraid that listening too hard might make them vanish again.
They didn’t.
If anything they steadied, low and careful, the particular hush of people who’d learned overnight exactly how much a raised voice could cost them.
He followed them without a sound, weaving between collapsed tents and the black scars of dead fires, until the voices sharpened into something almost recognizable, coming from inside one of the last shelters still standing.
He ducked through the torn flap and found four faces turn toward him at once, pale and wary in the gray afternoon light.
Nessa’s hand went straight to the knife at her belt, her eyes narrowing on a face she clearly didn’t recognize.
“Who are you?”
It took him a half second to understand why.
Every time she’d seen him before, cloth had covered everything but his eyes.
Standing here now, unmasked, he was only a stranger who’d walked out of the same smoke an army of the dead had come from.
Before he could answer, Wick broke free of his sister’s grip and crossed the space at a dead run, wrapping both arms around him.
“It’s him,” Wick said, muffled against his side.
“He smells like the healer.”
Cael huffed something close to a laugh despite everything, faintly startled all over again at how easily the boy’s nose had caught what nothing else about him gave away.
Nessa’s grip on the knife eased, though her eyes stayed guarded a moment longer.
“You’re really him,” she said slowly.
“I am.”
Something in her shoulders loosened, not quite relief, not with everything else still sitting behind her eyes, but close enough to it.
There was no time to waste on introductions.
The fourth figure in the shelter—a broad-shouldered man Cael didn’t recognize—lay propped against a rolled fur, his leg splinted with a broken spear shaft and strips of torn cloth, a crude bandage wound tight around a gash at his side.
Someone had clearly done what they could for him already; it plainly hadn’t been enough.
“Found him behind a wagon this morning,” the craftsman said quietly.
“Nessa heard him calling.
We set the leg best we could, but it’s a bad break, and that wound at his side hasn’t stopped weeping since.”
Cael knelt beside the man and began the ritual the others already knew by now—the shallow cut at the arm, the horn to catch it, carrying it behind the shelter wall where no one could watch him work.
This time, though, he didn’t drink from it.
He found a second horn among the salvage nearby, empty and forgotten, and poured the man’s blood into it instead, sealing it away for later.
Then he opened his own wrist over the first horn until it ran dark and rich, and carried that one back out to the man exactly as he always had.
The man drank, and his leg straightened on its own beneath the skin, bone knitting itself invisibly whole, the wound at his side closing over into smooth, unbroken skin.
He tested his own weight, disbelieving, flexing fingers that hadn’t moved right in hours.
They’d all seen the healer’s ritual before—blood given, blood returned, some working none of them understood or asked after.
It had kept them alive more than once already.
Cael slipped out once more, unnoticed, and tucked the second horn—the one that actually held what he’d need—deep into a fold of collapsed canvas outside, well out of sight of the shelter.
It would keep.
He’d know exactly where to find it again.
He was crouched beside the fire someone had finally dared to rebuild, listening to Nessa’s account of the attack.
Her voice stayed flat and careful as she spoke, the way people talk about things they haven’t let themselves feel yet—the horns sounding one after another, the pale riders stepping out of the treeline like they had nowhere else in the world to be, the mad scramble for the rocks, the long hours crouched in the dark listening to a whole camp go quiet around them.
“There wasn’t anything to do,” she said, staring into the fire rather than at him.
“You can’t win against death.
You can only get out of its way.”
Cael’s eyes went to the healed man, still testing the strength of his own leg by the fire.
“You fought it, though.
Didn’t you.”
The man was quiet a moment, as if deciding whether the memory was worth handing over.
“Long enough for my family to get clear of it.
Don’t remember much past that—swung ’til something hit me, and the world went dark.” He looked down at his own hands.
“Woke up alone.
Leg broken under me, couldn’t stand, couldn’t crawl far.
Camp gone quiet all around, like everyone in it had just up and vanished.” His jaw tightened.
“Screamed till I had nothing left to scream with.
That’s when they found me.”
Cael was still turning that over when another heartbeat reached him, faint and unsteady, threading in beneath the fire’s crackle.
For one wild, unreasoning second, hope surged through him before thought could catch up to it.
Vesper.
His whole body turned toward the shelter where he’d left the body, certain, desperate to be certain.
But the sound wasn’t coming from there.
It was smaller, farther, muffled almost past hearing, and Cael forced himself to listen past his own hope to find it properly.
He followed it away from the fire, past a collapsed tent, past the shattered remains of a supply cart, until it led him to an overturned barrel half-buried in a drift near the treeline, and stopped.
The heartbeat came from inside it.
He tipped the barrel onto its side, and a boy tumbled out into the snow—fifteen, maybe, though thin enough with hunger and cold to look younger.
Freckles stood out dark against skin gone pale as bone, his lips a deep, frightening blue, ribs faintly visible through ragged furs that hadn’t fit him in weeks.
His breath, when Cael finally caught it, came so shallow it barely counted as breathing at all.
Cael lifted him without hesitation and felt a fresh, quiet anger settle somewhere beneath his ribs—a child left to starve slowly enough that hiding in a barrel had nearly finished the job the White Walker’s army hadn’t.
He carried the boy back toward the fire, and something in the atmosphere shifted the moment the others saw who he held.
Nessa’s breath caught.
“It’s him.
Rolf.”
The craftsman took an involuntary step back.
Wick didn’t pull away from Cael—only stared at the boy in his arms, wide-eyed and wary, edging closer to his sister instead.
“Best not to bring that near the fire,” the craftsman said, not quite meeting Cael’s eyes.
“No offense meant to the boy, but skinchangers are cursed folk.
They say his kind steal a man’s own body while he sleeps, if you let them close enough.
Wear the eyes of wolves.
Watch you through a raven’s eyes from a hundred miles off and never know it.” He shrugged, uncomfortable.
“Doesn’t matter if it’s all true.
Enough folk believe it that nobody in camp ever sat near him.”
Nessa said nothing, but she didn’t argue either, one arm curling protectively around her brother’s shoulders.
“He’s still just a boy,” Cael said plainly, without heat.
“If he turns out dangerous later, we’ll deal with it then.”
No one argued with that.
He carried Rolf to the warmest corner of the shelter and laid him down beside Wick, despite the way the boy flinched further from him.
He was still crouched beside the fire when another sound reached him.
A heartbeat.
Not faint.
Not thready.
Strong, and steady, and coming from the direction of the shelter where he’d left a body with a broken neck less than an hour before.
Cael went utterly still.
He knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with hope this time, exactly what that heartbeat meant.
He’d spent a week learning to tell one heartbeat from another across a whole forest, and this one was unmistakable—the same rhythm he’d fallen asleep listening to every night since the day a deserter had found him crippled in the snow, beating now in a chest that shouldn’t have been beating at all.
It’s started.
He rose slowly to his feet, the others’ voices trailing off around him as they noticed the change in his face, Nessa’s question dying half-formed on her lips.
Whatever showed there, none of them asked him to explain it.
“Stay here,” he said quietly.
“I’ll be back.”
He circled past the collapsed canvas on his way out, retrieved the hidden horn without breaking stride, and walked out into the ruined camp toward the shelter where he’d left a corpse.
He was still a dozen paces off when he heard it—a low, wet sound under the wind, not quite a breath, not quite a growl.
Something shifting inside the wrecked frame, slow and deliberate, dragging against snow.
Cael stopped at the torn entrance, the horn heavy and warm against his palm, and made himself go in.