The fire had gone down to almost nothing by the time he noticed it was dark.
He was sitting where he had been sitting since she walked out, in the same spot against the cave wall, his bad leg stretched out in front of him, the wound from the wolf mostly closed now, mostly healed, and he had not moved in hours. He was not sure how many. The light outside had gone from grey to dark grey to black and he had watched it happen without doing anything about the fire, without doing anything about the meat that needed turning, without doing anything at all except sitting there with the shape of her still burned into the front of his mind like something branded on.
The cave had never felt like this before.
He had lived in it alone for seven months. He had known its exact dimensions in the dark, the low place in the ceiling where he always cracked his head if he stood up too fast on the left side, the spot near the entrance where the wind found a gap and howled through it during storms. He had made his peace with the size of it a long time ago, had stopped noticing that it was small, that it was one man's space and had always only ever needed to be one man's space.
Now it was too big. Now the emptiness of it had a shape, and the shape was her, the space where she had lain against the back wall for two days, and he could not stop looking at that space even now that it was just packed dirt and dried grass again.
He remembered her hair.
Black, and long, and it had come loose from whatever had held it during the fight, had spilled across his forearm when he carried her, and in the firelight it had not looked like hair at all. It had looked like oil, thick and dark and moving, a waterfall of it pouring off the edge of something, catching the light in threads of gold and copper where it should have just been black. He had held her against his chest and had not been able to stop looking at it even through the pain in his leg, even through the animal thing in him screaming that he had a mate now and needed to defend her.
He remembered her skin.
White. Not the white of the snow outside, which was flat and cold and dead. Her skin had warmth under the white of it, some pink thing living just below the surface, and it had gone paler where fear took her and flushed where something else did, and he had spent two days cataloguing every variation of it without meaning to, without permission from the part of him that used to be just a man from Kimura Street.
He remembered her mouth.
Red. Redder than blood, though he had plenty of blood to compare it to now, red in a way that had nothing to do with health or cold or anything natural, and he had wondered more than once during those two days what it would feel like against his own, and he had shut the thought down every time, and every time it had come back a little stronger, a little harder to shut down.
He had tasted something in those two days. He did not have a word for exactly what it was. Company. Warmth that was not just fire. The particular ache of wanting a person instead of wanting meat. And now it was gone, walked out of his cave and into the snow, and the tasting of it had made the absence of it so much worse than it would have been if he had never had it at all.
He sat with his back against the stone and felt something in his chest that was not the animal hunger and was not the man's grief either, something between the two, and he did not fight it because he did not have the strength left to fight anything.
He thought about leaving.
The decision came to him whole, all at once, the way the decision to eat the first rabbit had come to him seven months ago, born less out of hope than out of the simple recognition that staying was no longer survivable. There were people in this world. He had proof of that now, proof beyond the tracks and the burned villages he had found on the edges of his hunting range over the months, proof with a name and a face and hair like oil. If there were people, there were places people lived, and if there were places people lived, there was a way out of this forest and into whatever the rest of this world actually was.
He would give it a week. The snow was thinning at the edges already, the drifts settling, the same softening he had noticed the day he found her. A week, maybe less, and the ground would be clear enough to travel. He would eat what he had stored. He would take what tools and clothes and weapons he could carry. And he would walk out of this forest the same way she had, and he would find out what kind of world he had been surviving in alone.
The words that had come out of him in front of her, his name, her name, the handful of broken pieces of a language he had not used in seven months, had cost him something to produce, some rusted machinery grinding back to life, and now that the reason for using it was gone he found he did not want to use it at all. Growling was easier. Grunting was easier. The animal half of him did not need consonants to hunt, and the man half of him did not have anything left worth saying.
***---***
Freya walked into Ronta Vro two days after she left the cave, the light going long and orange behind her, her legs shaking with exhaustion she refused to show on her face.
The village was smaller than she remembered it being when her squad had first ridden through, a dozen buildings of timber and grey stone huddled behind a low fence, the fields around them flat and white and empty, waiting for a planting season still weeks away. Smoke rose from most of the chimneys. A dog barked somewhere near the fence line and did not stop until a woman's voice called it off.
She was seen before she reached the gate.
"Sword Freya!" The voice belonged to a boy, maybe fourteen, running full out across the frozen mud of the road, and behind him the village was already turning, faces appearing in doorways, a man setting down an axe mid swing and staring.
Chief Bertrand Voss met her at the gate himself, a broad man going grey at the temples, his coat thrown on hastily over a tunic he had clearly been eating dinner in. "By the gods," he said, and then again, quieter, like he was afraid saying it too loud would make it untrue. "We thought you'd all... where are the others?"
She told him standing in the cold, because it felt wrong to sit for this, wrong to be comfortable while she said it. Four names. Four women who had ridden out with her three weeks ago to hunt meat for a village that had asked for their help, and four women who had not come back, torn apart by wolves in a clearing at the edge of Little Edelmere while she watched.
Bertrand's face went grey under the ruddiness of the cold. "This is our doing," he said. "We asked you to hunt. We sent you out there."
"You didn't send the wolves," she said.
"You survived it," said a voice behind him, and she turned to find a lean older man leaning on a spear that looked more decorative than practical, though something in the way he held it told her it had seen real use once, long before it became a habit he carried into every room he entered. His eyes were sharp in a weathered face. "Survived four dead and came out walking. That's not luck, girl. That's a story."
"Hughe," Bertrand said, half a warning, half an introduction.
"There was a man," Freya said. "In the forest. He killed the wolves that were hunting us. Kept me alive for two days after."
That drew every eye on the road tighter around her.
"A man," Bertrand repeated. "Alone, in Little Edelmere, through a winter."
"He is Keth," she said, and watched the word land, watched the small ripple of unease move through the villagers close enough to hear it, because Keth meant a man from a nation Rostalio had bled against for three generations, and Keth in a place like Little Edelmere, alive after a winter alone, was not a small thing to say out loud in a border village. "Or from wherever Keth is spoken. He can barely speak it himself. Barely spoke at all."
Bertrand's wife, a soft-spoken woman named Idony, put a hand on Freya's arm before he could say anything else. "You're frozen through and dead on your feet. Questions can wait for morning. Come inside."
They gave her a room above the tavern, small and warm, a fire already built in the hearth by the time she striped off the ruin of her armour, and she had barely sat down on the edge of the bed when a small voice spoke from the doorway.
"Is it true he killed three wolves with his hands?"
The boy was younger than the one who had run to meet her at the gate, seven or eight, dark haired, Bertrand's chin unmistakable on his small face.
"Tomas," Idony said sharply from the hall, "leave the lady be."
"It's alright," Freya said, and found, to her own surprise, that it was. "Yes. Three of them. With a bone knife and his hands."
The boy's eyes went wide as coins. "I want to see him."
"Absolutely not," Bertrand said, appearing behind his wife in the doorway, his voice dropping into the particular flatness of a father who has said the same thing more than once tonight. "That is the last I want to hear of it."
Tomas's older sister, a girl of perhaps eleven with her mother's soft mouth, slipped past her brother into the room instead, her eyes catching on the ring on Freya's finger, the gold chain at her throat.
"Are you married?" she asked.
"Engaged," Freya said. "To a nobleman. Rordan Donalia, of the capital."
The girl's face lit with the particular delight children reserve for anything that sounds like a story, and Freya found herself talking, the words coming easy in a way most things had not come easy in days, the proposal, the ring, the ceremony that would happen once she was home. And as she spoke Rordan's face would not come, not clearly, not the way it should have, and instead what rose up behind her eyes was Eto's face in the moment she had shown him the ring, the way something in it had gone still and then cold and then something worse than cold.
"I'm very tired," she said, cutting herself off mid sentence. "I should sleep."
Idony ushered the children out with an apology Freya waved away, and the door closed, and the room went quiet, and she lay on the narrow bed with the fire cracking low and did not sleep for a long time.
Downstairs, Tomas sat by the tavern's cold hearth long after he had been sent to bed, turning the sword lady's story over and over in his head, a man alone in Little Edelmere who could kill three wolves bare handed, and decided, with the flat unshakeable certainty of a boy his age, that he was going to see this man for himself if it was the last thing he did.