I’m not sure how much stamina I have left in me. A cup that never refills as quickly as it empties. I need it to fill up now because, the rope tugs, and the warrior moves away from the cart.
I stagger to catch up with him, two steps ahead.
Body aching, I grit my teeth against the pain and follow him to the nearest campfire.
It’s doused now.
A scattering of a few embers gleaming from ash.
The warrior crouches at a leather satchel.
The other fae around this pile of ash and embers are packed and ready to move, except one.
A female with glacier hair, a faint bluish hue to it, the same shade as her eyes—eyes that are fixed on me.
I blanch under her stare, lifted from the bag she crouches at, and I turn my cheek to her.
The warrior—the one whose name I don’t wish to acknowledge—has one knee pressed into the thawed dirt and the mouth of the satchel tugged wide open.
Delicately, he folds paper wrappings over dehydrated meat strips, then secures them with string.
I don’t recognise the meat, but it faintly reminds me of beef jerky, that sort of parched meat, but this kind is black. No reds or brownish hues, just black to the core.
My mouth tugs with a frown, a look of faint disgust, before he slots the paper-wrapped meat into his satchel.
Beside his planted knee, there is a leatherbound notebook on the ground, speckled with some charcoal sticks and a stained cloth.
He’s just as delicate with it as he was the meat, and he slips it gently into the edge of the satchel. Then he wraps the charcoal pieces, the kind that stains his fingertips with a dust, in the cloth.
Maybe I’m too focused on the way he slots those packages into his bag, tidy and organised, maybe I watch too closely, but with a swift glance at the female warrior with glacier eyes, the difference is obvious.
Tidiness, organisation, delicacy—it’s not a dark fae thing. It’s ahimthing.
The glacier one just grabs things at random and rams them into her bag, until it’s bulging at the sides, planted between her boots, and before she fastens it shut, she fishes out a ribbon from the inside.
It’s tangled.
Her pale fingers weave through the knots for a beat, then she scoffs an irritated sound and gives up.
Knots and all, she lifts the ribbon in one hand as she flips her head until its dangling between her knees—and the flow of icy hair falls like a winter waterfall.
Out the corner of my eye, I watch her fingers spindle through her hair, from the nape of the neck up to her crown, and she braids it without a mirror or any help at all.
If I had a speck of energy in me to spare, my brows would lift, impressed, because I am.
The braid takes her just some practiced moments before she uses the tangled ribbon to lock it in place.
I toss my gaze down before she can throw her head back.
The cold warrior finishes packing his satchel, then ties a leather waterskin to his belt, and when he rises and rolls out the tension in his shoulder, the glacier one takes a step closer—
She murmurs something in a low hum.
Both their gazes slide to me.
Too much frost, too much ice, much too cold.
I cringe against it and curve my shoulders inwards.
