I heaved myself back on my horse just as Harthon replied, “It already did. By bringing me her.”
Chapter 25
The wolf became our shadow. It loped behind us, even as the incline became grueling and the hours tracked on. It followed when the temperature dropped and the winds became heavier, battering us with cold, and it was still there when the first tuft of white floated down from the sky.
I watched the icy speck land on my horse’s neck, where it promptly disappeared. Turning my face upward, my breath caught.
A flurry of delicate flakes rode the air like feathers, sweeping left and right as they dropped. They were the purest white, blindingly bright against the smoke-colored clouds above, dancing in the sky from every direction.
“First snow?” Harthon asked. Like me, gloves now protected his hands and he wore a heavier cloak, the hood pulled over his head.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, voice full of wonder. A flake landed on my nose, kissing it with cold. “I didn’t realize snowfall could still happen.”
The Domus had made the world gray and cool. The weather was consistently gloomy, never leaning toward extremes, never giving us anything as wondrous as this. I’d seen beauty in that butterfly, in the greenery of Harthon’s garden, but I didn’t know it could still come from the skies above.
“The mountains are one of the only places that retained some traits from before the Domus. I imagine it’s the elevation,” he shared.
The flakes landing on his cloak managed to hold their form for a second before melting, like they wanted to lend him some of their beauty before they died.
A smile played across his lips as he observed me from beneath his hood.
I brushed a snowflake from my eye. “What?”
“I think showing you this world may be one of my favorite things to do.”
“It has to be annoying. Me not knowing anything.” Domus knew it was annoying to me.
He responded with a leisurely shake of his head. “It’s a gift, being the one to share all this with you—getting to see that look in your eyes every time you discover something new.”
The humming in my chest had nothing to do with the heat there. Harthon already tangled my insides into addictive shapes. When he wassweet?
It made my heart throb, like it wanted to leap out of my chest into his hands. Like it belonged to him.
Maybe it already does.
The thought rocked me, because it felt entirely right.
Before I could analyze it further, my horse jerked to a stop. Harthon had grabbed the reins, face hard. “Stay on the horse this time,” he demanded.
I followed his line of vision to a large tree, beside which a burlap lump was being swallowed by snowflakes. It could easily have been mistaken for a mound of dirt.
He and Aric dismounted in tandem, weapons in hand, and cautiously crept toward it. Harthon reached it first and toed it with his boot. When it didn’t move, he grasped the top andpulled. A pile of bones sat on the ground. By the shape of the skull, they were human.
His attention wasn’t fixated on the skull, though, but the side of the pile. He crouched, fingering something, muttering words I couldn’t hear to Aric. He stood, and the two of them studied the ground around them.
With more caution than before, they returned, troubled expressions across their faces.
Harthon put his weapon away and swung onto his horse. “From here on out, unless we’re under attack, no one here steps down from their horse without our signal first.”
I looked at the pile of bones, which Harthon had covered again with the burlap. “What did you find?”
“A trap,” he said grimly. “Whoever that was, they stepped in one, and were left to die in the elements.”
Well, that was ominous. “Why would they have been left here? You set traps to capture something. Not to leave it.”
It was Aric who responded. “My guess? It’s an old trap that was forgotten by people who used to live here. That tells us two important things.” He cut me a look from atop his horse, eyes dark. “One, there are probably more old traps here for us to step on. And two, these people like to set traps big and strong enough to capture humans. Just because these people have changed locations doesn’t mean their habits would.”
If I hadn’t spent so much time trapping animals myself, I might wonder how he knew those traps were meant for humans. But small game—which was the majority of available food for the last fifteen or twenty years—required lighter traps. Spring them too heavily, and a rabbit would turn into a pulverized mess.
