Monster, my frightened brain insisted, even as the rest of me watched a man do a small kindness for an enemy.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“I can run,” I said, surprising myself.
“Good.”
He stooped to snatch up my dropped knife and set it in my palm, handle-first.
“Keep this,” he said quietly. “If you need to use it on me, aim for the throat. Here.” He tapped a seam where armor met skin.
I stared at him. “Why would you tell me that?”
His mouth did something like a smile, brief and tired. “Because you are afraid. And because I do not want to be what he called me.”
Another horse screamed, farther away.
Rygnar’s head snapped up. “Now.”
We ran.
The road fell away behind us, and the foothills took us in—rough and rising. He chose a line that wasn’t a trail so much as a suggestion: up a dry wash, through stands of cedar, over a rib of rock that scraped my palms raw.
Twice he steadied me with a hand at my elbow, and twice he took it away before the touch became anything else.
We climbed until the wind tasted like snow.
The land opened suddenly at a lip of stone. The Front Range surged up in a jagged wall of blue ice and pine, the sky above it a hard white.
Rygnar scanned the lower slopes, quick and methodical. Satisfied, he gestured toward a dark seam in the cliff face barely wider than a wagon plank.
“Shelter,” he said. “For tonight.”
I hesitated at the seam, chest heaving, heart doing the rabbit-against-snare thing it does when death brushes by and then doesn’t take you.
My hand brushed the courier tag through my shirt. It pulsed back.
“Wait,” I said. “I have to—”
I fumbled under the collar, found the tiny pressure switch, and killed the signal.
The tag went cold, and I almost cried from the hush that fell inside me.
Rygnar watched, that still way of his like a held breath.
“Good,” he said. “Clever.”
“Not clever enough,” I said, and stepped into the seam of stone.
He followed.
The world narrowed to stone and the whisper of our boots.
For a long time, there was only our breathing and the faint drip of water—the old bones of the mountain taking us in like we were small and unimportant.
Like we were safe.
I didn’t believe in safe.
