"I'm sorry," she said.
"It was a long time ago."
She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
"I had both parents until I was twenty-three," she said. "Father went first. His heart, the physicians said. Mother followed six months later. The physicians called that her heart too, but I think it was simpler than that. She just stopped wanting to be here without him."
"And then Corvin."
"And then Corvin." She rested her chin on her knees. "I have an aunt in the southern provinces. We exchange letters twice a year. She signs them 'with warm regards' and asks about the weather."
"That is your family?"
"That is what remains of it."
The fire had burned down to a steady glow, the larger logs collapsing into beds of ember. The shelter had warmed enough that she could feel her fingers again, her toes, the tip of her nose that had been numb since yesterday.
Targesh rose and added more wood to the fire. The flames climbed, casting new shadows across the walls. When he settled again, it was closer to her. Not touching, but near enough that she could feel the heat radiating from his body.
"The clan is family," he said. "Not by blood. By choice."
She turned her head to look at him. His profile was sharp against the firelight, and she thought about how terrifying he had seemed that first night in the archives. How she had stood in the dark with her heart pounding and her mind racing, cataloguing threat assessments like they would save her.
She had not been afraid of the right things.
The fire settled. Outside, the wind had dropped to nothing. She could tell by the silence, the way the shelter stopped its faint creaking. The mountain going still.
She was watching the smoke hole when she noticed the color.
Not firelight. Firelight she knew—orange, red, the occasional blue at the base of a flame. This was green. A faint wash of it, there and gone, sliding across the circle of dark sky visible through the opening in the roof.
She stared at it. Her mind reached automatically for the monograph.Atmospheric particulate interaction at elevation, iron-mineral suspension in cold air masses following significant temperature drop—
Another wash of color. Green deepening to gold at its edge.
Targesh stood.
He did not say anything. He crossed to the door and pushed it open, letting in a blade of cold air, and stepped outside.
Verity unfolded herself from the platform and followed him.
The sky was alive.
Curtains of green and gold rippling across the dark from one horizon to the other, slow and immense, folding and unfolding like something breathing.
She forgot to be cold.
She forgot to catalogue.
The lights moved like water. Green bled into gold bled into a pale violet. Targesh stood beside her, his face tilted upward. The light played across his features, softening the brutal angles, turning his scars into decoration. He was not watching her. He was watching the sky with an expression she had never seen on him before.
Wonder. Simple and unguarded.
"What is it?" Her voice came out hushed, as though speaking too loudly might break whatever was happening above them.
"The mountain's breath." He did not look away from the lights. "That is what my mother called it. The old stories say the mountains dream, and when they dream deeply, their breath rises and catches fire in the cold."
"That's not—" She stopped herself. She had been about to saythat's not how atmospheric phenomena work, and the words died in her throat because she did not want to reduce this to phenomena. Not now. Not standing in the snow with the sky burning green above her and this man beside her.
