I know this. I know her. I've watched her for weeks. I know the way her eyes go flat when the memories surface and the way her hands grip her own knees when the guilt rolls through and the way she looks at me and then looks away fast, as if seeing me hurts.
She ran because I gave her something she wants, and she believes she can't keep it.
She’s wrong. But she won't know that until I tell her.
I put the comb in my pack. Then I go to the back of the hall.
Vortek’s trophies are in the chest where I've kept them for seven years. I opened it for her. Now I'm opening it to empty it.
The pale claw of the ridge bear. I can still hear him laughing, holding it up to the light. I told him he was exaggerating. He threw it at my head.
A pelt of white fur. Mountain cat. His best kill. He wore it across his shoulders for a season, strutting, insufferable. I buried him without it because I couldn't stand to put it in the ground.
More. Teeth and claws and small bones from a dozen hunts. Seven years of his memory, preserved in fragments.
I pack them all. I don't hesitate. I don't hold each one to the light and grieve over it. I pack them the way she would pack them: quickly, everything in its place.
Vortek would have told me I was an idiot for letting her leave in the first place. He would have been right.
I take my coat. My spear. The pack with the trophies and the comb. I fill a waterskin and wrap dried meat in leather. I bank the fire because I plan to come back.
Her tracks lead south. I follow them at a run. Eight feet covers ground faster than five, and I know this terrain — every ridge, every valley, every place where the wind scours the snow down to ice.
The tracks end at the trading road.
The portal station. The stone arch at the crossroads, humming faintly, the air around it still disturbed. She had coins in her jacket.
She’s not walking to Lakthgrad. She’s already there. Or she will be before I can catch her on foot.
The bride market. She’s going to stand on a platform and let some creature buy her and take her away to a place where I can't find her. She’s going to trade herself for safety because she thinks safety is all she’s worth. A tool, a pair of hands, a body that knows how to work. Not a person. Not someone worth following across the Wastes.
I don't have coins. I have two legs and a fire in my chest that she put there.
I lengthen my stride. The wind pushes against me and I push back. The fire inside me is not banking down. It’s climbing. Feeding on the empty space where she was.
I head southeast. Toward Lakthgrad. Toward her.
ESELD
Lakthgrad is built into the side of a mountain. Stone and timber, layered up the slope in tiers connected by steep stairways and rope bridges. The buildings are mixed construction: Jötunn-scale on the lower levels, human-scale packed into the upper terraces where the rooflines crowd together. A trading post that grew into a town that grew into whatever this is. A place where the territories overlap and the laws get complicated.
The portal drops me on the second tier. I stumble on the landing — they're not built for comfort — and get my bearings. Sore and half-frozen and running on dried meat and meltwater. The boots held up. His boots.
I find the market office on the second tier. A low stone building with a wooden counter and a clerk who looks at me without interest. He’s seen women walk in looking worse than I do.
“Registration?”
“Yes.”
Forms. I fill them out with steady hands. Name: Eseld. Origin: human territories, south. Skills: demolitions, structuralassessment, field engineering. No family listed. No debts. No conditions.
The clerk reads the skills line. Looks up at me. Back at the form.
“Demolitions.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No. Unusual.” He stamps the form. “Platform four. Tomorrow, midday.” He stamps another form. Hands me a token with a number scratched into the wood. “Lodging is on the third tier. Meals included. Don't cause trouble.”
