I nodded. “I believe so.”
“Have you been to Glassfyr?” she asked me.
“No. It’s too south for me. What would a trailfinder do with paths marked and carved into the ground for all to follow?” I looked around at the empty land. “No, this is my home.”
“Icy wilderness, isolated and struggling?” she asked me skeptically.
“How do you know you’re alive if you’re not fighting for survival?” I countered.
Larana laughed. “You don’t need to fight every day, Amarya. Some days you can just sleep in.”
I laughed at the silliness of our conversation. We walked on in companionable silence, and I realized that I liked both her and Baxley’s company. Nicco… meh.
“So what is Darysia like?” I asked her, my eyes scanning the terrain in front and seeing the trail ahead.
“Warm,” Larana instantly replied. “Not as warm as Cinderia.” She glanced at me. “Cinderia is my homeland. Trust me, you’d never cope with the heat.” Her gaze ran over me. “And other things.”
“Other things?” I asked curiously. “What other things?”
“Let me put it this way, Amarya. When was the last time you only wore one layer of clothing?”
My cheeks burned with a blush. “Larana!” I was scandalized. “You don’t ask those kinds of questions.”
Her peal of laughter was loud in the silence. “In Cinderia, in my village, we wore one layer, two items of clothing, and…” She leaned into me. “The fabric is so light, it’s almost transparent.”
I jerked away from her in shock, my eyes wide. “You lie!”
She was grinning, and she turned, her gaze searching. “Nicco, tell the trailfinder how little they wear in Cinderia,” she called.
“I don’t need to. She believes you,” he called back lazily. “I can practically taste her outrage.”
That earned him a scowl from me as Larana scolded him about being nicer.
I didn’t ask any more questions, and Larana dropped back to scout for game with Baxley.
I could have told them they were wasting their time. The game they needed was under the snow, not on it. But the truth was, I was still thinking about wearing only one layer of clothes and how exposed it would feel.
Night fell gently — too gently for this far north — and I should have been more alert, instead of daydreaming about foreign lands with strange customs.
The snowstorm hit us in the middle of the night.
I don’t know who was on watch, but they missed seeing the wall of snow in the blackness all around us.
I would have seen it, but I was sleeping soundly. Another thing I never did on the trail.
The storm decimated the camp within seconds of hitting us, and then it was a mad scramble to gather our stuff, wrap up asbest we could, and hunker down together as it battered against us.
The horses were gone. I couldn’t hear them if they were near, and I’d heard one whinny before the storm swallowed the cry.
“What the fuck is this?” Nicco shouted above the howling wind. “Is this normal?”
“It’s a skarveld!” I yelled back. “Hard to predict, worse to see, and we just?—”
The wind swallowed my words. When it had lowered its screaming wail enough to be heard, Nicco shouted back at me.
“We just what?” he demanded.
“Survive it!” I screamed back, hoping he heard me.
