“Relax, I’ve got this.”
His eyes glittered as they held mine. “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it.” Vorn smiled beside me. “Come,bunny,let’s get you warm.”
Shit, how long had they been following us?
Chapter 17
Vorn's settlementsmelled of woodsmoke, animal fat, and survival.
It wasn't exactly unpleasant. It was the smell of people who had stripped everything down to what mattered and stopped apologizing for how they lived. I recognized it the way you recognize a dialect — not your own, but close enough to understand.
He led me to a shelter near the center of the settlement. Low-roofed, half-buried in the frozen ground, it had a small, efficient fire that wasted nothing. He motioned for me to sit, and I sat down. For a while, neither of us spoke.
That was fine. I understood silence as a language.
I kept looking at the single bedroll on the floor and finally looked up at him. “You mention shared body heat, and I’ll slit your throat.”
He laughed as he unwrapped his outside clothes. Which was his cloak, and his neck warmer. Everything else he kept on. Thank the gods.
Vorn was somewhere between thirty and weathered, broad across the chest as if he'd never once considered stopping work. He wasn’t old, but his face resembled the land itself — wind-scraped, frost-marked, always hardened against softness. Not cruel. Just stripped of anything unnecessary. Dark-haired, he had pale, washed-out blue eyes. He was... handsome in his own way.
“You came from Skallfen,” he said eventually.
“We passed by it.”
“Passed by.” He turned the words over. “Passed by or passed through?”
There was no point in lying. “We went through,” I told him. “Though there wasn't much left to pass through.”
He looked at me steadily. “Meaning what?”
I wasn’t sure how much to tell him, but I answered anyway. “I don’t think many are left alive.”
He watched me closely. “Them?” He jerked his chin to the entrance of the tent.
I shook my head quickly. “No. Worse.” I suddenly felt sure he’d laugh at me if I told him. “Frosttaken.”
Vorn searched my eyes for any sign of deceit. He looked away, his sniff loud. “They said they’d walk again before the winter months had passed.”
I leaned forward. “They? Who’s they?”
He sat down on a low stool across from me. “Elders. One has the sight, she says.”
I nodded. I knew of a few of them but avoided them mostly. “She’s seen the Frosttaken?”
He nodded slowly. “She claims it’s what blinded her when she was younger.”
I sat back. “What?”
“She claims they seek the Chosen.” His lips curled in a sneer. “Fucking Verei Kahn bitches, itwouldbe a monster that a monster sought.”
“She’s Verei Kahn?” I asked him, feeling panic rise in my chest.
He snorted. “Nah, just an old woman with a little sight of the Chances.” He scratched his beard. “She did say they were wakening again,” he mused. “All of the town gone?”
I didn’t need to answer for him to see the truth in my face. He nodded once, slowly, as if this confirmed something he'd suspected for a while.
