He’s awake when I turn from the workbench, watching me from the furs. He misses nothing. “Early start,” he says.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
He doesn’t press. He’s learning when to ask and when to leave the space open, and the fact that he’s learning it means something I’m not ready to look at directly.
“I need wild garlic,” I say. “And root vegetables, if the frost hasn’t killed them. And more frostbark, for the deterrent compounds.”
“You want to forage?”
“I want to make food that isn’t burned. Foraging is the first step.”
He uncurls from the furs, the motion smoother than it was two weeks ago. The salve is working; his body is stronger, the tremor quieter, and the way he moves through the cave has changed, less careful, more certain.
We go out together. The morning is cold and bright, the sky sharp blue, the kind of mountain light that makes every edge clean.
He leads down the switchbacks, and I follow, my pack on my back with the empty vials and the knife. At the tree line the scrub thickens and the ground cover changes, moss, dead leaves, and underneath them the things I’m looking for.
“Here.” I crouch at the base of a flat rock. Wild garlic, the leaves frost-burned at the tips but the bulbs intact underground, and I pull three. The left hand fumbles the third bulb and it rolls into the moss; I pick it up without comment, and he watches without comment. I hold one up. “Smell.”
He lowers his head, his nostrils flaring, the heat pits along his jaw registering the plant’s temperature, which is not how anyone has ever assessed garlic before. “Sharp,” he says.
“That’s the sulfur compounds in the bulb. Same family as the crystals from the vent, different concentration. Edible. Good for stew. Good for about six medicinal applications I won’t annoy you with.”
“You wouldn’t annoy me.”
I look up at him. He says it simply, not flirting, just the truth as he sees it. “Three of the six involve digestive parasites. You’d be bored.”
“I would not be bored by digestive parasites.”
“Nobody is interested in digestive parasites.”
“I’m interested in what you know.” He pauses. “All of it.”
I pull another garlic bulb and don’t look at him. Looking at him right now would require a response, and I don’t have one that fits in my mouth.
We move along the tree line, and I point out what’s edible and what isn’t: bittercress; wood sorrel, which tastes like green apples and grows in the shade of the larger rocks; a cluster of root vegetables I don’t have a name for in the common trade language, but that the guild called stone turnips.
“Don’t touch that one,” I say, pointing to a low-growing vine with dark berries.
“Poisonous?”
“Aggressively. Contact irritant. Blisters within an hour. Actually...” I pull a vial from my pack and collect three berries with the frostbark knife, careful not to touch them. “These are useful for the deterrents.”
“You see food and weapons in the same patch of ground.”
“I see chemistry. Whether it feeds you or kills you is a question of dose.”
A low rumble in his chest.
We check the deterrent placements along the eastern approach while we’re down here. His job is reading the tracks and checking the choke points; mine is testing the compounds I placed three days ago, refreshing the ones the weather has degraded.
The tracks are the same as yesterday, up to the wide section, no advance. Holding pattern.
“They’re waiting for something,” he says.
“More people?”
“Or orders. Or weather.” He looks up the slope. “The ice shelf is stable for now. If the temperature drops again it’ll hold through the week.”
