Chapter 14

The wilds of DarkFyre Dale were a raw, wretched place, and never more so than in the grip of winter.

For the first few days they traveled mostly through the open, sweeping meadows and plains of the western highlands. During the all too brief summer months the highlands were an entirely different place characterized by tall, lush green grasses swaying in the cool wind, speckled with notes of color from wildflowers. They teamed with small, secret life. Bees buzzing, drone-like and purposeful, and field mice scurried about in the abundant shelter of the dark grasses. Roaming herds of wild horses grazed over the grass with long, strong legs silhouetted, rising up to powerful haunches as they bent graceful necks down to sample the tasty greens.

In winter, it was different. The flatlands were abandoned and covered over with the unchanging, beautifully dreary snow. The airy powder suffocated the lush green grasses, froze out the flowers, sending the field mice into their burrows to hibernate away the cold. It hung heavy on the sparse, scattered trees and dusted the great boulders that rose like lonely, forgotten sentinels. They were scattered about in groups, cast aside and forgotten by ancient giants that forsook the Northlands long ago in favor of someplace blessedly fucking warm.

Growing up in the Dale, Silmaria thought she understood what cold was. Oh, she'd had a good idea, true. But nothing of her experience of DarkFyre winters had prepared her for the travails of traveling through the wilds. Always before, when she was exposed to the bitter, biting cold, she'd had walls and a roof and shelter to retire to at the end of the day. Even the scant nights traveling to Trelling's Rest after House IronWing burned didn't fully prepare her for what they faced.

Now, there was no escaping the cruel grip of the torturous freeze. When they bedded down for the night, they were lucky if they managed to find a stone large enough to offer some cover from the wind that came whipping dagger-like to knife cold down to the bone. Though Rael was reluctant to set up fires, worried that if they were, indeed, being followed the flames would act as a beacon, the cold left them with no choice; it was construct a fire, or freeze to death.

Even sleeping as closely as they dared to the fire, the nights were brutally cold. Rael and Silmaria had quickly set all propriety aside and slept rolled up together with all their combined blankets and cloaks bundled around them as they huddled together for warmth. Silmaria was eternally grateful for the Nobleman during those nights. He cast off an enormous amount of body heat, more than any man she'd ever known, as if he was deeply warmed from within. If not for his body's warmth, the Gnari girl would have frozen for sure, even with all their blankets and cloaks and clothes. The cold was a constant oppression, and the only reason Silmaria was able to sleep through the misery of their conditions was due to how utterly exhausted she was at the end of the day's march.

The days weren't much of an improvement. They walked, endlessly walked, on and on in an unforgiving trudge through snow that sometimes piled up around the bottoms of her thighs. Rael was relentless. He hardly ever tired, and he refused to let her rest or fall behind. Silmaria had complained once or twice, but he hardly slowed his pace at all, reminding her gently but firmly that she'd wanted to come, and he'd warned her. Then he would tilt his head in that way of his, half curious, half cocky, and ask her if she would be okay. Silmaria heard the unspoken challenge in his voice: Can you keep up?

It made her seethe every time, and every time she went trudging along faster, cursing all Nobles and Warriors and stupidly stubborn Knights, sometimes under her breath, sometimes not.

When they weren't marching on and on until her poor cold feet blistered in her boots, Rael was at work in other areas. When they stopped for a rest, Rael scouted around, usually looking for some kind of vantage to get a measure of their surroundings. A tall, sturdy rock, or a hill overlooking the otherwise flat land. A few times he even made his way up a tree when he found one that grew tall and strong. He surveyed the land around them, took his bearings, and adjusted their course as needed.

Their food was rationed carefully. They both grew leaner during those days of forced marches and less nourishment. Rael did everything he could to bolster their food supplies, stringing up snares for snow rabbits and other small game when they made camp, and ranging for small deer and mountain elk with his bow.

And so their days went. It was near a week before the wide flatlands of the Western Plains began to change, turning into the gently rolling hills of IceMarch Rise. They trudged gradually upward, and trees and woodlands became more common. Tall pines and thick, old evergreens gathered in small, secretive groves on the rocky hills climbing in ever-swelling humps toward the Frostfall Mountains. The days seemed to stretch longer with each dawn, harder and more grueling than the last.

The journey changed Rael, it seemed. Already serious and intense, he became even more focused during their travels, as if all his being were tuned to taking them deeper into the wild and escaping from the Dale at all costs. He made it quite obvious early on that he was to be obeyed implicitly and unwaveringly. He was not cruel, not even unkind, really. He continued to treat her with the same quiet kindness and respect he always did. But there was a hardness to him now, a sternness and demanding quality that would brook no argument and give no rest or reprieve to the pace he demanded until the day was over and he was satisfied they'd covered enough ground. His temper was even and patient as she balked and struggled to adapt to his pace. But he was unyielding, and he smiled less.

Silmaria tried. Truly she did. She put her all into meeting his demands. She rose to the relentless challenge he set forth, putting her heart and soul into keeping up with his pace. She stubbornly pressed ahead. Her will was born of the desire to prove to him she could do it, both as an act of defiance, and also to gain his approval. She couldn't say which was her true motivation from one moment to the next, but she was determined to do it all the same.

Still, all the determination in the world didn't make the journey a single step shorter or one bit less demanding. As much as she was loathe to admit it, Silmaria was wearing thin.

"This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be," Silmaria admitted quietly one night. They camped high on a hillock, just under the edge of a copse of trees. The canopy of branches would have been great shelter for the fat, falling snowflakes that had been following them the last two days. Only tonight, the sky was empty and clear, the unforgivingly thick blanket of clouds finally giving way to a captivating view of the cool winter sky with its distinctively gleaming stars spread by the thousands like diamond dust cast into the void. The Gnari girl sat, her knees drawn up to her chest, staring up into the sparkling darkness while Rael sat across the serenely crackling fire, running a whetstone along the blade of his greatsword.

"I warned you," he reminded her, not unkindly.

"I know," Silmaria sighed. She reached up to idly toy with her hair, running her fingers through the long, dark locks of it to try to work some of the tangles free. "And I believed you. I didn't understand how ... big ... everything is. The world is a lot wider than I thought, I guess. I never knew I could hate something so simple as walking so passionately."

It was true; if Silmaria spent the rest of her life off her feet, she'd die happy. Silmaria had always considered herself to be fit and strong, but after the countless miles they'd covered, her body ached everywhere. Her hips hurt. Her thighs and calves and the soles of her feet hurt, and her back and shoulders from lugging her packs around, too. She wasn't doing anything especially strenuous, but it was so constant, endless. If they weren't sleeping, and they weren't eating, then they were walking, and sometimes they were walking when they did that, too, or at least it certainly felt like it. And walking hadn't gotten one bit more enjoyable once they started heading up hill, oh no!

Silmaria turned her eyes to him, and caught him with a faint but definitive smirk on his lips. The bastard was smirking at her! "It will get worse," he said grimly.

"How?" she demanded flatly.

"IceMarch Pass will be hard going," Rael explained. "It will take us high into the mountains, where it will be colder. The pass will be steep and treacherous, and this time of year there will be harsh winter storms that will make the weather down here seem mild and enjoyable. Surviving that part of the journey will be very difficult."

Silmaria felt her stomach go sour at his words. She looked down at her dinner, a bowl of thick stew they'd made from rabbit meat and the last of the venison, and several tubers of roots they had found earlier that morning. All in all, it wasn't a bad dinner, but now she'd lost her taste for it.

She forced herself to eat for several bites, then in a sudden burst of temper, she tossed her bowl violently into the snow, spattering the soft white with chunks of rabbit and deer. Caught between fear and despair, tears threatening to spill at any moment, Silmaria fought off the impending sobs by leveling a fierce glare at her companion.

"That's great. That's just fucking great! I'm already struggling just to get through without falling behind. Now you're telling me this is the easy part? How the hell do I survive all that! I'm barely keeping up as it is!"

Rael looked up at her then, though his hands never slowed at their work. The firelight caught in his coppery hair, making it shine all the more brilliant, accentuating the wild, untamed locks and the fierceness that his growing beard lent to his face. The flame traced ragged, shining lines up the killing edge of his blade, and his gaze was just as sharp, a flash of silver fire, threatening to burn her if she got too close.

She shivered, and not from the cold.

"Lower your voice. We don't know what is in these hills with us," he warned her calmly. She hadn't even realized she was yelling until he said it. Flushing with embarrassment, she balled her hands into fists, angry, and opened her mouth to shout a retort.

"Be quiet!" Rael commanded, and this time there was steel in his voice. The fire in his eyes blazed bright, and his progress with the whetstone stilled. Silmaria's breath caught in her throat, and though she couldn't help but continue to glower at him, neither could she help but obey him.

The whetstone began to move once again, and his gaze returned to his work. "This is hard. I know. It is hard for me, too, and I'm more used to these things. But understand this. You will persevere. You will drive on, because you have no choice. Because there is no other way. We move, and we hunt, and we keep warm, and we make our way to journey's end, or we die. Simple as that."

"I can't do this," Silmaria said softly with real fear in her voice. She was afraid, angry and afraid, and now tears threatened to spill down her cheeks. This made her even angrier, because she didn't want Rael to see her cry, and even more afraid, because if she started, she didn't think she could stop.

"You can, and you will," Rael replied firmly. His whetstone slid over the edge of his blade, an almost hypnotic undertone to his words. "You are a strong woman, Silmaria. The only woman I would ever take with me on this journey. I wouldn't have brought you along just so you could die, you know. I knew before we left that you could do this. And I still know that now."

Silmaria huddled into herself, rocking gently back and forth. Her eyes turned to the fire now, watching the flames shift and sway in their sensual, deliberate way, a dance as old and primal and unknowable and familiar as the world itself. The girl, feeling very small, soaked up Lord Rael's words as he spoke them in tones of sureness and finality. She hated him then, as she sometimes did, and like usual she wasn't really sure what for. She hated him for being so hard. She hated him for being so kind. She hated him for being so sure when she felt so lost and confused and hopeless. She hated him for having so much faith in her. For putting his confidence in her and forcing her to be stronger than she thought she was capable of being, just to live up to his expectations.

Most of all she hated him because, somehow, she couldn't stomach the thought of letting him down.

"Teach me to hunt," she said.

So he did.

The most difficult part for Silmaria was the bow. The longbow Rael used was designed for a man taller than her, and with a much stronger arm; it took all her strength to draw the string and nock an arrow back. A few hours of hunting with half a dozen arrows loosed left her back and shoulders on fire from the strain.

Despite the difficulty, the Gnari proved a natural hunter. After a bare handful of days, she was hunting almost as frequently as Rael himself. Once the Nobleman taught her how to handle the bow, how to identify game sign and how to quietly stalk a kill, Silmaria's instincts and natural ability took over. Her heightened senses and quickness on her feet helped her to shadow prey with natural grace and poise.

When she stalked her quarry and moved in position to take down her kill, all the rest of the world, the hardships and the struggle, the pain of her lost friends and home, the perils of their journey ... all of it faded from her mind. Her heart wasn't squeezed quite so tightly, and all she lived for was the moment. The hunt. The kill. It was a peaceful, violent sort of exhilaration. She reveled in the thrill of the hunt, and was deeply gratified to be doing something truly useful and necessary to their survival. The pressure of the bowstring drawn taut under her fingers, the arrow knocked back. The solid wood of the ash bow, thrumming with tension and potential. It spoke to her, a promise of food, of value and purpose and power. It was a heady thing, and she savored it.

Soon, Rael had to depend on Silmaria's tracking skills entirely to hunt; as they made their way deeper and deeper into the hilly country and up to the mountains themselves, game became scarce and hunting was made no easier by the ever-worsening weather. They'd salted and smoked as much extra meat as they could. Rael held those supplies back, staring at the unfriendly sky and seeing nothing but bleak, lean days ahead.

The pair reached the FrostFall Mountains after just over two weeks in the wild.

Silmaria craned her head back to stare up at the massive peaks towering up in a long, jagged row, and felt truly small. She'd never been so close to a mountain before. The steep cliffs were dotted and peppered with the green of scraggly trees clinging to the rocky slopes, their small, powerful, stubborn roots resiliently digging their way into any crack or purchase they could find. Snow capped the upward jutting tips of the mountains, which wore cloaks of snow and thick cloud cover like mysterious, faceless conspirators come for some clandestine meeting at the edge of the world.

"They're huge ... how are we supposed to go on? I don't think I can climb this," Silmaria said doubtfully as she eyed the giants arrayed before her.

Rael, standing beside her, gave a thin, amused smile. "You haven't tried yet. You seem to be doing a lot of things you didn't think you could. But it doesn't matter; we'll be taking IceMarch Pass. It's a long way through the mountains, and treacherous at winter. But it will carry us through sure and sound, if we're careful."

If Silmaria thought traveling the hills had been hard, now she knew better. IceMarch Pass was a narrow slip of a path worn into the mountains. It was just wide enough for a single cart to navigate, if the driver were exceptionally brave, or exceptionally stupid, or exceptionally well loved by all the collective gods named and unnamed. The pass alternated between steep rises and long, stretching gradual climbs, sudden blind turns and serpentine windings in an ever increasing climb. The way was slow, and grueling, and the path was heaped with snow and, as they went higher, treacherous ice. Rael led them at a cautious, calculating pace, giving no window for disaster to catch them unawares.

They followed the pass deep into the mountains. The great stone giants surrounded them, beautiful and terrible. The path opened on one side to drop off into nothingness, a deep ravine gouged into the mountain chain far below, mist hanging in specter-threads over open and empty space, calling.

The craggy faces of the mountains soared, reaching with all their might to the sky, as if the land collected itself in a great surge to reach the sky and kiss the sun before falling back to earth, still and lifeless and complete. The bones of the world were arrayed around them, white-capped and cold and lonely. Silmaria was filled with a sense of something old and powerful beyond knowing in those strange and wonderfully treacherous mountains, and that was comforting and alarming all at once.

After a time, Silmaria decided she would have rather liked the mountains, if it weren't for the storms. By their second day trekking along IceMarch Pass, the storms had slowed them to a snails crawl. The wind was constant and howling and so powerful it made her ache just to be buffeted by it. They were both wrapped with every bit of winter clothes and heavy cloaks they possessed, but even then the wind cut straight through to chill them to the marrow.

Rael led the way blocking the worst of the elements. Wind, snow, ice and freezing rain whipped all about him, driven by mighty blowing gusts. Silmaria had never been more grateful for the man as she was then; she knew if it hadn't been for him absorbing the brunt of the storm she would have froze, or been blown right off the mountainside. As it was, she buried her hands under her arms to keep them warm, her teeth chattered violently, and she trudged on through knee deep snow, her head bent as she stubbornly pushed forward.

And so they made their way, forward and upward, as the storm battered at them viciously. Rael pushed on for there was no place to rest, and if they stopped moving, they'd never move again. The snow and ice born on merciless winds felt like razors when they touched any exposed skin. Rael had his hood drawn down and his face swathed in thick clothe, but he was of course unable to cover himself entirely. He squinted out into the blizzard raging around them, eyes narrowed nearly shut and his brows crusted with ice.