There was nothing in the snares the next morning. Grif divided the remaining apple chunks evenly in two and then they packed up the camp.

It had snowed a little overnight, but it still wasn’t bad; they were wading through whiteness past their knees, but that was all. So far.

Midday, though, Grif stopped walking and stared toward the north. Snow clouds. They’d had a couple of days of clear weather and that was a gift at this time of year; they couldn’t have expected their luck to hold forever.

“We need to find a spot to make camp,” he told Kiernan.

The kid frowned back at him. “Now?”

Grif jerked his head toward the clouds. “We’ve got a couple hours before those get here. We need to be well dug in before then.”

For a moment it seemed like Kiernan was going to argue, but finally he nodded. “Should we find a cliff again, and set the tent up against it?”

“That was blind luck, last time. Tents are no good in the wind, or in the snow.”

“I’ve camped in the snow before using a tent.”

Grif bit back his impatience. “Down by the ocean, when you were traveling the flat land with your healer?”

Kiernan nodded.

“You haven’t seen snow if all you’ve seen is the little skiff of it you get down there. Already there’s more here than you’d see in a season below, right?”

Another nod, this one reluctant.

Grif’s frustration was fading; it was actually kind of fun, being a teacher. Having information worth sharing. “The west side of the Whitetooths is known for its snow fall. There are other ranges that are much colder—places where you’ll go for days or weeks without seeing a tree or anything but rock and ice, even in the summer. And the east side of the range doesn’t get the snow, but it’s windier than all the hells, and too dry all year round, so there are hardly any trees. No game. On this side the ocean helps keep things warm, and we really aren’t that far north anyway. But the problem with the ocean is all the water. It soaks the air, and when the air hits the hills and starts rising, we get snow. Lots and lots and lots of snow.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about this.”

“You’ve heard. But do you know? Not if you think a tent is going to do us a damn bit of good. I’m talking about snow piled up over your head, drifting to twice that high in the wrong spots. And right next to a cliff, where the wind would carry it? That’s a wrong spot. Ten or twelve feet of snow on top of your tent—what’s going to happen?”

Kiernan exhaled hard. “So what do you suggest?”

“We’ll find a good spot and build a burrow. We’ll have to keep an eye on things overnight, make sure we keep an air hole open, but that’s not too tricky.”

“If it’s that easy, why didn’t you do it yourself? Why were you still walking when you fell off that cliff?”

There were parts of that question that Grif simply didn’t want to answer. Easier to give a half-truth. “Not enough snow, not then. And it was too far east. We’re farther west now, and that storm dumped enough for us to get started, if we find somewhere it drifted.”

They walked on, found a small clearing that suited Grif’s requirements, and got to work. They used their hands to dig, and the cooking pot, and the axe, and they made a little mound of snow with a flat area in front, as they had the previous nights.

“Start a fire,” Grif told Kiernan. They wouldn’t likely be able to keep it going once the storm hit, but if they could go into the burrow nice and warm, they’d have a good start. The warmth from the fire would help the snow set too, making their walls stronger and letting them build a bigger space without worrying about collapse.

The wind picked up as Grif began to dig into the side of the snowbank they’d built, and by the time he had a hollow big enough for both of them to slide into, the storm was on them.

“Crawl in,” he bellowed, and Kiernan nodded and started crawling without argument. Grif took the final step of leaning up and shaking the long tree branch he’d shoved through the roof of their shelter, jerking it sideways to make sure there was an opening around it. That would be their air hole once the snow covered the opening they’d crawled in through.

Once he was out of the wind, he pulled his mitts off and warmed his face with his hands. He looked over to see Kiernan doing the same, and he couldn’t help himself. He grinned, and the kid grinned back, and there it all was again. The bewildering warmth, the twisting in his stomach that should have been unpleasant but somehow wasn’t.

He’d wanted men before, naturally. Things were easier with women, but women weren’t always handy and even when they were, sometimes he wanted men anyway. It wasn’t a matter he’d ever worried about.

This was different, though. Well, it wasn’t completely different. It was partly physical, sure, but if that had been all, the solution would have been simple. He’d have made a move, and Kiernan would have been interested or he wouldn’t have been. If he hadn’t been, that would have been an end to it, and Grif didn’t care if that meant he was a soft touch—he would never, never do to anyone else what those men had done to him. So he’d have put Kiernan out of his mind and moved on with his own right hand for company.

Aye, that would have been nice and simple. But things couldn’t be that easy, because Grif didn’t simply want to fuck Kiernan. He wanted to make him smile. Wanted to share the damn smiles, wanted them to hold hands and stare at each other like they were characters in a play.

He was too damn old for this nonsense. He knew better. Of course he knew better; he’d known better when he’d actually been a kid, known it was best to keep sex separate from feelings and feelings buried deep, deep inside where no one could see them and where they might fade away.

Yes, he was being stupid. But he didn’t know how to fix it and didn’t know how to make himself want to fix it.

So he lay there in the dim light of the burrow and smiled.

Kiernan said, “It’s cozy in here,” and Grif fought to find a coherent response.

“We can make it bigger soon,” he managed. “As more snow falls, we can dig out the ceiling. Make it so we can sit up.”

“Lying down isn’t so bad,” Kiernan said.

Damn the dim light! Was Kiernan blushing? Had he said that as an invitation? Exactly how damned innocent and protected was the kid, anyway?

Why in the names of all the gods did Grif care? Make a move and see what happens. That was the only logical way forward.

But what would happen if Kiernan didn’t want him? If he was disgusted, if he stormed off into the snow and froze to death? Or if he stayed, but hated Grif because of it? What if he shrank away from Grif, from innocent contact like huddling together for warmth, the way Grif had tried to pull away from those other men long ago?

No. If Kiernan was going to hate Grif, it would be because of something else. Because Grif had hit him or stolen from him or— Well. There was no shortage of reasons for Kiernan to hate Grif. All those reasons were fine. Grif could handle them. He’d barely notice them.

“We can dig down the floor,” he said. Because the sooner he was able to sit up, the better. “Make sure the doorway stays lower than the place we’re sleeping, or we’ll end up washed with cold air. But there’s another foot of digging you could do before that’s a problem.”

“Whatever you think is best,” Kiernan replied. “I’m in your hands.”

Grif bit back a groan. He was supposed to behave himself with Kiernan saying things like that? The gods were testing him, clearly. They wanted him to suffer, as usual.

As always, the gods could go straight to the hell of their preference. Grif wasn’t their puppet.

“Dig,” he ordered. Maybe the snow would help cool him off.

When Kiernan had been traveling with the master healer, one of their patients had been a young woman with an imp inside her. She’d been brought to the healer by her parents, who described her outbursts, her unpredictable behavior, and explained how she’d always been a good girl, an obedient girl, until one day she’d been digging potatoes in the heat and had fainted. They’d put her in the shade of a tree to recover, and that must have been when it happened. The imp had slipped in through her ear—“Through her ear, doctor, that’s how it happens? Through their ears?”—and made itself at home inside her. From that day on, she’d been completely unmanageable. She would refuse—“absolutely refuse, doctor, as if she were a grand lady”—to perform certain chores. Usually the nastier ones that should be her responsibility because she was only a girl, and not a very pretty one, and if she weren’t doing the nasty chores, then what exactly was she good for anyway? And she’d sneak away at night and go down to the ocean or into the forest and when her parents demanded to know what she’d been doing, she’d laugh at them! She’d laugh!

She had an imp, and the healer needed to get rid of it.

Kiernan’s master had sent the parents from the room, and then he’d sat on a stool facing the girl and looked her in the eyes and said, yes, he could see an imp in there. Then he’d rummaged through his bag and held the mirror up to his own face and smiled. Yes, there was an imp inside him too. But he had no intention of trying to get rid of it. He’d asked the girl if she wanted to be rid of hers and she’d shaken her head. So he’d told her parents there was nothing he could do and the only cure lay in giving the girl as much love and kindness as possible, because it was widely known that imps reacted poorly to affectionate treatment.

That was the story running through Kiernan’s mind as he followed Grif’s instructions on digging out the floor of their burrow.

Well, he followed Grif’s instructions, mostly. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he followed Grif’s instructions but added a few twists of his own.

Grif had said, for example, to scoot to the side and peel back the tent canvas they were using as a floor covering in order to get at the snow beneath. He hadn’t specified that Kiernan should roll to the same side of the space as Grif, snug in beside him, and make sure that his ass rubbed against Grif’s groin every time he scooped out some snow. No, Grif hadn’t mentioned that part; Kiernan had improvised.

Or rather, his imp had.

Because surely that was the only explanation for his behavior. There was no logical reason for this sort of flirtation. It was dangerous, really; a man like Grif wouldn’t be sophisticated enough, cosmopolitan enough to appreciate sexual adventures. Most of the men in Sevastia didn’t appreciate them—Vin’s father certainly hadn’t appreciated them—so Grif absolutely wouldn’t. And if he didn’t like what Kiernan was suggesting, Grif was certainly capable of responding with violence. He’d already proved that with much less provocation.

Still, Kiernan’s imp drove him to continue. The imp actually seemed to enjoy the sense of danger. The imp reminded Kiernan of the fleeting looks he’d caught from Grif, staring when he shouldn’t have been staring . . .

When Grif told Kiernan to pile the dug-up snow over by the door opening, he complied, but made sure to wriggle against Grif as he turned and slid. And as soon as he was the tiniest bit warmer than frozen, he squirmed out of his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt, and he stared right into Grif’s eyes as he was doing it.

None of this was anything Kiernan would have done on his own. His imp had apparently decided it was time to take charge.

Kiernan couldn’t make himself regret the imp’s decisions. He felt alive, like he had in the early days with Vin, both of them unsure and fumbling, sneaking away and laughing and gasping for breath and—

Not that Grif was like Vin in any way. Not that Kiernan could ever care about Grif like he’d cared about Vin. His attraction to Grif was purely physical, and quite possibly situational. Sex with him would be an experience, but that was all. The man was a brute, a criminal—he had none of Vin’s intelligence or sensitivity or compassion. But Vin had bowed to his father’s wishes, had said he and Kiernan would never be together again, so Kiernan was free to let his imp take charge.

Kiernan wriggled backward after dumping his latest buckets of snow out the door and aimed for Grif’s body, for his groin, just as he’d done before. This time, though, his ass hit something flatter. He twisted and saw that Grif had rolled over and was lying with his face to the wall, his back to Kiernan.

“One of us should be awake all the time,” Grif said, his voice a little muffled. “We need to make sure the air hole stays clear. So I’ll sleep now. When I wake up, you’ll sleep.”

No, that was not at all what Kiernan and his imp had in mind. But apparently its efforts to get Kiernan to this point had worn the imp out, because when he called to it and invited it to take over, there was no response. There was no one left but quiet, reserved Kiernan, and no way for him to find the courage he needed in order to say what he wanted to say or do what he wanted to do.

He’d come so close. To ecstasy or disaster, he wasn’t sure, but close to something.

And now he was back to shoveling snow, and Grif was back to being the Highly Annoying Man.

The storm didn’t last as long as Grif had worried it might. The rest of that day and all of the next, the two of them huddle in their cozy den as the wind raged and the snow fell outside. They ate what was left of their food, and they waited.

They waited in silence, at first.

Eventually, Grif said, “Do you gamble, down in Sevastia?”

“There’s gambling. But I’ve never partaken, no.”

Which meant he’d be an easy mark. But he didn’t have any belongings left for Grif to win. “Other games, maybe? How do you pass the time?”

“Personally? I read, whenever there’s literature available. I like histories and sciences. I like to understand how the world works.”

Well. Reading. Grif didn’t have much to contribute to that conversation.

But after a few moments Kiernan said, “What about you? How do you pass the time?”

“The opposite of everything you said. No reading. Lots of gambling.” Whoring, drinking, fighting, trading threats, and stirring up trouble. “Storytelling. Hearing about what other people have seen, trying to sort out how much is truth and how much is what they wished had happened.”

“That’s not too different from reading, then.” Kiernan shifted so he was facing Grif more directly. “Especially with histories—I always wonder what the other side would be saying. When our historians write about how dishonorably another realm behaved, I always wonder whether the historians in the other realm are giving similar criticisms about how we behaved.”

“That’s a dangerous thing to wonder about in some places.”

“Not in Sevastia,” Kiernan said proudly. “We value freethinking and critical questions.” He paused. “With history, at least. We’re willing to look hard at our ancestors.”

“Not as hard at people still alive?”

“Well,” Kiernan said, and for a moment Grif thought it was the end of the conversation. But then Kiernan said, “No. If they’re still alive— It’s understandable, of course. There are political currents, matters of power most of us can’t hope to understand. It’s best for the country—best for unity—if we limit our questioning of our current leaders.”

“And what would happen if someone asked questions they shouldn’t?” Again, Grif wasn’t sure how hard he should push, and again he was bewildered by his reluctance to go too far. Should he ask whether someone who asked too many questions might be sent into the mountains alone in the winter? No, probably best to not bring that up.

“Nothing terrible,” Kiernan said, sounding as if he believed it. “They’d be spoken to. Reprimanded, and reminded of their duty. But it’s a question of honor, mostly. An honorable man wouldn’t be critical of the tsarn or lord to whom he’d sworn loyalty.”

There was no trace of guilt in Kiernan’s tone, no self-recriminations. So whatever had earned him his wintery trip, it hadn’t been criticism of his leaders.

“I’ve been places they’d flay you alive if you spit out the dirt after some lord’s carriage churned shit up into your face.” Grif frowned. “And other places where there’s no respect for the leaders at all, just a big pit of anarchy with some useless nobles swanning around above it all as if they don’t even notice what the rest of the people are up to.”

“So Sevastia is a happy middle ground.”

“I never really minded the pits of anarchy.”

“Because you’re strong. I assume the weak in those places would enjoy them less.”

The weak in those places didn’t generally live long enough to form strong opinions, as far as Grif had seen.

But he didn’t want to talk about that, didn’t want to cast a pall on the conversation.

So he fell quiet again, and eventually Kiernan said, “What kind of stories did you tell? Were they mostly true, or mostly what you wish had happened?”

“Mostly true. All true, the way I saw them. I don’t—” No, he couldn’t say he didn’t lie. He wanted to say he didn’t let himself believe things that weren’t true, didn’t allow himself the luxury of imagining anything beyond cold, hard, reality. “I don’t see the point in making stories up.”

“So what tales do you tell? What true things have you seen?”

It was almost like a dare. It was also a way to pass the time, to kill the boredom, to distract Grif from the closeness of Kiernan’s body, the ease with which Grif could reach out, could take whatever he wanted. So talking was a good idea.

He spoke hesitantly at first, waiting for the rebuke, the dismissal, the signal that his words weren’t welcome, his thoughts not valued. But when that didn’t come, he talked more freely, and was surprised by how enjoyable it was. Kiernan was a good listener, interested—genuinely interested, as far as Grif could tell—in hearing about the places Grif had been, the things he’d seen.

The monks of Bitramar, with their bewildering, stoic calm. The great cats of Alta, trained for war, devastatingly effective right up to the point they turned on their handlers. The jungles of Lar, the great, filthy cities of the east. And the blood. Everywhere Grif had gone, battle and blood and pain and death. It was the life of a sell-sword, but he didn’t go into much detail about that part of it all. Well, he practically lied, making it sound as if he’d been a sort of bodyguard for innocent travelers venturing to dangerous places. He told the truth about what he’d seen, though, and Kiernan seemed fascinated.

“I’m considered well traveled, at home, because I’ve been from one end of the realm to the other, and crosswise also. But I’ve only been once to a foreign land, and that was only Senese, directly south of us.”

“The monks of Bitramar would say a man doesn’t need to move his body in order to travel. They’d say the most important voyages take place inside your mind, and you can learn as much by watching your neighbor as by meeting a foreign prince.”

“Is that what you’d say? Have you learned as much at home as you have on your travels?”

Kiernan asked as if he really wanted to hear the answer, so Grif took his time and thought it over. “I suppose so. I learned how to survive when I was just a boy, and that’s the most important skill there is. Picked it up without stepping foot out of my neighborhood.”

“I still haven’t learned that,” Kiernan mused. “If you hadn’t been here—if I hadn’t been with you—I would have died in this storm, I expect. I’ve been paying attention to the wind, and you’re right, it’s shifted directions several times. If I’d been relying on a cliff to keep it off me, I’d have been swept away. So . . . thank you.”

“There’s an avalanche risk as well.” Easier to teach than to think about Kiernan actually being grateful to Grif. “You have to watch the lay of the land and make sure you’re not somewhere an avalanche is likely to fall. It’s tempting, because they give nice banks of snow to burrow into, but where there’s been one slide, there’s likely to be another, and burrows aren’t nearly as snug when you’re buried and suffocating.”

“Snow’s the enemy, but it’s also a friend,” Kiernan said, and he smiled, that sweet, open expression that made Grif want to wrap him in blankets and protect him from all the cold, hard dangers of the world.

Kiernan told his own stories, about his family and friends, about some man called Vin whose name Kiernan spoke in almost reverent tones. Grif didn’t care for Vin, and he listened to the stories about him with an ear ready to find flaws. It wasn’t hard to spot them, especially once Grif decided it was Vin who’d sent Kiernan on whatever his important mission was. Because sending someone into the mountains in early winter, so ill-equipped and unaware—it was either gross incompetence or it was worse.

Grif had worked for enough bumbling, idiotic nobles to know that gross incompetence was quite likely. But what if it had been something else? If the bastard had taken Kiernan’s obvious hero worship and twisted it to—to what? That was the missing piece Grif searched for as he listened to Kiernan’s stories. Nobles liked having kids like Kiernan around—admiration felt good, and the more men got of it, the more they seemed to need. Kiernan clearly had an endless supply of fawning attention to share, so he should have been valuable. He seemed to come from a reasonably well-placed family, powerful enough to have protected him from life’s hardships, rich enough to have bought him into and then out of a valuable apprenticeship. So what in all the hells had gone wrong enough to get him sent into the mountains to die alone?

Incompetence was the most likely explanation. Combined with arrogance, it could be absolutely deadly. There was no need to look for anything sinister at work.

Still, Grif didn’t like the idea of sending Kiernan back down the mountain to deal with the bastard on his own. Incompetent or murderous, the man had put Kiernan in harm’s way once. He shouldn’t have the chance to do it again.

They were safe for the moment, though, so Grif listened to what Kiernan said, and puzzled over the things he didn’t say, and tried to ignore the emptiness in his belly. He also ignored the ways their bodies were behaving, the way the two of them ended up snuggled into the middle of the burrow, even after they’d dug and melted a wider space. It wasn’t all that cold, and they’d both taken off their outer layers of clothing to allow them to air out; they weren’t cuddled together because they needed the warmth, not really. But it was best not to think about that. Best just to enjoy it.

Also best to avoid starvation, so when the winds died down sometime in the second night, Grif disentangled himself from Kiernan’s warm limbs and began to pull on his outer layers of clothing, working in the light of their one remaining candle.

“Where are you going?” Kiernan asked sleepily.

“I’m setting the snares.”

“But it’s the middle of the night. Isn’t it?”

“That’s when snares work best.”

“Will you be long? Should I come with you, or— What can I do to help?”

“Stay here. I’ll be cold when I get back, and you can warm me up.”

Despite the low light, Kiernan’s blush was visible. It was an interesting reaction, Grif decided as he pulled on his fur-lined hat.

If the kid had truly been innocent, he wouldn’t have seen anything suggestive in the comment. Which meant he wasn’t so innocent, so all the crap earlier, with Kiernan rubbing up against Grif, hadn’t been accidental. Kiernan had been suggesting—he’d practically been demanding—a reaction from Grif. A reaction Grif would have been all too pleased to have given, under normal circumstances.

If only he hadn’t been so wrapped up in his stupid brain, hadn’t been trying so hard to be sensitive, and considerate—but, no, that hadn’t been the problem. If he hadn’t been trying too hard to protect himself, to make sure he didn’t look foolish or get his feelings hurt, then he could have spent the last day and a half naked and happy instead of clothed and—

Well, that was strange. Clothed and happy. Was that what he’d been? Not drunk, not fucking, but still happy? Was that possible?

He was so deep in his contemplations that he barely noticed the cold of the snow he had to batter his way through to get out of the tunnel, but by the time he was on his feet, surveying the landscape in the moonlight, he wasn’t thinking about Kiernan anymore. At least, not thinking about getting him naked, just about keeping him alive.

There was a lot of snow on the ground. A lot. When Grif waded forward, cautiously searching with his feet to be sure he was stepping onto solid ground, he was engulfed. Before they’d denned up, the snow had hit them slightly above their knees; now it was midchest, and heavy, not light powder that was easier to shift aside.

And they were at a fairly low elevation. Assuming Kiernan was remembering his eastward journey correctly, there was one more high pass they’d have to climb through before beginning the final descent. In the summer, four days walking would have taken them to safety. At this time of year, with no supplies, and no strength to drag the supplies through the snow even if they’d had them?

Grif sighed, his moist breath leaving condensation on the fur around his face. He knew what they had to do. But Kiernan wasn’t going to like it, and for some damn reason, Grif apparently cared about what Kiernan liked.