TWO TURNS had passed, and each day Ras woke to the news that again Culy had said “perhaps tomorrow,” leaving Carin to fume and Ryd to compensate by carving bones.

Ras felt as though his strength had been taken from him.

The snow continued to fall, not as heavily as it did in Cantoranth but heavily enough that they were able to gather enough water from the roof of their hut to survive. The meat held, but Ras knew if they didn’t find more food soon, they would starve.

Ras had settled into an uneasy rhythm. Each morning, he woke at first light and ventured into the hills to hunt. He returned hours later with a few sluggish squirrels or a hare if he was lucky. He envied Carin her halm bow but never dared ask to borrow it. The villagers always whispered when he returned, but no one came over to speak to him.

In the evenings, he would sit and make arrows while Ryd carved. For all the young man was an undirected thing, his hands took to his tools like a bird finding its wings, and the bone needles and instruments he made became valuable items they traded. Three for a set of tatted woolen cloths—fyajir wool, Ras had found, was a useful thing in every instance—for filtering water. Two for a handful of dried currants.

The days and turns passed thus, and Ras grew anxious. Culy, after that first visit, had not returned. Though they were not told otherwise, Ras often found himself itching at the edge of the waymake, wondering how free they truly were within and without.

With Reflection growing pregnant in the sky and game growing leaner on the ground—indeed Ras himself had watched his body change, grow harder—one morning Ham ran by their hut with a yell.

The man had perhaps fifty harvests, still a young person by any standard, and he called out to Ras even as he buckled his belted sheath across his narrow hips.

“Halka!” he said. He pointed up the hill, where Ras could see the sky slowly beginning to lighten.

It unnerved Ras that the mere prospect of a large animal to hunt filled him with desperation.

“How many?” he asked Ham. His words felt clumsy, and even after the turns—now moons—spent north of the mountains, Northlander speech still often eluded him. Every time he spoke, he was unsure he would understand the answer.

Ras hated it.

“At least fifteen.” Ham grinned, showing teeth in desperate need of a cleaning. Ras missed his rilius resin. He had used the last of it in the cave with the ialtag, those strange winged beasts. He missed the ease of their communication, but he did not miss the sense of smallness he had felt in their midst, nor the sense that those who shared so easily were probably best at knowing how to conceal.

Halka he understood. Ras’s fingers twitched for his bow. Placing one end against his foot, he restrung it easily.

A woman came over, her own bow dangling from her fingertips. She murmured something to Ham that Ras couldn’t quite hear, let alone understand. Her name was Dahin—or maybe Dahym. She sometimes came to sit and ply twine whilst watching Ryd carve in the evenings.

Ras stood watching as a few others trickled over, all speaking in low, excited tones.

For a moment, he thought they would leave him behind, closing shoulders to show that he was not welcome. But then Ham and Dahin turned and beckoned him to follow.

The swell of relief and pride that puffed up Ras’s chest felt silly and young, like a child showing hys parents a painted stone and receiving a kiss and praise in return.

The hike up into the hills took half the morning. While they walked, the sun rose, cold and unfeeling, always a reminder that Ras was home no longer.

Night was easier. Soft, gentle darkness could spin webs of comfort.

The day cut through illusion and memory, even short as it was in winter.

It also cut through hope.

They walked for hours, up and down slopes of the foothills, venturing closer and closer to the mountain. Dahin began to click her fingernails together, her hands free of any mitts in spite of the cold. When the sun passed its apex, they had still found no trace of the halka.

“They were here,” Ham said.

“They move faster than we do,” Ras said, and some of the others looked at him curiously, as if he himself were a halka that had opened its mouth to speak.

One of the others whose name Ras did not know pointed up the hill with two fingers. Ras only caught one word in two, but the word he caught was tiger.

The beast must have spooked the halka into moving more quickly than usual. Ras thought of the tiger skin Carin kept rolled in her rucksack, wishing he had killed the beast and earned its pelt himself. He understood why she had given the fyajir hide to Ryd—the smaller man’s previous cloak was as warm as a layer of doubloon leaves. Ras was surprised he’d made it through the mountains with all ten fingers and all ten toes without losing more than that flap of earlobe.

When the sun began to move toward the west and Reflection rose over the hills without either shining light on the missing herd of halka, the group slowly began to return to Alarbahis empty-handed.

Panic was not a word Ras liked to apply to himself. He hated that he depended on his skills without them bearing fruit, and each day that went by reminded him that he had left behind a land of bounty for one of scarcity. That the people were not at each other’s throats over the scraps they had boggled him.

Alarbahis’s smoke appeared in the distance. A wet thunk sounded behind Ras’s shoulder.

Ham yelled, “Rovers!”

Ras felt a jolt go through him, a flash of bright fear.

Spinning to face the attackers, Ras nocked an arrow and fell into a crouch behind a bush. He had always been the hunter, not the hunted.

A person armed with a bronze sword and shield came sprinting toward them, and Ham dropped to one leg and rolled to avoid a second arrow that whistled through the air.

In the back of his mind, Ras scowled at the craftership of the fletching, to make such a sound of warning. He loosed his own ghostly silent arrow at the attacker. It hit its mark, blossoming out of the person’s neck and spattering the snow with crimson.

A quick look told him that they were outnumbered in spite of the one Ras had downed. Grim, he nocked another arrow, seeing a group of ten rovers advance over the snow. Half of them had bows drawn, men, women, hyrsin. Each wore darkened leather with a bright white rune on their left shoulders.

Ras aimed for the rune on one of the archers, striking his mark again and dropping the archer to her knees. She fumbled for her arrow, but could not pull back the string. His second arrow went through her heart.

A clash of bronze swords brought his head up sharply. Close. Too close. Ham had out two daggers that glinted as he shifted them in his hands, and he darted in between one of the rovers and a hunter from Alarbahis.

Someone laughed.

The sound was so disconnected to the blood on the snow, that for a moment Ras forgot himself and nearly fumbled his next shot.

A woman’s voice cut through the yelling and the clank of metal. “So, southerner. You want to prove you deserve that bow?”

At first Ras thought she was talking to him, but he couldn’t turn to look. He responded by landing an arrow between the eyes of a rover, then stopped short. The arrow that pegged the rover’s forehead was white, not brown. His own had gone wide and caught a lagging rover in the chest. Spinning around, he saw Carin almost a hundred paces away, face grim and bow held at the ready. The young woman at her side had short black hair and dancing eyes, and she laughed again with approval, clapping Carin on the shoulder before running into the fray, sword spinning.

They were no longer outnumbered.

Within moments of the girl entering the fight, she had downed two rovers. Ras finished the one he had injured, and the other hunters fell upon the remaining attackers until the snow turned to red slush.

The girl sauntered back toward Ras, looking right past him at Carin. “Guess you deserve that bow after all.”