The cold had stopped being cold.

  That was the thing nobody told you. That at a certain point it stopped being a sensation and became something else — a heaviness, a thickness in the blood, a general slowing of everything that was almost peaceful if you didn't think about what it meant. She had stopped thinking about what it meant some time ago. It was easier that way.

  She was still upside down.

  She had been upside down for — she didn't know. Time had become approximate. The blood had long since finished rushing to her head and had settled there, heavy and pulsing, and the head injury from the branch combined with that pressure had turned her vision into something unreliable. Things at the edges shifted. The light changed in ways she was fairly certain weren't meteorological.

  The cord had tightened twice since she'd stopped being able to feel her hands.

  That was the part she hadn't expected — the cord was not static, not simply a snare that held and stayed. It moved with the wind, with her movement, with some mechanism she didn't understand, and each movement cinched it incrementally tighter. Her wrists behind her back had gone from painful to something beyond the vocabulary of pain — she knew they were there only because the cord was there, a fact she understood intellectually while feeling nothing. Her arms against her sides were similarly past sensation.

  Her ribs she could still feel.

  Those she could feel very well.

  Below her — above her — she had lost track of which was which — the demon in the pit was still there. She could hear it. She could hear the others too, the ones from the treeline, though they had gone quiet in the last while in the way that things went quiet when they had decided to be patient.

  She looked at the thing in the pit.

  "Still here," she told it. Her voice came out strange — slow, slightly slurred at the edges. "Still not tasty. Situation unchanged."

  The demon said nothing.

  "You're very committed," she said. "I respect that. I do. That's a real quality."

  ---

  Her mother arrived first.

  She appeared the way things appeared when the cold had been at you long enough — not dramatically, not with any announcement, just suddenly present in the way that a thought became a voice became a shape at the edge of what Elia could see.

  She was standing below. Or above. In the direction of the ground, anyway, in the snow, in her apron, with the two escaping pieces of hair at the nape of her neck, exactly as she had always looked on an ordinary morning.

  Elia looked at her for a long moment.

  "I know you're not real," she said. Conversationally. "I want to be upfront about that."

  Her mother looked up at her.

  *Why didn't you come home sooner,* her mother said. Not unkindly. Just — the words, placed down, the way facts were placed down.

  Elia felt something move through her chest that had nothing to do with the cold.

  "I know," she said.

  *I told you not to dawdle.*

  "I know. I know, I'm sorry, I —" She stopped. Breathed. Small increments. "I took the heavier cloak. I did that part."

  Her mother said nothing.

  "I'm sorry," Elia said again, quieter. "I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm sorry I couldn't —"

  *You were always somewhere else,* her mother said. *Even when you were home you were somewhere else.*

  That one landed differently. She felt her eyes go wet which was strange because she hadn't thought she had anything left for that — her body spending its remaining resources on staying alive, not on crying — but apparently there was enough left for this.

  "That's not —" she started.

  But her mother was already gone.

  ---

  Her father arrived the way he had always arrived — quietly, from the side, as if he had simply always been there and she had only just noticed.

  He was standing in the branches above her. Sitting, actually, with the particular ease of a man who was comfortable anywhere, which he had always been. He looked exactly as he had the last morning she'd seen him — worn jacket, the grey at his temples he'd complained about, the expression he wore when he was deciding whether to say something.

  He had decided.

  *You should have been faster,* he said.

  "I know."

  *Faster and stronger and smarter.* Not cruel — never cruel, even now, even like this — just honest in the way he'd always been honest. *You knew the world was dangerous. You knew it.*

  "I was getting stronger," she said. Her voice had taken on the slurred quality again, thicker than before. "I was training. I was — every morning, before anyone else, I was —"

  *Not fast enough,* he said. *You never were.*

  She looked at him.

  "No," she said. Small and honest. "No, I never was."

  He looked back at her and she loved him so much it was a physical thing, was indistinguishable from the pain in her ribs, and she was so cold, and the cord tightened again — she felt that, she felt that part — and her father sat in the branches above her and watched her with an expression she couldn't read clearly anymore because her vision was doing the thing at the edges again.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "I'm sorry," she told him. "I'm really sorry."

  He didn't say it was alright.

  She hadn't expected him to.

  ---

  She cried for a while after that.

  Not loudly — she didn't have the energy for loud, and the sounds she made were small and broken and floated up into the cold air and disappeared. The tears tracked up her forehead rather than down her cheeks because she was upside down and that detail struck her as genuinely funny and she laughed a little too, briefly, which hurt enormously and also didn't matter very much anymore.

  The demon below was getting restless.

  She could hear it — closer, the sounds more frequent, the patience wearing in increments. The others had started moving again, slow circles in the snow below her.

  "I know," she told them. "I know, I know. Just — just a minute. I'm having a moment."

  The cord tightened.

  She felt her breath go short — shorter than the ribs had made it, shorter than she had remaining capacity for — and she looked at the sky which was grey and flat and completely indifferent and she thought about Kaelan's room, the thin line of light under his door that last night, and how she had almost knocked and hadn't, and she thought that was probably —

  That was probably something she would always regret.

  If regret was a thing you carried somewhere after this.

  She wasn't sure about that part.

  "Okay," she said. Very quietly. To no one. To the mountain and the cold and the demons below her and the hallucinations that had come and gone and the cord that kept tightening. "Okay. That's — okay."

  Her vision was going properly now, not just at the edges — a darkening that was coming in from all sides, slow and patient, the way the demon had been patient in the forest that first night. She recognized it as the same kind of patience. The kind that knew it had time. The kind that knew how this ended.

  Her father appeared again, briefly, at the edge of what she could still see.

  *You could have been more,* he said.

  "I know," she whispered. "I really —" She felt her eyes closing, not from decision but from weight, everything too heavy now, the cold and the blood in her head and the darkness coming in. "I know that. I'm sorry. I'm so —"

  Something moved at the treeline.

  Fast.

  She didn't look. She couldn't, really. Her eyes were most of the way closed and the world had reduced itself to sound and the slow, distant pulse of her own blood and the tightening of the cord which was still tightening, always tightening —

  "I don't think you're real either," she said, to whatever had moved. Slurred and very quiet and most of the way gone. "I think you're another one. You're all — I keep seeing — "

  She heard the sound of something being cut.

  She heard demons.

  She heard something large and fast moving through snow.

  "If you're real," she said, or tried to say, the words not fully forming now, her mouth not fully cooperating, the darkness almost complete — "if you're actually — I think I'm — I can't —"

  The cord snapped.

  She fell.

  ---

  Somewhere in the forest the cold front had come in an hour early.

  He had been moving fast — faster than he had told himself he was moving, fast enough that Riven and Davan behind him had stopped trying to match him and had simply kept him in sight — and the temperature had dropped another four degrees in the last thirty minutes, the sky pressing lower and greyer, the wind picking up from the north with the specific conviction of weather that had made a decision.

  *Training clothes,* he kept thinking. *She is in training clothes.*

  He had not said anything else to Harren before he left.

  He had been very close to saying several things to Harren. He had walked past him instead because the things he wanted to say were not going to find her any faster and finding her faster was the only variable that mattered right now.

  But he had thought them.

  *You absolute —* he thought, moving through the trees at a pace that was not a run but was everything adjacent to a run. *You sent her out here in training clothes in front of a cold front into terrain with active traps and outer-range demon presence and she has been here for six hours and you came and told me like it was a* report. *Like it was a—*

  He found her boot print in the snow.

  He stopped. Crouched. Looked at it — the narrow impression of it, the depth, the way the snow around it was disturbed. Recent. He looked at the direction it was heading and looked at the terrain ahead and he kept moving.

  He found the wire first — disturbed, something had gone through it at pace and caught it, the snow around it showing a fall and a rapid recovery. He looked at the blood on the ice-crusted ground beside it and kept moving.

  He found the pit. The torn snow at its edge, the knee-shaped impression, the place where she had wrenched herself out and kept going.

  He found the cord at chest height between the two trees — the one that had hit her across the ribs, he understood immediately what it was and what it would have done at full sprint — and he looked at the tree behind it and the blood on the bark and the shape of the impact and something in his chest went very tight and very still.

  He moved faster.

  *The ribs,* he thought. *She just healed. She just —*

  He heard the demons before he saw them.

  Two, three — he counted by sound, positioning them in the terrain ahead — and beneath them something larger, something that had chosen not to move, which was worse than movement. He came through the last line of trees into the small clearing and he took it in in one second, the way he had been trained to take in a scene:

  The pit.

  The demon in it, standing to full height, looking up.

  Three others in a loose configuration in the snow, looking up.

  The snare mechanism in the trees above.

  And Elia — upside down, suspended eight meters up, arms pinned to her sides, wrists behind her, the cord visibly deep into her skin. Not moving. Her eyes most of the way closed. Her lips moving very slightly around words he couldn't hear.

  The blood dripping from her fingers into the pit below.

  He was moving before he had finished processing it.

  The first demon came at him from the left and he dealt with it without breaking stride — fast and absolute, no wasted motion, the way he did everything — and the second from the right and that took three seconds and he was still moving toward the tree, toward the mechanism, toward the cord that was still tightening around her, incrementally, steadily, with the patient mechanical intention of something designed to hold.

  The large one in the pit came up over the edge.

  He turned to it.

  This one took longer. Not because he was outmatched — he was not outmatched — but because it was large enough and fast enough to demand his complete attention for the thirty seconds it took, thirty seconds during which he was very aware of the cord still tightening above him, still tightening, and he finished it and turned back and reached the tree and looked up and —

  Her eyes were closed.

  Her lips had stopped moving.

  He cut the cord.

  He moved beneath her in the same motion, caught her before she hit the ground — the full dead weight of her, entirely unconscious, her body cold through her thin clothes in a way that registered immediately against his hands as *too cold, this is too cold* — and he brought her down and he went to one knee in the snow with her in his arms and he looked at her.

  Her wrists were bad. The cord had been at them long enough and tight enough that the skin was broken and deep and her hands were the color of the snow around them and he pressed two fingers to the inside of her wrist and waited and —

  There.

  Faint. Slow. But there.

  He pulled his cloak off and wrapped her in it, all of her, tucking it close with the efficiency of someone who understood that every second mattered now, every degree of heat retained mattered, and then he got to his feet with her against his chest and her head against his shoulder and he looked at the terrain around him and he started walking.

  Not back toward the Stronghold.

  Faster than that.

  He adjusted his hold, making sure her head was supported, and he looked down at her face — white and still and too quiet — and something moved through him that was not a thing he had felt before, or had not felt in long enough that he had forgotten its dimensions.

  "Elia," he said.

  She didn't respond.

  "Elia." Quieter this time. Not a command. Something else.

  Nothing.

  He held her closer against his chest and he moved faster through the snow, the cold front pressing in from the north, the grey sky lowering, and he did not look down at her again because looking at her was not going to get her back faster and getting her back faster was the only thing that mattered.

  But he was aware of her breathing against his chest — faint, too slow, but there — and he matched his own breathing to it without deciding to, the way you did with something you were trying to keep.

  *Stay,* he thought, not quite a word, not quite a command, not quite a prayer.

  *Just stay.*