The strategy room was loud by its own standards, which meant it contained three conversations happening simultaneously at a volume slightly above the usual.

  This was how mission preparation sounded. Kaelan had learned this years ago and had made his peace with it — the specific productive noise of people who knew what they were doing getting ready to do it, which was different from chaos and only resembled it superficially. He stood at the head of the table and let it run for the two minutes it needed to run and then he set his hand flat on the map and the room went quiet.

  "Northeast corridor," he said. "Team seven went dark four days ago. Last confirmed position was here —" he indicated the map "— three kilometers inside the Veldmoor treeline. Six hunters. Full kit. No distress signal before contact was lost."

  Riven leaned over the map. "Four days is a long window."

  "It is."

  "If they were taken quickly there's a recovery possibility. If they've been dark for four days because something has been keeping them dark —"

  "Then we assess when we get there," Kaelan said. "We don't conclude before we have information."

  Riven nodded. He looked at the map with the focused attention he gave everything — reading it, Sorin would say, the way Sorvane had read cave walls, which none of them would ever know was an apt comparison.

  Davan was at the equipment wall, running through the pack inventory with the methodical efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that the process was completely automatic and his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about his wife — he was usually thinking about his wife before missions, not anxiously, just with the specific warm awareness of someone who had something worth coming back to and kept that awareness close on purpose.

  *You have everything,* Sorin said, passing him without looking up from his own preparation.

  *I always have everything,* Davan said. *The checking is the point.*

  *The checking is compulsive behavior.*

  *The checking,* Davan said pleasantly, *has saved your life on at least three occasions that I can specifically document.*

  Sorin said nothing, which was agreement in his particular language.

  Kaelan looked at the map. At the Veldmoor treeline. At the three-kilometer mark where team seven had last been confirmed. He thought about what the northern corridor had been doing in the past month — the movement patterns, the Upper rank sightings, the specific quality of demon activity that Riven had identified as directed rather than instinctive.

  Six experienced hunters going dark without a distress signal.

  Something had been fast enough and coordinated enough that none of them had managed to send word.

  He filed this and continued preparing.

  ---

  He went to her room before they left.

  He knocked twice — his knock, the one she had learned — and she said come in and he came in and she was sitting at the window where she had apparently taken to spending her mornings, which he knew and had not mentioned and had decided not to think about too carefully.

  She looked at him when he came in and then at what he was wearing — full mission kit, the weapons at his back, the cloak — and something moved across her face that she managed quickly.

  "You're leaving," she said.

  "Mission. Northeast corridor." He looked at her — at the color that had returned to her face this week, the way she was sitting upright without the careful deliberateness of someone managing pain. Better. Considerably better. "We'll be back in three days. Possibly four."

  She nodded. She looked at her hands in her lap and then back at him. "Is it dangerous."

  "Most things we do are dangerous."

  "That's not —" She stopped. She was not going to ask him to be careful because asking Kaelan to be careful was like asking the mountain to be smaller, and she knew this, and she set it aside. "Okay," she said instead.

  He looked at her for a moment.

  He crossed to the chair — his chair, the one that lived in a specific position in this room now — and he sat on the edge of it, not settling in, just present for the minutes before departure.

  "While I'm gone," he said. "Davan's wife will look in on you."

  She looked up. "Davan has a wife."

  "She's in the civilian quarters on the east wing. Her name is Sera. She —" He paused, selecting. "She's not like most people here."

  "You mean she's a person," Elia said.

  Something happened in the corner of his expression. "Yes. She's a person."

  Elia almost smiled. "I'd like that."

  He nodded. He looked at her wrists — the lighter dressings now, the skin underneath healing — and then at her face, and she met his gaze and held it the way she had learned to hold it, not looking away first, not managing anything, just — present.

  "Four days," he said.

  "I know."

  "Don't do anything —" He stopped.

  She raised her eyebrows slightly. "Don't do anything what."

  He looked at her with the specific expression of a man who had a complete thought and had decided against completing it aloud.

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  "Rest," he said.

  She looked at him. "That was not what you were going to say."

  "Rest," he said again. Firmly. Final.

  She pressed her lips together against something and looked at the window. "Fine."

  He stood. He moved toward the door. At the threshold he stopped and looked back at her — she was looking at the window, her profile lit by the morning light coming through it, her hands folded in her lap — and he stayed there for one moment that was slightly longer than leaving required.

  Then he left.

  She listened to his footsteps in the corridor. She listened to them go.

  Next door his room was already quiet — packed away, closed up, the thin line of light that lived under his door at night already absent even though it was morning.

  She looked at the window.

  *Four days,* she thought.

  She wasn't going to count them.

  She counted them anyway, already, from the moment she heard the outer door close.

  ---

  They were forty minutes out from the Stronghold when Sorin said, without looking up from the terrain ahead:

  "She's following us."

  Kaelan did not break stride.

  Riven looked at Davan.

  Davan looked at the middle distance with the expression of a man exercising extraordinary restraint.

  "How long," Kaelan said.

  "Since the eastern gate," Sorin said. "She picked up our trail at the fork. She's good at staying back but —" A pause. "She's not trained for this kind of terrain."

  "No," Kaelan said. "She's not."

  They walked for another thirty seconds.

  "Are we —" Davan began.

  "Keep walking," Kaelan said.

  Davan kept walking. His expression did something very specific that he aimed at the trees ahead of him where no one could see it — something that was warm and privately delighted and that he would absolutely not be showing to Kaelan right now or possibly ever.

  Riven looked at the path ahead with his usual focused neutrality.

  Sorin looked at Kaelan's back with the expression of someone recalibrating a situation they had thought they understood.

  They kept walking.

  ---

  She was not good at this.

  Elia understood this about herself in real time, with the specific clarity of self-knowledge that arrived when you were attempting something you had no training for and the gap between intention and execution was completely visible. She had watched them leave from her window — had watched Kaelan cross the outer courtyard with his unit behind him, the four of them moving with the unified economy of people who had done this hundreds of times — and she had thought *four days* and then she had thought *a team went missing* and then she had thought about the world as Riven had described it in the strategy room conversation she had overheard from the medical wing, about what directed demon activity meant, about six hunters going dark without a distress signal.

  She had been out of her room and moving before she had fully decided to move.

  She was not close enough to be seen. She was — she thought — far enough back that the distance covered the sound of her footsteps in the snow, that the trees between them were sufficient screen. She followed the compressed marks of four pairs of large boots and she kept her breathing even and she told herself she was being sensible and careful and not at all visible.

  Then all four of them stopped walking.

  She stopped immediately, pressing herself behind a tree with her heart doing something that had no business being this loud.

  They didn't turn around.

  They just — stopped. Standing in the path in a loose configuration, not looking back, apparently having a conversation at a volume she couldn't hear from here.

  Then they kept walking.

  She stayed behind her tree for a moment.

  Then she followed.

  ---

  Kaelan let it go for another hour.

  He used the hour to do the thing he always did in transit — assess, plan, run scenarios, identify variables and account for them. The terrain between the Stronghold and the Veldmoor corridor was not the most dangerous ground they covered but it was not without risk, especially with the recent patterns of demon movement in the northern reaches. He knew every kilometer of it. He had mapped it in his head years ago and updated that map with every mission that crossed it.

  He also spent some of the hour being aware of the sound of her footsteps approximately two hundred meters behind them, which were distinctive in the specific way that someone untrained in field movement was distinctive — not loud, she was being careful, but with a rhythm that was human and unhunted and completely different from the way four hunters moved through terrain.

  After an hour he stopped walking.

  The unit stopped with him.

  He turned around.

  ---

  She came around a bend in the path and found four hunters standing in it looking directly at her and she stopped so suddenly she nearly lost her footing on the snow.

  Four faces.

  Davan's doing something she couldn't fully interpret but that was distinctly warm. Sorin's carefully neutral in the specific way that meant he had known for a while. Riven's carrying the particular quality of a man who was not going to say *I told you* because he had not in fact told anyone but had privately concluded this outcome some time ago.

  And Kaelan's.

  Kaelan's was doing nothing. It was simply looking at her with the complete, steady attention she knew, and she looked back at him and felt the heat arrive in her face and did not look away because looking away at this point was not going to help anything.

  "Hi," she said.

  The word came out smaller than she had intended.

  Davan made a sound. She couldn't identify it precisely but it was the sound of someone converting something into a cough that had not started as a cough.

  Kaelan looked at her.

  "You followed us," he said.

  "I —" She stopped. Started again. "I was already going this direction."

  "You were going northeast into mission terrain," Kaelan said, "in the direction we happened to be traveling."

  "Yes."

  "Coincidentally."

  "Largely."

  Riven looked at the trees.

  Davan looked at the sky.

  Sorin looked at his boots with the expression of a person finding something on them extremely interesting.

  Kaelan looked at her for a long, level moment and she stood in the snow in her borrowed travelling clothes and looked back at him and did not move.

  "You can't come," he said.

  "I know," she said.

  "This is a recovery mission in active demon territory with unknown variables and you are not —"

  "I know," she said again. Still quiet. Still not moving.

  He looked at her.

  She looked at him.

  "I just —" She stopped. She looked at the ground briefly and then back up at him and there was something in her face that was not an argument, not a plea, just — honest. The way she was always honest when she stopped managing herself. "I know what happened to the last team. Six hunters. I know what that means. And I thought —" She stopped again.

  "What," he said. Quieter than before.

  "I thought I would rather be there," she said, very quietly, "than here. Counting days."

  The path was very still.

  Wind moved through the upper branches. Snow fell from one of them, soundlessly, into the white below.

  Kaelan looked at her for a long moment.

  Something moved through his expression that he did not show and that she almost saw anyway and that Davan, standing slightly behind and to the left, saw completely and filed in the part of himself that kept the things worth keeping.

  "You stay with Davan," Kaelan said. "You do not move without being told to move. You do not engage anything. If something happens you go behind and you stay there and you do not —"

  "Yes," she said. Immediately. Before he had finished.

  "Elia."

  "Yes," she said again. "I understand. All of it. Yes."

  He looked at her.

  She looked back at him with the expression of someone who has gotten the thing they came for and is being very careful not to show how much they wanted it.

  He turned around and kept walking.

  She fell into step.

  Davan appeared at her left shoulder so smoothly it was almost as if he had always been there.

  "Counting days," he said, at a volume exclusively for her.

  She looked straight ahead. "Don't."

  "I'm not saying anything."

  "You're saying everything."

  "I'm simply walking," Davan said peacefully. "In the direction we're all walking. Which you are also doing. Coincidentally."

  She pressed her lips together very hard.

  Ahead of them Kaelan walked with the same measured, deliberate stride he always had, his black swords at his back catching the pale winter light between the trees — two blades, darker than the other hunters' blades, darker than any blade she had seen, the color of them absorbing light rather than reflecting it, a black so complete it looked like the swords were made of the dark between stars.

  She looked at them.

  She looked at the set of his shoulders above them.

  She looked at the path ahead and kept walking and did not count anything.

  ---

  *End of Chapter 15.*