The wind did not blow in the Gift.
It worried.
It worried at peat-plastered walls the way a starving dog worries at a grain bin, scraping and scratching and never quite giving up, as if the huts themselves had offended it by daring to exist. It found seams in doorframes. It found weak thatch. It found the small gap between collar and throat and slid in there with a slow, patient cruelty, turning breath into needles.
Edrin sat by the communal cookfire with a wooden bowl held close to his chest, and the bowl felt less like a dish than a shield.
The slurry inside had been called porridge, once, back when men still pretended words could make things fuller. It was thin grey mush stretched with ground acorns and the memory of salt, cooling fast, a skin forming on top like old scab. The steam rose in a narrow ribbon, then flattened the moment it touched the draft, slapped down by the wind and smeared along the hut's rafters.
He found himself staring at it anyway.
Steam meant heat. Heat meant life. The mind liked simple equations when everything else was chaos.
In another life he would have been scrolling a screen and half-listening to someone talk. In this one, he measured his world in cups of broth and the way smoke behaved.
He hadn't meant to be staring. He'd only meant to keep his hands close to the warmth long enough to stop them shaking.
But the shaking had nothing to do with cold.
He'd died twice.
He tried not to think about that in public.
He tried not to think about it at all.
"You're staring at the steam again, Ed."
The voice rasped like a saw dragged across old wood.
Edrin didn't jump. He didn't even glance up at first.
The Awareness had settled into him like a second spine. It was not a voice. Not a vision. Not anything so clean. It was the sense of pressure in the air before a blow. The faint vibration of boots on hard-packed earth. The way bodies displaced heat and sound. He'd felt the man's approach two heartbeats before the words arrived.
Hobb.
He lifted his eyes then, slow.
Hobb was a wall of muscle and scar tissue squeezed into a patched wool tunic and a cloak that had once been black. Now it was all grey with ash and salt stains. His nose had been broken so many times it looked like a lump of gristle stuck to his face by accident. His beard was red-brown and stiff with old grease. He stood with his feet planted wide, as if he expected the ground to try and buck him off, and his heavy wood-axe leaned against his thigh like a third leg.
Hobb's eyes flicked, not to Edrin's face, but to his hands.
Wrapped.
Always wrapped these days. Cloth strips scavenged from old sacks, wound around knuckles and wrists. It made him look like a boy playing at being a fighter.
It also hid the scars.
"Thinking is for maesters and corpses, boy," Hobb grunted. "And you don't look like you've spent much time over a book lately."
The hut smelled of damp wool, woodsmoke, and men who had not washed properly in weeks because washing cost heat and heat cost food. A baby somewhere cried with a thin, exhausted wail that sounded like a bird with a broken wing. Someone coughed hard, wet and rattling, then spat into the dirt.
Edrin swallowed a mouthful of porridge and felt it sit in his belly like cold mud.
"Just thinking about the wood-pile, Hobb," he said.
He kept his voice level. He kept it plain. He kept it Gift-folk.
Inside, a different part of him, the part that remembered clean water and steady meals and the concept of a future , wanted to snarl thinking is for people who don't want to die like idiots, but he bit that down and chewed it into something else.
He looked up fully, meeting the big man's gaze without flinching.
"The pines near the ridge are brittle," he said. "Good for quick heat, bad for the long night."
He watched Hobb's face for the reaction. Hobb was not stupid. He was not clever either, but he had the kind of cunning men earned by surviving winters that killed smarter folk. He knew when someone was trying to sell him a story.
Hobb narrowed his eyes. "The ridge?" he said, and the word came out like a curse. "Only a fool or a suicide goes that high when the sky's that color. There's a shadow up there. A big one."
The hut quieted a touch at that. Not silence. But attention. The sort of attention that came when men smelled blood in a story.
Edrin felt the old urge to smile and couldn't. He had teeth and he had cheeks like any boy, but smiling felt like a luxury now. Smiling meant you weren't expecting to be hit.
"I saw it," he said.
He did not say I killed it.
He did not say I tasted its heart and now I can smell the iron in your blood.
He did not say I know exactly how much fear you're pretending not to feel because my body is reading the micro-tells of your posture like a spreadsheet.
He said what he could say.
"It won't be bothering the snares anymore."