By the time the high snows returned, Edrin moved through the Gift like a shadow cast by the trees.
He didn't slip on ice. He felt the friction.
He didn't miss the ambush. He smelled the intent.
Sometimes the hunts gave him memories, flickers of instinct not his own, a sense of where to find water, where to find shelter, how to read the way wind curled around a rock.
Sometimes they gave nothing.
He didn't know if the Awareness was absorbing it all, or if some beasts simply had nothing worth taking.
He didn't know how much of him remained his.
He tried not to think too hard about that either.
Back in Hollow, Edrin became a ghost.
He kept his sleeves down to hide the crisscross of scars. He kept his shoulders slumped. He kept his cough ready, a thin hack that made men look away in discomfort. Sick men were work. Sick men were weak. Sick men were not threats.
When Hobb asked him to help haul logs, Edrin made sure to stumble. He gripped the wood with white knuckles, pretending to strain, coughing into his hand like he was choking on his own lungs.
"You're getting scrawnier, boy," Hobb grunted, tossing a log that Edrin "struggled" to catch. "Scouting's eaten your marrow."
"The woods are empty, Hobb," Edrin lied, voice thin. "I walk all day and find nothing but frozen bark."
He said it while his belly held deer meat and his muscles held new strength.
Hobb snorted and spat. "Then stop walking," he said. "Walking won't feed you."
It wasn't advice. It was a warning. In Hollow, men who didn't earn were resented, and resentful men did violence when they were hungry enough.
But Mara wasn't fooled.
She watched him walk.
She saw that even when he moved slowly, he never placed a foot wrongly. He didn't stagger like the others on slush. He didn't flinch at sudden noise the way frightened boys did.
She cornered him near the drying racks, where strips of rabbit hung stiff as boards.
"You're bringing back fewer rabbits, Edrin," she said. "But you look… fed."
Edrin kept his face blank. He controlled his heartbeat the way he'd learned, slow in, slow out. Let the body be still. Let her find nothing.
"I eat the berries you're too afraid to touch," he said.
Mara's eyes narrowed. "Where are you hunting?"
"Further than you'd go," Edrin replied, and his voice wasn't a challenge. It was just fact. "Further than anyone goes."
For a heartbeat Mara looked like she wanted to slap him.
Then she looked away, sharp anger replaced by calculation.
"You'll die," she said.
Edrin shrugged. "We all do."
Mara's fingers twitched as if counting. "Not all the same way," she muttered.
She let him go.
But he felt her watching him from that day forward, like a knife left on a table.
He didn't go to the elders with his plan.
Elders in Hollow were just the ones who hadn't died yet. They were not wise. They were cautious. Caution kept you alive until it didn't.
He went to the ones with friction in their souls.
He found Lysa by the well, hands purple with cold, drawing water that came up half-slush.
"I found a place," he said, not looking at her at first. "Warmer. Safer. There's a cabin starting to look like a home."
Lysa didn't look up. "Nothing's safer in the Gift, Ed," she said. "Only different ways to die."
"Less worse, then," he countered.
He let the wind fill the space between them. Let her hear how it gnawed at the huts. Let her feel how the cold had teeth.
"I'm going to use it," he said. "Whether you come or not."
Lysa finally looked at him.
Her eyes were red-rimmed from cold and sleeplessness. She had a bruise on her cheek she hadn't had the day before.
"You're serious," she whispered.
Edrin nodded.
Lysa swallowed. "If I go," she said, voice tight, "and we die out there… I'll haunt you."
Edrin's inner voice, modern and tired, said fair, because haunting sounded almost comforting compared to the reality of being eaten by crows.
Out loud he said, "You'll haunt me if you stay too."
Lysa's mouth twisted, and for a heartbeat she looked almost like she might smile.
Then she nodded once. "Show me," she said.
Rowan was harder.
He found the scout girl behind the woodpile, sharpening a skinning knife on a stone. Rowan had hair dark as wet bark and eyes that missed nothing. She was young, but the Gift had made her old in the ways that mattered. She'd been the one to find lost children. The one to warn about strange tracks. The one who could walk into the woods and come back with a rabbit when others came back with frostbite.
"You planning to live there?" she asked before he could speak.
She didn't glance up from her knife. Her voice was casual, as if she were asking if he planned to piss before bed.
"Yes," Edrin said.
"You planning to defend it?" Rowan asked. "If the Watch comes. Or wildlings."
Edrin looked at his scarred hands.
"I'll learn," he said.
Rowan finally looked up.
Her dark eyes assessed him; the way he stood perfectly balanced even on slush, the way his shoulders didn't hunch against cold the way they should have.
"Then show me first," she said. "If I can't find it, it's a good hiding spot. If I can… it's a grave."
Edrin nodded.
"Come at dawn," he said.
Rowan's gaze sharpened. "You giving orders now?"
Edrin's inner voice said I'm building an org chart in a fucking snow-hole, and he almost laughed.
Out loud he said, "I'm offering."
Rowan snorted. "We'll see," she said, and went back to her knife.
He built the sanctuary with desperation.
He didn't have real tools at first. He didn't have iron nails. He didn't have proper saws. He had a knife, a hatchet, and hands that bled.
But he had something else.
He had a modern mind that could not stop asking why.
Why did Hollow's huts rot? Because water pooled. Because roofs sagged under snow. Because smoke filled lungs. Because sleeping on the ground let cold creep up like death.
So he did the opposite.
He found the warm stream and built near it, but not too near, high enough that spring melt wouldn't swallow him. He dug into the slope to shelter from wind. He stacked stones for a base, to keep wood from sucking up wet. He built a sleeping platform three feet off the ground to escape the "breath of the frost."
He angled the roof so the heavy Gift snow would slide off before it crushed beams.
He built a small smoke vent and kept the fire low, so smoke would not betray him.
He learned the hard way that pine smoke stung worse when it didn't have room to rise.
He found survival notes on a frozen traveler once, a man who'd died of thirst in a land of ice because he couldn't think clearly. The man's fingers had been blue-black, his mouth open like he'd been trying to swallow the sky.
Edrin took the notes anyway.
He didn't feel shame about it.
Shame was for people who had choices.
The notes were crude, scratched on leather, but they spoke of small truths: keep your bedding dry, keep your fire fed, keep your water clean.
Clean water.
That brought him to the one problem he couldn't solve neatly.
Toilet.
In his old life, waste was invisible. It went away. It was someone else's problem. He hadn't thought about it unless something broke.
Here, waste was death if you did it wrong.
He tried digging pits, but the ground was frozen hard in winter. He tried carrying waste away, but that left trails. He tried using the stream, then stopped himself, violently, because even the thought made him feel sick.
You can get away with being dirty, his modern brain told him. You can't get away with poisoning your own fucking water source, you idiot.
He didn't have a perfect solution.
Not yet.