The Gift did not have wind.
It had teeth.
It came down out of the high places with a patient malice, worrying at every seam and stitch the way a starving dog worries a bone, never in a hurry, never satisfied. It found the gaps in peat walls. It slid beneath doors. It slipped into a man's ear when he slept and whispered that warmth was a lie, that spring was a story told to children, that all things ended in cold.
Edrin had learned to measure it the way his old world measured storms. Not by what it was, but by what it did.
Tonight it made the steam off the stream lie flat against the rocks, pressed down like a hand. Tonight it made the smoke from their little fire crawl along the ground before it dared rise, afraid the gale would snatch it and carry it straight to any eyes that might be hunting.
A good hiding wind, he told himself. A good wind for not being found.
A bad wind for being alive.
They stood in a rough half-circle near the water, the stream's thin ribbon of warmth cutting through the snow like a vein beneath pale skin. It never froze, not here, not even when the world turned iron-hard. The banks were black with wet earth and bright with a slick of moss that stayed stubbornly green. Edrin had almost laughed the first time he'd seen it in this country. The sound had died in his throat like everything else that tried to be light in the Gift.
Five of them, if you counted truly.
Lysa. Rowan. Two boys from the wood-line, Tym and Jory, both long-limbed and hollow-eyed, with the look of lads who'd grown up on hunger and learned to call it normal. And Edrin himself, fifteen years old in body, something else entirely behind the eyes.
And then there were the ones not here, the ones who had been Hollow an hour ago, a lifetime ago, a smear of smoke on the horizon now. He could almost smell it still when the wind shifted: peat and burnt hair and old piss and the sharp sweet of fat rendered wrong.
Hobb. Mara. Old Wena. Old Rusk with his cracked laws. Thirty others with names he didn't speak aloud because names made ghosts more stubborn.
Edrin's hands were shaking, and it wasn't from cold.
He forced them still.
In his first life; his real first life, he'd been the sort of person who thought shaking meant fear. That you could "power through" fear like it was a muscle, and if you were smart enough, rational enough, you could simply choose not to feel it.
Then he'd died.
Then he'd died again, in a world where being smart got you fed and being wrong got you eaten.
Now he understood shaking for what it was. Not fear, necessarily. The body dumping poison out of itself. Adrenaline bleeding away. The aftermath of violence trying to settle in bones that did not have the years to hold it.
Rowan watched him across the fire, her face streaked with soot and blood. She had a cut across her cheek where a wildling's nail or knife had kissed her. It wasn't deep, but it was ugly, the sort that would make a scar that caught the eye.
"Say it again," she said.
Her voice was flat. Not angry. Not begging. Just the voice of someone who'd been taught by the Gift that if you didn't speak plainly, you died with your secrets still stuck in your teeth.
Edrin looked at her. Then at Lysa, who was huddled on a rock with her arms wrapped around her knees, her breath coming in quick, shallow puffs like a rabbit's. Her eyes kept darting south, as if she expected to see Hollow walking toward them on the horizon like a man in a cloak.
Tym and Jory stood close together, half behind a pine, clutching their knives in white-knuckled hands. They did not look like boys who believed this place was salvation. They looked like boys who'd followed because the alternative was worse.
Edrin made himself speak.
"Hollow was survival," he said, and the words came out rough. They tasted like smoke. "This could be… something else."
Rowan's mouth twitched, not a smile. "Something else like what? A new hole to die in?"
Lysa made a small sound; half laugh, half sob...that died quickly.
Edrin stared into the little fire, watching the sticks blacken. Watching the fat drip from a strip of rabbit Rowan had found in her pouch, saved from earlier like a secret. It sizzled. The smell made his stomach cramp with want.
Seven hells, he thought, I'm standing here doing speeches when what I should be doing is making sure nobody shits upriver of our drinking water.
The thought was crass and stupid and modern and it made him feel briefly, violently alive.
He swallowed.
"Something else like a foothold," he said. "Like not waiting for the Watch to remember we exist. Like not dying because some wildling chief decided our huts looked easy."
Rowan snorted. "Wildlings don't 'decide.' They follow hunger. Same as us."
"Yes," Edrin said. "That's the point."
He could feel their eyes on him. Not trust. Not faith. Not yet.
Attention.
Attention was a knife. If you held it right, it cut for you. If you held it wrong, it cut you.
He had learned that from the System more than the Gift. The System did not care for feelings. It gave numbers like the world gave snow.
When he'd first come back, returned, the word in his head like a bit of grit between teeth, he'd thought the System was a cheat, a game overlay on a world that was too dirty and real. He'd wanted it to be clean, to be fair.
It wasn't.
It was just… there. Another part of the world's cruelty. Another mechanism.
It had given him Awareness, and then it had sharpened it into something that made his skin prickle when someone lied. It had given him strength and endurance and perception, in small increments bought with meat and pain.
It had not given him a home.
Homes were built.
Rowan broke the silence first. She stepped closer to the stream, crouched, and dipped her fingers into the water. Her breath hitched when she felt warmth.
She looked at him then, and for a heartbeat the hard scout-mask slipped. What showed beneath was not softness. It was need.
"This is real," she said.
Lysa's head snapped up. She crawled to the water on her knees like a worshipper to a shrine and plunged both hands in. Her shoulders shook.
"It's warm," she whispered, as if afraid the stream would hear and take offense. "It's warm."
Edrin watched her and felt something twist in his chest that he did not like. A thing like guilt. Like responsibility.
In his old world, responsibility had been a choice you made. You picked up a burden or you didn't. You took on a role or you didn't.
Here, responsibility was a consequence. You did a thing, and then people looked at you differently, and then you could not un-do it.