Hobb went still.
The air between them sharpened as if the wind had found a new seam to worry at.
In a place like Hollow, you didn't make claims like that unless you wanted to be challenged. Claims were coin. If you spent them too freely, men took your throat to see if you had any left.
But Edrin didn't look like he was boasting. He made sure of that. He held his shoulders wrong, just slightly, like a boy with too much cold in his bones. He kept his eyes tired. He let his mouth hang open a touch, the way fools did when they spoke beyond themselves.
Let Hobb see what he wanted to see.
Let everyone see what they wanted.
"Bold talk for a bastard who usually hides in the brush," a new voice cut in.
Mara.
She approached like a fox approaches a trap, silent, careful, eyes always moving. She was draped in a moth-eaten cloak of grey fox furs, the fur patchy and thin in places where it had been chewed by years. Her fingers kept moving as she walked, as if she were counting invisible coins.
Mara was not old, not truly, but the Gift aged people the way salt aged meat. Her face was narrow. Her eyes were the color of old ice. Her lips were always dry, always cracked. She had the kind of beauty that came from sharpness rather than softness, and men noticed her less than they should have, which was why she was dangerous.
She stopped by the fire and looked Edrin over the way a butcher looked over a carcass.
Her gaze paused at his shoulder, where the wolf's claws had ripped through his tunic in the previous life.
There was no wound there now. Not in this "run."
But the fabric was frayed.
He'd made sure it was.
Mara's nostrils flared.
"You smell of wet fur and old blood, Edrin," she whispered, voice a dry rattle. "And you've got a look in your eye that reminds me of my father right before he walked into a blizzard and never came back."
Edrin turned his spoon slowly in the porridge. The spoon scraped the bowl. He could hear it. He could hear everything.
Maybe that was the worst part. Not the death. Not the cold.
The detail.
"Maybe your father found something better than this," he said, and he gestured with the spoon toward the circle of shivering, hollow-cheeked villagers.
A man with cracked lips and a bandage over one ear stared back with dull resentment. A woman with a babe on her hip stared with tired hatred. A boy his own age stared as if Edrin had just said a prayer.
Mara's lip curled. "There is nothing better than staying alive," she said. "You owe the grain-store three days of labor for that bowl. Don't go 'scouting' yourself into a grave until the debt's paid."
It wasn't kindness. Mara didn't do kindness. It was ownership. It was the reminder that in Hollow, even food was a chain.
She moved off, her cloak brushing shoulders, leaving a chill behind her that the fire couldn't touch.
Edrin felt a light touch on his arm.
He turned and saw Lysa.
Her hair was tucked under a wool cap, but strands had escaped, clinging to her cheek with frost. Her cheeks were mapped with broken capillaries from cold, tiny red spiderwebs that would never go away. She didn't speak at first. She just held out her hand.
In her palm sat a small, shriveled apple.
A treasure.
Edrin stared at it like it was a gold coin dropped in mud.
"Eat it," Lysa murmured. "Before Old Rusk sees and starts reciting the laws of the Gift."
Edrin took it carefully. The skin was wrinkled. The flesh was soft. It smelled faintly sweet, faintly sour.
"Where'd you get this?" he asked.
"Found a cache the squirrels missed." Her eyes flicked, quick, around the hut. "Or maybe the gods felt pity."
She looked back at him and held his gaze, and Edrin felt that uncomfortable prickling Awareness gave him when someone looked too closely.
"You're different today," she said softly. "You're… sitting like a man who's waiting for a signal."
Edrin's thumb pressed into the apple. It gave slightly.
In his mind, a list formed, as it always did now.
Risks: winter worsening, Hollow raided, Watch taxes, sickness, starvation, random violence.
Resources: one warm stream, hidden ridge, moss, iron deposit, his Awareness, his ability to come back.
Constraints: fifteen-year-old body, limited supplies, no allies with power, social suspicion.
Lysa watched him.
He forced himself to breathe and speak with his mouth, not his mind.
"I'm tired of waiting, Lysa," he said, and his fingers brushed hers as he took the fruit. Her skin was like ice. "Hollow is a tomb that hasn't been closed yet. I found a place. Above the ridge. There's a stream that doesn't freeze. Moss that's still green."
Lysa's laugh was short and brittle. "Green?" she said. "In the Gift? You've been chewing the wrong mushrooms, Ed."
"I'm serious," he said.
He leaned in closer, and he felt the wolf's instinct in him, the subtle mapping of who was listening and who was pretending not to. Old Rusk on the far side of the fire, eyes half-closed, listening anyway. Two women near the pot, whispering. A boy with a snotty nose, staring at the apple like he wanted to bite Edrin's hand for it.
"If the snow gets worse and it will; the mess won't keep us," Edrin continued. "The Watch won't come for us. We're just 'Gift folk' to them. targets."
He didn't say collateral because that was a modern word that didn't fit. He didn't say bureaucracy because that would have gotten him a blank stare.
He said what they understood.
Lysa's eyes were wide now, bright in the firelight. "You'll freeze," she whispered, but there was a flicker beneath the fear.
Hope.
Hope was the most dangerous thing in the North. It made men walk into storms. It made women birth babes in famine.
"I won't," Edrin said.
Across the fire, Old Wena watched them.
Her eyes were milky, cataracts clouding them, but sometimes it felt like she saw more than anyone. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, fingers gnarled, nails yellow. When she turned her head, it was slow, deliberate, as if every movement cost.
Her gaze landed on Edrin, and he felt, absurdly, like a boy caught stealing.
Wena nodded once.
She knows, Edrin thought.
Or maybe she didn't. Maybe she only knew the shape of desperation, because she'd worn it longer than he'd been alive.
He stood up, joints popping.
He made himself stand like a boy rising too fast from the heat. He made himself sway slightly, hand bracing on a post.
Inside, his body felt wrong. Too ready. Too coiled. Like a knife in a sheath.
He didn't feel like the boy who'd died twice. He felt like a man learning the rules of a very old, very bloody game.
"Hobb," he called as the big man turned to leave. "If you want that brittle pine, bring your sled to the split-trunk at dawn. I'll show you where the ridge breaks. It's safer than you think."
Hobb paused, looking over his shoulder.
His eyes went to Edrin's belt.
The knife hung there, and Edrin's hand rested near it not with the grip of a nervous boy, but with the casual familiarity of a butcher.
Hobb's gaze sharpened. He saw. He didn't know what he saw, but he saw something.
"Dawn, then," Hobb grunted. "But if it's a trap, bastard, I'm using your head for the first log."
Edrin didn't smile. He just nodded.
"Fair enough."