He had saved them.
So now they were his.
Congratulations, he told himself, bitter. You wanted meaning. Here. Have some. Try not to choke on it.
Tym shifted his weight. "Are they coming?" he asked, voice thin.
"Who?" Jory whispered, though he knew.
"The wildlings," Tym said. "The ones who did it. Will they follow?"
Rowan's gaze went to Edrin again, sharp as a thrown axe. "Will they?"
Edrin closed his eyes for a heartbeat and let Awareness do its work.
He felt the land. Not in some mystical sense. In a predator's sense.
The wind had covered their scent for most of the flight. The thorn thicket had torn cloth and skin and left blood, but it had also left confusion. The ridge had been exposed, open, but the wind up there was a hammer. It broke trails. It erased prints. It shoved snow back into the world's own scars.
They had moved fast, and he'd moved them fast because he'd already died three times learning what "fast enough" meant.
Would the wildlings follow?
Maybe.
Wildlings were not stupid. Not all of them. Some were hunters with brains as sharp as their flint. Some were desperate animals. Thirty of them suggested a band with leadership, with purpose.
They'd hit Hollow not just to steal. They'd hit it to take, to burn, to erase. That was more than hunger. That was strategy.
And strategy meant they would ask questions.
Where did the survivors go?
Edrin opened his eyes. "They'll look," he said. "At first light, maybe sooner. But they won't find us easily."
Rowan's jaw tightened. "That's not the same as 'won't find us.'"
"No," Edrin agreed. "It's not."
He stood and walked to the cabin.
Calling it a cabin was generous. It was a squat, timber-and-stone thing half sunk into the slope, roofed with angled poles and sod packed thick enough to shed most snow. The walls were pine logs stacked and sealed with mud and moss, the seams tight. It did not look like a lord's hall. It looked like something an animal would burrow into.
Which was what it was.
Edrin ducked through the low door and gestured for the others to follow.
Inside, the air was warmer by degrees. Not warm like his old world's heated rooms, where you could forget winter existed. Warm like a blanket you didn't deserve. Warm like breath in a dying man's mouth.
He had built the sleeping platform along the far wall, three feet off the ground, layered with pine boughs and old furs. Underneath it was storage: dried roots, smoked rabbit, bundles of kindling, a few crude clay pots he'd fired in a pit when the ground had been less frozen.
In one corner he'd made a stone-lined fire box, with a small vent in the roof. The smoke went out in a thin thread that the wind scattered. He'd learned to keep it low, to feed it slowly, so it did not belch like Hollow's communal fire.
Rowan stepped inside and immediately scanned corners, like she expected a man to jump out with a knife. Old habits. Good habits.
Lysa just stood, staring, as if the sight of a roof that did not leak was a miracle.
Tym and Jory lingered in the doorway.
Edrin went to the back wall and pulled a hide aside.
There was a narrow pit he'd dug into the earth, lined with stones. It was not deep enough to be a proper latrine, and it was too close to the stream, and he knew it, and it bothered him in a way that felt almost obscene compared to the fact people had died tonight.
But it was something.
"This is where you piss," he said bluntly.
Rowan blinked at him. "That's… what?"
"A piss pit," Edrin said. "Shit goes outside. Downwind. Far. You dig it deep and you cover it. If you shit near the water, we drink it later and then we die slow, and I'm not doing that."
The boys stared at him like he'd spoken Valyrian.
Lysa made a small choking sound that might have been laughter.
Rowan's mouth twitched again. "You think like a… like a--"
"Like someone who's had food poisoning," Edrin said, and the lie came easily because it was half true. "Like someone who's watched people die because they don't understand small things."
He saw the way Rowan's gaze sharpened at that. She heard the insult beneath it. She was Gift-born too. She had watched the small things kill men.
Edrin met her eyes. "I'm not saying you're stupid," he said. "I'm saying this place is. It punishes ignorance."
Rowan looked away first.
A silence settled, thick as the sod roof.
Then the wind hit the cabin like a fist. The whole structure groaned.
Tym flinched. Jory whispered a prayer to the old gods.
Lysa's hands trembled. "They'll burn this too," she said. "They'll burn everything. They always--"
"No," Edrin said.
The word came out harder than he meant.
Lysa stared at him.
Edrin exhaled slowly, forcing his voice down. "No," he said again, quieter. "Not if we stop being prey."
Rowan turned her head sharply. "How?"
Edrin's mind tried to split itself the way it always did now. One part wanted to be a boy, wanted to curl up on the platform and sleep for three days and wake to a world where Hollow still stood. Another part was already building lists.
Water source. Shelter. Heat. Food stores. Defenses. Routes. Lookouts. Redundancy.
His old world had called it risk management. He would have used nice words. He would have drawn diagrams and pretended people were rational.
Here, risk management was called not dying.
"How," Rowan repeated, and there was something like challenge in it, but also something like hope.
Edrin stared at the fire box. "First," he said, "we eat. Then we sleep in turns. Then at first light we set snares and look for tracks."
Rowan's lip curled. "That's just surviving."
"Yes," Edrin said. "That's the base. The foundation."