He felt his stomach tighten.
"How many?" Tym whispered behind him.
Edrin did not answer immediately. Counting tracks in snow was like counting lies in a council chamber. You could do it. But you had to be careful not to fool yourself.
"Three," Rowan said, before he could. "Maybe four."
Edrin nodded. Scouts.
The wildling band had sent eyes ahead, not the whole force. That was good. That meant they weren't sure survivors existed. Or they weren't sure where.
Or they were patient.
Patience in a raider was worse than hunger.
Rowan glanced at him. "What do we do?"
Edrin's mind split again.
Part of him wanted to run. To take them deeper into the Gift, away from this stream, away from this foothold. The Gift was huge. There were places no man walked. He could disappear.
Then he saw Lysa's face when she'd touched the warm water. Saw the way her shoulders had shaken as if she'd finally remembered what being human felt like.
And he thought of his own words: not being prey.
Running meant being prey.
He swallowed.
"We don't let them find the cabin," he said. "And we don't let them report back."
Rowan's eyes narrowed. "You want to kill them."
Edrin didn't flinch. "Yes."
Lysa made a small sound. "Edrin--"
He turned to her. "If they go back and tell the band they found a warm stream and shelter, they come with fire," he said. "And then we die. Maybe not today. But soon."
Lysa's lips parted. She looked like she wanted to argue, but what could she say? That mercy mattered more than survival?
Mercy was a luxury. Hollow had never had it.
Rowan's gaze stayed on him, assessing. "Can you kill them?"
Edrin remembered dying. Remembered the bone club.
Not like a hero, he thought. Not like a fucking story.
"I can," he said.
He didn't add: because I can die to learn how not to die.
He would not tell them that. Not now. Not ever, if he could help it.
Rowan nodded slowly. "How?"
Edrin looked at the valley. The wind was in their favor, blowing from the ridge down toward the scouts. That meant the scouts would not smell them if they stayed low.
The terrain offered a shallow gully, half-hidden by drifts. A cluster of rocks near a stand of scrub.
"We set an ambush," he said. "We don't fight fair."
Rowan's mouth curled, approving. "Good."
He looked at Tym and Jory. "You two stay back," he said. "If it goes wrong, you run to the cabin and grab the packs and get Lysa moving."
Tym swallowed hard. "You're leaving her?"
Edrin's gaze snapped to him, cold. "I'm making sure someone lives," he said. "If you want to be brave, be brave by doing what I say."
The boy flinched. Jory nodded quickly, eyes down.
Rowan moved with him into the gully. Their breaths were thin, their movements careful.
Edrin's Awareness reached out like an animal scenting prey.
He felt them before he saw them. A faint disturbance in the rhythm of the woods, like a wrong note.
The scouts came through the valley in a loose line, three men and one woman. They were dressed in patched hides and ragged fur, their weapons crude but deadly, spears tipped with bone, a stone axe, a short bow.
They moved cautiously, heads turning. They were not stupid.
Edrin waited until the lead man stepped onto the patch of ground he'd chosen, where the snow was thin over slick stone.
He threw a pebble.
The sound was nothing. A tick.
The lead scout turned his head reflexively.
That half-second was enough.
Edrin surged up out of the gully like a wolf.
He hit the man low, shoulder into thigh, knocking him off balance. The scout's foot slipped on the stone. He went down hard, breath exploding out.
Edrin's knife flashed. He drove it under the man's ribs.
The scout's mouth opened, eyes wide, and blood bubbled.
Rowan was already moving, arrowing toward the second scout with her own blade, silent as smoke. She cut the man's hamstring and then his throat in one smooth motion, like she'd been doing it all her life.
The third scout, woman had the bow. She snapped it up, loosed.
The arrow tore through Edrin's cloak and grazed his shoulder. Pain flared, hot and sharp. He gritted his teeth, kept moving.
The fourth scout, a big man with a stone axe, roared and charged Rowan.
Rowan sidestepped, but the axe clipped her arm, tearing hide and skin. She hissed, stumbled.
Edrin saw it in a flash, the angle of the axe, the way the man's weight was committed, the way his feet dug into snow.
He moved without thinking, Awareness guiding him like a hand on the spine.
He came in behind the big man, hooked his leg with his own, and yanked.
The man went down hard, axe flying.
Edrin straddled him and drove his knife into the man's throat.
Blood sprayed hot against cold air, steaming.
The woman with the bow screamed then--finally, a human sound and turned to run.
Edrin's heart hammered.
He could let her go.
He could.
Then he saw Hollow burning again in his mind, and he felt the weight of four lives on his back.
He grabbed a handful of snow, packed it hard, and flung it at her head.
It hit her ear and cheek, enough to make her flinch and slow.
Rowan, bleeding, snarled like a cornered thing and threw her knife.
It struck the woman in the back.
The scout went down into the snow, twitching.
Silence fell quickly, broken only by the wind.
Edrin stood over the dead, chest heaving. Blood ran warm down his side.
Rowan bent, retrieved her knife, and wiped it on the scout's cloak with a kind of casual cruelty.
She looked at Edrin. "That was clean."
Edrin almost laughed at that, because nothing about it felt clean. The smell of blood was thick, iron and shit and fear.
He stared at the bodies. They looked smaller now that they were dead. Not threats. Just meat.
His stomach twisted.
This is what you wanted, he told himself. You wanted to stop being prey. This is the cost.
He knelt by the first man he'd killed and put a hand on the corpse's chest, feeling the last weak warmth fading.
The part of him that was modern, rational, clinical, whispered: Food. Supplies. Useful.
The part of him that was sixteen in Westeros whispered: Sin. Curse. Blood.
And the System in him, the thing that had rewarded him for eating hearts, sat silent, watching.
Rowan's voice cut through his thoughts. "Are you going to… do your thing?"
Edrin looked up sharply.
Rowan shrugged, eyes hard. "I've seen you cut strange. I've seen you stare at dead beasts like you're listening. Don't lie to me, Ed. We're past lying."
Edrin held her gaze. Then he looked at Lysa, who stood at the edge of the gully, pale and shaking, watching the bodies with horror.
And he knew.
He could not do the heart ritual in front of them. Not yet. Not ever, if he wanted them to follow without fear turning their loyalty into something twisted.
He stood. "We strip them," he said. "We bury them shallow and scatter snow. We leave no sign."
Rowan nodded. "And the bodies?"
Edrin's jaw tightened. "We hide them," he said. "And we move our trail."
He did not say: and I come back alone later.
By midday they had dragged the corpses into a cleft between rocks and covered them with branches and snow. It was not a true burial. It was a lie told to wolves and crows.
They took what they could, two bows, a handful of arrows, a flint, a small pouch of dried meat that tasted of smoke and desperation.
Rowan's arm was wrapped in cloth, blood still seeping. Edrin's shoulder burned where the arrow had grazed him.
Lysa moved like a sleepwalker.
Tym and Jory kept looking over their shoulders, as if expecting the dead to rise.
Back at the cabin, Edrin set them to work.
He did not ask.
He told.
Rowan cut more pine boughs. Tym and Jory carried rocks to build a low wall near the cabin's entrance, something to break a charge, something to funnel movement.
Lysa tended the fire, hands shaking, but she did it.
Edrin walked the perimeter with Rowan, marking trees, measuring distance.
"We need alarms," he said quietly, so only she could hear.
Rowan frowned. "Alarms?"
"Trip lines," Edrin said. "Snares that don't catch but warn. Little things that make noise if someone walks through."
Rowan stared at him. "That's… clever."
"It's basic," Edrin muttered. Basic in my old world, he thought. Revolutionary in a place where people think winter is a god and shit near the stream is just fate.
Rowan's mouth twitched. "You talk like you've seen better."
Edrin looked away. "I've thought about better," he said.
Rowan studied him. "You're not just a bastard from Hollow."
"No," Edrin said.
It was the closest he'd come to truth.
Rowan didn't press further. She had the sense not to. Or maybe she could feel the edge beneath him.