The journey back took longer than the journey out.

  Three additional bodies accounted for most of it — the recovered hunters from team seven, two of whom could walk with support and one of whom could not walk at all and was carried in rotation by Davan and Sorin with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this before and would do it again. The pace was slower. The stops were more frequent. The silence of the group had the particular quality of a mission that had concluded without full resolution — the hunters found, alive, but the questions that had sent them into the Veldmoor corridor in the first place still unanswered.

  Kaelan set the pace from the front.

  Elia walked where he had told her to walk — next to him, slightly behind his left shoulder, close enough that he was aware of her without having to look. He had established this position with one sentence and had not revisited it and she had not questioned it and it had simply become the arrangement, the two of them moving through the snow in a proximity that was deliberate on his part and that she appeared to be not examining too closely on hers.

  This was, he thought, probably wise of her.

  He was not examining it too closely himself.

  ---

  The snow started an hour in.

  Not heavily — a thin, consistent fall, the kind that accumulated quietly without announcing itself, that turned the world incrementally more white and the air incrementally more cold. He felt the temperature drop and adjusted his pace to account for it and looked at the sky and calculated the remaining distance against the weather's trajectory.

  Then he looked at her.

  She was walking with her arms crossed over her chest, her thin training cloak — the one she'd worn for the mission because it was what she had, because no one had thought to equip her properly for this before she had not-quite-accidentally followed them out of the Stronghold — pulled as close as it could be pulled, which was not close enough. The fabric was not built for this. He could see, even from here, the specific quality of cold that had settled into her — the set of her shoulders, the way she was holding herself together against it, the flush of her cheeks that had gone past the healthy pink of exertion into something deeper and more concerning.

  Her cheeks were very red.

  Her hands, where they were tucked under her arms, were the wrong color.

  He looked at her for a moment longer.

  Then he reached up and unclasped his cloak.

  ---

  She didn't notice until it landed on her shoulders.

  She stopped walking — just for a second, the sudden warmth of it hitting her before she processed where it had come from — and then she turned and found him standing beside her without his cloak, the snow falling on the dark material of his jacket, completely unbothered by the temperature in the way that he was unbothered by most things.

  "What —" She reached up to take it off. "You don't have to —"

  "Keep walking," he said.

  "Kaelan, you need this, it's —"

  "I don't," he said. Simply. The tone of someone stating a fact that required no supporting argument.

  She looked at him. At the snow falling on his shoulders. At the cloak that was so large on her it covered her completely, past her hands, to her knees, warm in a way that was almost embarrassing given how cold she had been a moment ago.

  "This is — I'm fine," she said. "I wasn't even that cold."

  He looked at her with an expression that said, very clearly and without words, that he had seen her cheeks and her hands and the way she had been holding herself against the cold and that the sentence she had just said was not a sentence he was going to dignify with a response.

  She looked back at him.

  He reached out and took the hood of the cloak and pulled it up over her head.

  She went very still.

  His hands were close to her face — just for a moment, adjusting the hood, making sure it sat properly — and she looked up at him from inside it and his eyes were on the hood, on the adjustment, and then they dropped to her face and he looked at her for one brief moment from very close.

  He stepped back.

  "Keep walking," he said.

  She turned around.

  She kept walking.

  Inside the hood of his cloak the warmth was complete and the smell of it was — him, she supposed, which was a thought she was not going to have, she was setting that thought down and walking away from it — and the snow fell around her without reaching her and she walked next to him with her hands now hidden entirely by the cloak's excess length and she said absolutely nothing.

  ---

  An hour into the return Davan appeared at Kaelan's right shoulder.

  He did not announce himself — Davan never announced himself — and he walked in silence for a while, which was unusual enough that Kaelan registered it.

  "Say what you're going to say," Kaelan said.

  "I wasn't going to say anything."

  "Davan."

  "I'm simply walking." A pause. "She went toward two Upper ranks with a knife."

  "I know. I was there."

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  "She couldn't have known it wouldn't work. She went anyway." Another pause, lighter than the first. "Toward two Upper ranks. With a knife. For three hunters she'd never met."

  Kaelan said nothing.

  "I'm just noting it," Davan said pleasantly. "For the record. Since no one else is going to."

  "There is no record."

  "There is always a record." He touched his chest briefly. "Sera is going to love her."

  Kaelan looked at the path ahead.

  "Go help with the carry," he said.

  "Sorin has it."

  "Davan."

  "Going," Davan said, entirely untroubled. "I'm going."

  He dropped back.

  Three seconds of silence.

  "Nice cloak," he said, from behind them, to no one in particular.

  Kaelan kept walking.

  Ahead of him Riven made a sound that was almost nothing and looked at the trees.

  ---

  She had gone quiet after the cloak.

  Not the quiet of someone depleted or frightened — he had learned the difference between her silences by now. This was the quiet of someone sitting with something they hadn't decided what to do with yet.

  He didn't push it.

  He walked and let her have the quiet and was aware of her beside him with the continuous peripheral attention that had taken up residence in him the night he found her in the forest and had not vacated since.

  At some point she said, without looking at him:

  "What are they."

  He looked at her. "What."

  "The swords." She was looking at the path ahead, the hood of his cloak framing her face, her cheeks finally returning to a color that did not concern him. "The black ones. The demon — when it looked at them — it looked at them differently."

  He considered this.

  "All demon hunter swords are made a specific way," he said. "A specific process, specific materials. It's the only thing that works on demons — ordinary steel doesn't. Every hunter carries them."

  "But yours are different."

  It wasn't a question.

  "The blades come out different colors," he said. "Most are silver. Some are closer to white. A few are darker — grey, deep blue." He paused. "Mine came out black."

  She looked at his back — at the hilts visible above his shoulders.

  "Why," she said.

  "No one knows," he said. Which was true. He had asked the question himself, when he was young and newly equipped and standing in front of the blade-master with two swords that were the wrong color and no explanation. The blade-master had looked at them for a long time and said nothing and that nothing had been somehow more informative than an answer would have been.

  "The demon knew what they were," she said.

  "Upper ranks know what's dangerous. The black blades are the rarest. Most hunters never see them. Upper ranks apparently have reason to know what they mean."

  She was quiet for a moment.

  "What do they mean," she said.

  He looked at the path ahead.

  "I'm not entirely sure," he said. Which was also true.

  She nodded slowly.

  "They're beautiful," she said. Very quietly. As if she hadn't entirely meant to say it aloud.

  He looked at her.

  She was looking at the path, the hood of his cloak around her face, and she did not look back at him.

  "They're tools," he said.

  "Things can be both," she said.

  He said nothing.

  She said nothing.

  They walked.

  ---

  The Stronghold appeared through the trees as it always did — sudden and massive and permanent, the grey stone of it rising against the grey sky.

  She stopped walking when she saw it.

  Just for a moment — a half step, quickly corrected — but he felt the interruption in her rhythm. He looked at her and found her looking at the Stronghold with an expression that was complicated in the specific way expressions were complicated when a place had become something you hadn't expected it to become.

  "What," he said.

  She shook her head slightly. "Nothing. I just —" She stopped. "I didn't think it would feel like that."

  "Like what."

  She looked at the Stronghold for another moment.

  "Like coming back," she said. Very quietly. "To somewhere."

  He looked at the Stronghold.

  He looked at her — at the hood of his cloak around her face, at the red of her cheeks finally settled back to something normal, at the way she was looking at the grey stone building with an expression so honest it was almost difficult to look at directly.

  He thought about a girl who had run through the forest with nothing to run toward. Who had arrived here with nothing. Who had been here long enough that the nothing had quietly, stubbornly become something.

  "Come on," he said.

  She came.

  ---

  The medical assessment of the recovered hunters took two hours.

  Kaelan stayed for the debrief — what team seven had encountered, the nature of the demon activity in the deeper Veldmoor corridor, the picture their answers collectively described. It was not a comfortable picture. The activity in the corridor was directed. Coordinated in a way that required communication between individual demons that lower ranks were not capable of on their own.

  Something was directing them.

  He sat with this after the debrief, alone in the strategy room, the map in front of him and the markers on it. Then he rolled the map and put it away and went to find her.

  ---

  She was in her room.

  Of course she was in her room — she had been on a mission in active demon territory, been buried in snow, faced two Upper ranks with a knife, walked four hours in the cold — and she was sitting on the edge of her bed with her boots still on and his cloak still around her shoulders and her eyes half closed with the specific heavy quality of someone fighting a tiredness that was winning.

  She still had the cloak.

  He looked at that for a moment without saying anything about it.

  "Hi," she said. Her voice had the soft rough quality of exhaustion.

  "Why are you still dressed," he said.

  She looked down at herself. "I was going to — I sat down for a moment."

  "How long ago."

  She thought about it. "I'm not sure."

  He came in. He sat on the edge of the chair and he looked at her. She looked back at him with her eyes half open and her hair still carrying the cold of outside in it and her hands loose in her lap and she was so tired she had stopped managing anything — the composure simply absent, just her underneath it, unguarded and quiet.

  "Kaelan," she said.

  "Mm."

  "The hunters in the depression." She paused. "They were alive because of the position you put them in. Before the main engagement. You already knew something might come from the east."

  "I plan for most things," he said.

  "You didn't plan for me going after them."

  "No," he said. "I didn't plan for that."

  She looked at her hands. "I'm sorry. For not staying where you told me to stay."

  He was quiet for a moment.

  "The three hunters in that depression are alive," he said. "In part because of what you did."

  She looked up.

  "The knife didn't work," he said. "But you slowed it. Gave me time to get there." He looked at her steadily. "I'm not going to tell you it was the right decision. It wasn't. You could have —" He stopped. "It wasn't the right decision."

  "But," she said.

  "There is no but," he said. "It wasn't the right decision and you should not do it again." A pause, so brief it was almost not there. "And the three hunters in that depression are alive."

  She looked at him for a long moment.

  "That's a but," she said. Very quietly.

  Something moved through his expression.

  "Sleep," he said.

  She almost smiled — the almost of it very visible and very tired and entirely genuine. "Okay."

  He stood. He moved toward the door.

  "Kaelan."

  He stopped.

  She was looking at him from the edge of the bed with his cloak still around her shoulders and her eyes half open and her hands folded in her lap.

  "Thank you," she said. "For the snow." A pause. "And the cloak."

  He looked at her.

  "Do you need assistance," she said, very quietly — not quite an impression of him, not quite a joke, something in between that was entirely her.

  He looked at her for one long moment.

  "Go to sleep Elia," he said.

  She lay back on the bed with her boots still on and his cloak still around her and she was asleep, he was fairly certain, before he had finished closing the door.

  He stood in the corridor outside her room.

  His cloak was in there.

  He was not going to knock on the door and ask for his cloak back.

  He went to his room.

  He sat at his desk and he looked at the wall between his room and hers and he thought about *things can be both* and the shape she'd left in the snow and the way she had looked at the Stronghold and said *like coming back to somewhere* and he thought about all of it with the careful attention of a man who was running out of reasons to file things under categories that were becoming increasingly inadequate.

  He sat there for a long time.

  The Stronghold settled into its nighttime rhythms around him.

  Next door, she slept in his cloak.

  He did not sleep for a while.

  ---

  *End of Chapter 17.* ??