Chapter 128 — "Conceptual Wind"

They left at fourth bell, which was two hours before anything in Varen had the decency to become visible.

Renna saw them out. She did not give a speech. She checked four packs, adjusted one strap on Ost’s without explaining why, and said, "Six days. Officer Kell has command. You are not students out there and you are not soldiers. You are the fourth thing, and the fourth thing keeps its mouth shut and its eyes open."

"What’s the fourth thing," Ost said.

"Baggage that can be useful," Renna said, and went back inside.

Officer Kell was fifty and built like something you’d struggle to move off a road. He looked at four students in new cold-weather gear and did not sigh, which Seraphina thought was a professional courtesy she’d remember.

"Names."

"Halvard."

"Ost. Third year. Top eight in—"

"Names," Kell said again.

"...Ost."

"Valois."

"Sennick."

Kell’s eyes moved over them once, the way you check a load before you tie it down. "Six days. Border track, western spur. It’s cold, it’s flat, and it’s boring, and the day it stops being boring is the day you’ll wish it hadn’t. Walk where I walk. Sleep when I say. If you fall behind, say so before you fall behind."

He turned.

"Sir," Ost said, "how many rotations have you—"

"Walk."

The first two hours were nothing. Grey light coming up over flat land, frost breaking under boots, breath going in front of them.

Ost talked.

He talked about his month-two evaluation. He talked about a supply route incident that had apparently been formative. He talked about a conversation with an instructor that improved each time it was mentioned, until by the third telling the instructor had implied Ost was the most promising student of his year, which Seraphina noted had not been in the first version at all.

Halvard walked in front of her and said nothing.

Eren walked beside her, half a step closer than the track required.

"You’re crowding."

"There’s a wind."

"There’s no wind."

"There’s a conceptual wind."

"What’s a conceptual wind," said Ost, from behind.

"He’s making it up."

"I’m making it available."

"Available to who."

"To anyone cold enough to want it."

Ost thought about this for nearly forty seconds, which was the longest he had gone without speaking since fourth bell, and Seraphina found she was grateful to the conceptual wind for that alone.

Kell stopped them at midday beside a marker stone with nothing around it in any direction.

"Eat. Ten minutes."

Halvard sat. Ost sat and began explaining why the western spur was strategically significant. Eren produced, from somewhere inside a pack Seraphina had watched him fill that morning and had definitely not seen this go into, a small wrapped parcel, and put it in her hands.

She looked at it.

"No."

"You haven’t opened it."

"I know the shape of it."

"It’s a shape, not a proposal."

"It’s a proposal shaped like a shape."

He looked genuinely wounded. It lasted about a second and a half, which was as long as anything lasted on his face.

She opened it. Dried fruit and something dense and sweet from the market that stayed open past dark.

"When."

"Tuesday."

"We were training on Tuesday."

"You were training on Tuesday."

Halvard, without looking up: "He went into town."

"You saw him."

"I see most things."

"Do you," said Eren, pleasantly.

Halvard chewed. Said nothing.

Seraphina ate the dried fruit and filed the exchange somewhere she’d have to look at later, in a stack that was becoming genuinely unwieldy.

The cold arrived properly on the second afternoon.

Not gradually. It came off the flat like something that had been waiting.

The wind took the top layer of warmth out of everything and then came back for the rest.

Her face stopped being a face and became a surface with weather on it.

Ost stopped talking at some point during the fourth hour.

She noticed the exact moment it happened and remembered eleven words in an emptying yard.

When he stops — that’s when it’s started.

Halvard did not look back. But he shifted, once, so that he was walking a little further to the windward side than the track required, and stayed there.

They made camp against a low ridge that broke maybe half the wind, which Kell described as "generous."

Ost’s hands were shaking on the tent line. He was pretending they weren’t, which required him to work slowly, which meant they shook longer.

"Give it here," Halvard said.

"I’ve got it."

"You’ve got it. Give it here."

Ost gave it here.

Seraphina got her own line up, badly, and only realised how badly when Kell walked past, corrected one knot without breaking stride, and said nothing at all.

She sat down heavily and took her gloves off.

"Don’t," Eren said.

"I need to check—"

"I know what you need to check. Do it with them on."

"You can’t feel anything through—"

"Seraphina."

She stopped.

He said her name maybe once a month. He used Valois in front of instructors and something ridiculous the rest of the time. The actual name arrived rarely and always meant the joke had been set down.

She put her gloves back on.

"Give me your hands."

"...What."

"Both of them."

She gave him her hands.

He took them in his and held them, flat between his own, and said absolutely nothing for a while, which was the most alarming thing he had done in two years.

"Your grip’s fine," he said eventually.

"I know my grip’s fine."

"You’ve stopped checking it. You checked it eleven times an hour on the first day. You’ve checked it twice since noon."

She looked at him.

"You counted."

"I count things."

"You count me."

"I count what’s in front of me." A pause. "You’re frequently in front of me."

Across the camp, Ost said, "Are they—"

"Yes," said Halvard.

"Since when."

"They haven’t."

"Then what’s—"

"Yes," Halvard said again, and that appeared to be the whole conversation.

Later, in the dark, with the wind doing what it did:

"Sennick."

"Mm."

"Four pages."

"Absolutely not."

"You wrote four pages to get onto a list."

"I wrote four pages badly, and if you keep saying it, they get worse retroactively."

"What did they say."

"They said—" He stopped. Started again, and something in his voice had adjusted a half-step, the way a floor adjusts when weight moves on it. "They said that observation without proximity is a very efficient way to be wrong about someone. And that I’d been being wrong about several things for a while, in warm rooms, at a comfortable distance."

Silence.

"That’s not four pages," she said.

"No. That’s the last line. The other three and a half were about logistics."

"Logistics."

"Rotation capacity. Precedent for late admission. Historical exceptions." A pause. "Instructors don’t respond to feeling. They respond to precedent. I gave them precedent and then I put one true sentence at the end where they’d have to read it."

She lay looking at the underside of the tent.

"You should marry me," he said.

"Ask me when I’m not this cold."

"That’s the first refusal I’ve received with a condition attached."

"It wasn’t a condition."

"It was shaped like one."

From the other tent, after a long pause, Halvard’s voice came through the canvas.

"That was a yes-shaped no."

"THANK you," said Eren.

"GO TO SLEEP," said Seraphina.

Ost, muffled, plaintive, genuinely lost: "What’s happening over there."

Nobody answered him.

She lay awake a while.

Two things sat on her chest and would not move off it.

The first was Halvard shifting to the windward side on the fourth hour and staying there, and never once mentioning it, and how she’d noticed and would probably never say so.

The second was that in six days of hard walking, in cold that had taken Ost’s voice and her own hands and Halvard’s easy stride, Eren had not once been out of breath.

Not once.

Not impressively. Not heroically.

Just — the same. Exactly the same as he had been at fourth bell on the first morning.

She turned that over.

Then put it down, the way she’d been putting things down all year, on a stack that was getting taller than she liked to look at.

Outside, the wind kept on.

Conceptual, mostly.

She was still awake when the wind changed.

Not stronger. Direction. It had been coming off the flat from the north all day and then, sometime past the middle of the night, it swung and started coming down the ridge instead — which meant it came over the top of them, which meant the half-shelter Kell had called generous stopped being shelter at all.

The canvas started doing something unpleasant.

Then Kell’s voice, outside, entirely level: "Up. All of you. Now."

Nobody argued. Ost was out of his tent in under a minute with his boots half-laced. Halvard was already moving, hands working the lines in the dark, no light, no fumbling.

"What is it," Seraphina said.

"Wind’s on the ridge." Kell didn’t look at her. "We move to the low ground before it takes the tents. Everything on your back in four minutes. Leave nothing."

"Leave nothing where—"

"Four minutes."

She got her pack together in three. She was quietly proud of that and had nowhere to put the pride, so she folded it small and carried it.

Eren was beside her when she straightened up, pack already on, entirely composed.

"You were fast," she said.

"You were faster."

"I wasn’t."

"You were by nine seconds. I wasn’t going to mention it but you invited the correction."

"I didn’t invite—"

"You said I wasn’t. That’s an invitation."

They moved out into the dark, four students and one officer, walking down off a ridge in a wind that had changed its mind about where it wanted to be.

Halvard fell in beside her without a word.

Windward side.

Again.