She had been told to stay behind the fallen oak.

  Specific instruction, specific tone, no ambiguity. *Behind the oak. You don't move. You don't engage. You stay exactly where I put you.* She had said yes and she had meant it and she was crouched behind the fallen oak with her hand braced against its bark watching the fight happen thirty meters ahead and she was — mostly — staying exactly where she had been put.

  The fight was nothing like she had imagined from the outside.

  Louder. Faster. More chaotic and simultaneously more precise — she could pick out the individual rhythms of each of them, the way Davan moved heavy and grounded and completely sustainable, the way Riven was economy in its purest form, the way Sorin covered distance in increments that shouldn't have been possible. And Kaelan — she could see the black swords from here even through the trees, the darkness of them completely wrong against the snow, absorbing light rather than catching it, moving like extensions of something that had always existed and the fight was simply revealing.

  She watched.

  She stayed behind the oak.

  She breathed.

  ---

  She saw them by accident.

  Movement in her peripheral vision — east, toward a dense section of trees where the terrain dipped into a shallow depression she couldn't see the bottom of. Two figures. Moving with the unhurried purposefulness of things that had somewhere to be and no reason to rush getting there.

  Upper rank.

  She knew without being able to explain the knowing. Something in her body translated it before her mind caught up — the same translation that had happened in the forest, that night, that had said *run* before she understood why.

  They were moving toward the depression.

  She looked at the depression.

  Three hunters on the ground. Team seven — the ones they had found an hour into the Veldmoor treeline, alive but incapacitated, injuries Davan had stabilized as best he could in the field. They were supposed to be safe there. Out of the main engagement. Covered.

  The two Upper ranks were going toward them with the patient directional movement of things that had identified something and were not in any hurry because the something was not going anywhere.

  She looked at the main fight.

  At Kaelan — back to her, both swords moving, fully occupied.

  At Davan — too close to his own engagement to redirect.

  At Riven and Sorin — east, deep, unreachable in time.

  She looked at the knife at her belt.

  She looked at three people who could not help themselves.

  She moved.

  ---

  She went wide through the trees, circling east, moving as quietly as the snow allowed. The two demons were focused on the depression — on the three hunters below — and not on the girl coming through the trees at their backs.

  She got close enough.

  She gripped the knife.

  She drove it in.

  ---

  The demon stopped moving.

  Then it turned around.

  Up close, in full daylight, an Upper rank was something no secondhand knowledge prepared you for. The face was almost human — that was the worst part, the *almost,* the way it sat just on the wrong side of recognition. It looked at her with eyes that were the right shape and entirely the wrong everything else and it reached back and removed the knife from its own back with the casual ease of someone removing a splinter.

  She watched the wound close.

  Instantly. Completely. Like it had never been.

  The demon looked at the knife in its hand.

  It looked at her.

  It smiled.

  *A little knife,* it said. The voice was wrong-smooth, too even, practiced at sounding human the way something learned rather than lived. *You think a little knife can stop me?*

  It laughed.

  She ran.

  She made it four steps before the world went sideways — not a blow exactly, more like the air itself decided to have an opinion about her trajectory — and she went down, hard and sudden, driven straight into the snow not forward but *down,* pressed into it with a force that had no visible source, the snow receiving her and then closing around her in a way that snow was not supposed to close around a person.

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  She stopped.

  She was — stuck.

  From mid-chest down she was packed into the snow, dense and total and completely immovable, her legs somewhere below in the white with no feeling of ground beneath them. Her arms were free — she discovered this when she instinctively threw them out — and her face was above the surface and she could breathe and she could see and from mid-chest upward she was entirely, humiliatingly present in the winter air.

  She tried to pull herself out.

  The snow held her with the patient certainty of something that had decided.

  She tried again — pushing down with both palms flat on the surface, attempting to lever herself upward — and gained nothing. Her hands sank slightly. She pulled them back.

  The demon was still there.

  It was looking at her with the specific attention of something that had found the situation amusing in a way that had a dark edge to it, the amusement of a thing that was deciding what to do with something that couldn't go anywhere.

  She looked at her hands on the snow.

  She looked at the space above her where the sky was grey and flat and indifferent.

  She was stuck.

  She was genuinely, completely stuck.

  She closed her eyes.

  ---

  The sound that arrived was not the sound she was waiting for.

  Fast. Absolute. A presence she felt before she registered it — warmth against the cold air, something covering the space between her and the demon with a speed that had no business existing.

  She opened her eyes.

  Boots in the snow directly in front of her face.

  His back. The width of it, the black swords drawn at his sides, the set of his shoulders that she knew — she knew the exact shape of him and she had never been so grateful to know anything.

  He stood between her and the demon and he was completely still.

  The demon looked at the black swords.

  Something shifted in its expression — not fear, but the specific recalibration of a thing that had been certain of the situation a moment ago and was now certain of something different.

  Its eyes stayed on the swords.

  *Hunter,* it said.

  Kaelan said nothing.

  The black swords moved.

  ---

  She did not watch the fight.

  She watched the snow directly in front of her and she breathed and she tried twice more to pull herself free and failed both times and she stayed where she was and she listened to the sounds behind her — fast, brutal, nothing she had language for — and then the sounds stopped.

  She looked up.

  The second demon was gone too. She hadn't seen when.

  Kaelan was standing ten meters away with both swords drawn and his back still to her and the clearing around them was empty and very quiet.

  She looked at the depression — Riven was already there, crouching beside the three hunters, his assessment running. Safe. They were safe.

  She looked back at Kaelan.

  He turned around.

  He looked at her.

  She looked at him.

  She became extremely aware of the fact that she was buried from the chest down in snow, completely immobile, with both hands flat on the surface and her hair everywhere and her face flushed with cold and exertion and she had absolutely nothing dignified left available to her.

  He looked at her for a moment.

  Then he crossed to her and he crouched down — slowly, with the unhurried deliberateness of a man with nowhere to be — and he was at her eye level and he looked at her with an expression she had never seen on him before, which was an expression of absolutely nothing, completely neutral, looking at her situation with the calm focused attention he gave everything.

  He said, very quietly and very seriously:

  "Do you need assistance."

  She stared at him.

  "I —" She stopped. "Yes," she said. "Clearly. Obviously yes."

  He looked at her.

  He looked at the snow around her.

  He looked back at her face.

  He did not move.

  "Kaelan," she said.

  "Mm."

  "I am stuck in the snow."

  "Yes," he said. "I can see that."

  She looked at him with an expression that said everything she was not going to say out loud and he looked back at her and the corner of his mouth did something so small and so brief that she almost missed it — almost — and then he reached for her.

  One arm came around her — beneath her arms, across her back, solid and certain — and he stood up.

  She came out of the snow.

  All at once, smoothly, like the snow simply released her, and she was upright and his arm was around her and her feet found the ground but she hadn't entirely found her balance yet and for a moment — one moment, brief and complete — she was against his chest with his arm across her back and his face directly above hers and she could feel the warmth of him through his cloak and the cold of everything else was very far away.

  She found her footing.

  She stepped back.

  He let his arm drop.

  They stood in the snow a foot apart and she looked at his collarbone because looking at his face right now was not something she was capable of and she breathed very carefully and said nothing.

  He said nothing either.

  Around them the Veldmoor trees were very still and the sky was grey and flat and the snow was undisturbed except for the shape she'd left in it which she was not going to look at.

  "The hunters in the depression," she said, to his collarbone. "Are they —"

  "Riven has them," he said.

  "Okay." She nodded. Kept nodding for slightly longer than necessary. "Good. That's — good."

  He was looking at her.

  She could feel him looking at her the way you could feel weather — not seeing it exactly, just aware of it, aware of the specific quality of the attention and what it was doing to the air between them.

  "The knife didn't work," she said. Still to his collarbone.

  "No," he said. "It wouldn't."

  "I thought it probably wouldn't. I went anyway."

  "Yes," he said. "You did."

  She looked up then. She couldn't help it. His face was doing the thing again — the thing she kept seeing and kept not being ready to look at directly — that quality underneath the steadiness, present and unmanaged, the softer thing that was only ever there when it was just the two of them and even then only for moments he didn't seem aware of showing.

  She looked at it for one second.

  Then she looked at the trees.

  "Don't do that again," he said.

  "I know."

  "Elia."

  "I know," she said. "I know, I just — I couldn't leave them there. I couldn't stand behind the oak and watch and not —"

  "I know," he said.

  She looked at him.

  "I know you couldn't," he said. Quiet. Completely even. "That doesn't mean —"

  "I know," she said.

  A pause.

  "You went toward two Upper ranks," he said, "with a knife."

  "It was a good knife."

  He looked at her.

  She looked at the trees.

  The silence that followed had a different texture from his usual silences — slightly warmer, slightly less composed, the kind of silence she was starting to understand meant something was in him that he was deciding what to do with.

  He decided, apparently, to leave it where it was.

  "Can you walk," he said.

  "Yes."

  "Stay next to me. Not behind me. Next to me."

  She looked at him. *Next to me* was different from the instruction he'd given before and they both knew it and neither of them said anything about it.

  "Okay," she said.

  He started walking.

  She walked next to him through the Veldmoor trees with the snow cold around her boots and the grey sky overhead and his arm a foot from hers and the shape she'd left in the snow getting further behind them with every step.

  She thought about *do you need assistance* delivered in complete seriousness while she was buried to her chest.

  She thought about the almost that had been in the corner of his mouth.

  She pressed her lips together very hard against something and looked at the path ahead and kept walking.

  Next to him.

  ---

  *End of Chapter 16.* ??