They found shelter in the lee of a granite outcropping, a jagged wall of stone that broke the wind. The place felt ancient, the rock worn smooth by centuries of rain and ice. Sineus worked by the light of a new fire, its flames small and hungry in the deep twilight. His first task was Alani. The guide sat with her back against the stone, her face pale, her jaw set against the pain. Her left arm was a ruin of torn leather and dark, sluggishly bleeding cloth.
He knelt beside her, pulling the waterskin from his pack. He poured a small amount of the precious liquid onto a strip of clean linen he had torn from his own undershirt. The fabric was plain, the work of a Belogorod weaver, but it was clean. That was all that mattered. Fedor stood guard at the edge of the firelight, a broad-shouldered silhouette against the encroaching dark. His axe was clean, but his distrust of the woods was a palpable thing.
“This will be cold,” Sineus said, his voice low.
Alani gave a short, sharp nod. She did not look away as he began to clean the wound.
The gash was deep. Three parallel furrows raked across her forearm, laid open to the muscle. The Blight-stitched wolf had not been a creature of normal flesh, but its claws had been real enough. He worked with a slow, steady hand, wiping away the blood and grime. The smell of iron and damp earth filled the small space between them. He saw the faint tremor in her hand, the tightness around her eyes.
She did not make a sound.
He finished cleaning the wound, the linen now stained a dark crimson. The bleeding had slowed. He applied a poultice of crushed moss he had gathered earlier, a trick learned from a border scout long ago, then bound the arm tightly with another, wider strip of cloth. He tied the knot with practiced efficiency. It was a simple, secure knot. The kind that holds.
For a long moment, the only sounds were the crackle of the fire and the whisper of the wind through the high pines. Fedor had moved to the far side of the fire. He pulled a whetstone from his belt pouch and began to sharpen his axe. The rhythmic scrape of stone on steel was a harsh, grating counterpoint to the quiet of the woods. Scrape. Scrape. A sound that promised violence.
Alani watched the flames, her dark eyes reflecting the flickering light. The pain had not left her face, but something else was there now. A deep, weary knowledge.
“The Blight is not an army,” she said, her voice barely louder than the fire.
Sineus paused, his hands still resting near her bandaged arm. He looked at her, waiting.
“It is a wound.”
The words settled in the cold air. A wound. He thought of the high-pitched rasp he heard in his mind whenever a memory was cut, the sound of tearing reality. He thought of the creature dissolving into foul mist, its mismatched parts returning to the nothing that had birthed them. It was not a force that conquered. It was a force that unmade. A wound fit.
“A spirit in pain,” Alani continued, her gaze still lost in the fire. “Crying out with all the memories the world has thrown away.”
Sineus felt a familiar ache sharpen behind his eyes. He saw the fire not just as flame, but as a shimmering overlay of all the fires that had burned in this spot before. He saw the ghost of the pine log as a living tree, its memory clinging to the burning wood. He heard the whispers of the Blight, the chorus of forgotten things. She was giving a name to the noise that lived always at the edge of his hearing.
It was the sound of pain.
Across the fire, the scraping of steel on stone did not stop. Fedor worked with a grim focus, his head bowed over his work. He did not look at Alani. He did not acknowledge her words. He was a man of the physical world, a world of clear threats and tangible answers. Her talk of spirits and pain was the talk of the Forest Folk, strange and unreliable. Superstition.
The edge of his axe caught the firelight, a thin, hungry line of white.
“Pain I understand,” Fedor grunted, his voice a low rumble that seemed to come from his chest. The scraping continued, a steady, grinding rhythm. “And I know how to answer it.”
He tested the blade with his thumb, a small, precise movement. Satisfied, he slid the whetstone back into its pouch. His answer was sharp. His answer was final. He looked up, his gaze meeting Sineus’s over the flames. His expression was clear. This was weakness. This talk would get them killed.
Sineus finished tying the knot on Alani’s bandage. The task was done. Her arm was protected, the bleeding stopped. But the space between his two companions had become a chasm.
He looked from Fedor, solid and unyielding as the granite at his back, to Alani, wounded but seeing a truth deeper than the physical world. The warrior and the mystic. The hand that strikes and the heart that feels the wound. He was the Knyaz. He was their leader. And he was standing between two opposing worlds.
He needed the axe. He knew its worth on a field of battle, its simple, brutal honesty. He had seen Fedor hold a broken gate against a dozen raiders in the northern wars. That strength was real. It was necessary.
But he had also seen the Blight consume a watchtower, not by breaking its stones, but by unmaking the memory of its form until it was just a pile of dust. An axe could not fight that. A shield could not block it. Fedor’s certainty was a shield, but it was a shield with a hole in the center, a hole shaped exactly like the truth.
Alani’s truth. She saw the world as a living thing, its memory a part of its flesh. The Blight was not an invader, but a sickness. A cancer born of their own actions. To her, Fedor’s axe was not a solution; it was just another cut, another wound inflicted on a world already bleeding.
The fire popped, sending a brief shower of sparks into the darkness. High above, the stars were cold and clear.
He needed to forge one path from two opposing truths.
