“Anyone find anything?” Janis asked without preamble.
Khollo tossed the shield to Janis wordlessly. He caught it, barely, and turned it over. “Ah,” he muttered. “Good work, Khollo.”
“What is it?” Hern and Sermas asked in unison.
“A shield,” Janis said, passing it to them.
“With the symbol of the vertaga,” Khollo elaborated.
“Curious, isn’t it?” Sermas observed. “Those lines at the top . . . do those look like mountains to anybody else?”
Khollo craned his neck for a better look at the shield. “Maybe,” he conceded. “But then, what’s the rest of it mean?”
“A horizon,” Hern said, pointing to the thick horizontal line. “The lines below could be more mountains.”
“Or a valley,” Janis put in.
A thought struck Khollo. “Janis,” he said. “Could this be – ”
“A map?” he replied. “Certainly looks that way. Wherever this arrangement of mountains is found could be an important place for the vertaga.”
“But why advertise it?” Khollo wondered. “Seems like they’d want to keep their base secret.”
“We don’t know enough about the vertaga to interpret this design properly,” Janis decided. “For now, we will have to be satisfied with knowing that it is a design the vertaga use. We’ll keep it as evidence for the time being.”
“Not exactly conclusive, is it?” Hern observed.
Janis shook his head. “No, but I’d be genuinely surprised if anything less than a severed vertaga head convinced the king that we were telling the truth.” He looked around the village, towards a small grove of trees west of the ruins. “We’ll camp there,” he said, pointing. “I’m not sleeping in the middle of a graveyard tonight.”
Sermas and Hern looked vastly relieved at this announcement. Their cheerful mood persisted until they dismounted and Janis gave instructions for setting up camp.
“No fire,” he said curtly, before anybody even thought to gather wood. “And only cold rations.”
“We’ll freeze!” Hern protested.
“And we’ve been riding all day!” Sermas concurred.
Janis met their indignant looks steadily. “Aye, but we are in enemy territory. If you want to build a great blazing bonfire and roast a whole pig over it in the center of the village, I won’t stop you. But I would like to live through the night, so I will stay here with no fire, eat my cold rations, and get some sleep.”
Hern and Sermas closed their mouths quickly and began searching their packs for food. Khollo was just as unhappy with the situation, but he knew that Janis was right. A fire would be like a beacon to the monsters that had burned Holwey.
After a rather subdued evening meal, Khollo, Sermas, and Hern rolled themselves in their blankets while Janis took the first watch. Khollo tried to ignore the biting cold, the wind sweeping across the Basin and rattling the bare branches of the trees. But it was hopeless. No matter how tightly he wrapped his blankets around him, cold continued to seep into his bones. He was almost glad when Janis shook him for the second watch. Khollo had not slept at all.
Maybe moving will help, he thought hopefully, shivering as he strung his bow and settled against a tree. He watched jealously as Janis crawled into his bedroll and immediately fell asleep. Khollo sighed heavily, shifted to a slightly more comfortable position, and resigned himself to a miserable night.
Two hours later, stiff, cold, his brain muddled by fatigue, Khollo shook Sermas awake for the third watch. The younger boy was faring no better than Khollo, and it took a good deal of prodding before Sermas left the warmth of his bed. Khollo returned to his bedroll and promptly passed out from exhaustion.
The next morning, Khollo woke to wood smoke.
The young warrior sat bolt upright, panicked. Did the vertaga find us? he wondered blearily. Is another village burning? Then a more likely scenario came to mind. Did Sermas and Hern light a fire despite Janis’ warnings?
Khollo turned and caught sight of his three companions, huddled around a small, nearly smokeless fire. Janis was breaking up dead branches and adding them to the fire, building up the flames.
Khollo quickly untangled himself from his blankets and joined the others at the fire, extending his hands towards the blaze. “Do you think if I jumped in I’d be warmer?” he muttered to no one in particular.
“For a few minutes,” Hern replied, teeth chattering. “Then you’d never have to worry about being warm again.”
“Cadets used to be made of sterner stuff,” Janis growled. “It gets even colder farther south. And the north is always frozen.”
“Then I’m never going there,” Sermas said thickly, wiping at his nose and sneezing.
“What brought about the change in heart?” Khollo asked, nodding towards the fire.
Janis shrugged. “We can see for miles and there’s no vertaga. Might as well be warm and miserable rather than cold and miserable.”
“When you say warm – ”
“I mean slightly less cold,” Janis replied, giving Sermas a feral grin. “Sorry about that.”
“No, you’re not,” Sermas muttered.
“Coffee anyone?” Janis asked, rummaging in his pack. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t got any of the fancy teas that city goers and fragile cadets drink.”
“I’ll drink anything hot,” Hern replied.
“I would advise a little more caution,” Janis said, shaking his head. “But I’m not as susceptible to the cold apparently.”
After a light morning meal of toasted bread and bracing mugs of coffee, the four hunters mounted up again, ready for another long day of travel. Janis surveyed the campsite, then turned Gray Wind west, toward Reoth.
Over the course of the morning, Khollo began to realize just how new to riding he was. In the first hour, muscles sore from the previous day’s ride screamed in protest. After that, new aches and pains sprang up, especially in his legs and back. Janis, by comparison, appeared
