It was going to snow.
She could feel it in the air, and in the earth. The world had a particular temperament when snow was imminent, and it was unmistakable. The sky was flat and white; a stretched-out blanket without discernible shapes of clouds. Stillness descended, and pressed upon her ears. No wind stirred. Even the wintering birds in their nests were hushed. Everything waited.
The quiet of her surroundings made the soft sounds of her own existence all the more stark against her eardrums. A shifting of a boot against frost-crusted leaf litter. An exhaled breath that rose in a smoky plume.
The Blackwolds in the camp would not hear her, but the sensation that she was making a cacophony of noise was still unsettling.
She had found a convenient perch upon a bluff overlooking the hollow where they had settled. The grassy ledges that rose on either side protected them from the harshest of the wind and rain. It also made it easy for her to remain unseen, and to have a useful view of the whole spread at once. Her bedroll and pack had been tucked well out of sight in an abandoned fox den a mile away. She stole silently through the pre-dawn mists that left her hair and eyelashes rimmed with ice crystals, and took up her watch before the sun rose.
Below, in the camp, a child cried out. The sound was grating and petulant. Another voice answered; a woman. Equally shrill and unpleasant.
There. Men were emerging from tents, and the few, hastily hammered-together shacks they managed to build from purloined scraps of lumber. Their figures were dim and dark in the weak light of a winter's morning. Together they huddled and spoke in tones too low for her to catch. One of them pointed northward. The others nodded, shrugging their shoulders and hugging themselves against the cold.
Narys turned to glance in the direction the man had pointed. There was nothing to immediately see. Andrath was blessedly removed from Bree-town by several miles of forested hills. But there were scattered farms beyond the southern rim of the hedge-wall, sitting between the Blackwold camp and the safety of the village proper. She had seen the brigands squabbling over scraps of stale bread and pots of watery stew for the past week. They were too many, and food was too little. The summer's terrible drought had come down the hardest on those who could not - or would not - seek an honest day's work.
Chewing on her bottom lip, she crept backwards from her perch, moving on hands and knees, until the camp was obscured from view. A day of scouting cold, snow-laden fields was not appealing, but she could no more refuse this unasked-duty than she could refuse her next breath. If she could thwart an invasion upon unsuspecting, good folk, then she must.
Rising to her feet, she adjusted her bow over her shoulder and broke into a slow, lazy jog northward. Something invisible, miniscule, and very cold struck against her cheek. She grunted irritably, shook her head, and passed on under the naked boughs of the trees.
