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“’tis a long road we have ahead of us,” Ren says. The first snowflakes of winter are falling on his head, leaving a light dusting of powder on the tips of his ears and the fur on his head. Winter’s never a good time for anyone. Their harvests are neatly tucked away, yes, but there’s always a sense of foreboding to it. The wind whistles sharply past his ears and it carries — memories, maybe. Promises that no one could hope to keep.
“As long a road as we can travel, I hope.” Martyn can’t quite keep the doubt from his voice — the sand people are never far from his mind, and their uneasy truce with the Crastle likely won’t withstand anything heavier than a light tap.
“Yes, my hand, as long as that and longer.” Ren’s making an admirable effort not to shiver under the weight of his heavy oiled cloak, although Martyn hardly feels the cold at all. “I dream of peace, and peace comes not easily.”
“Well.” Martyn shrugs. His headband is starting to freeze, stiff against his forehead. “I don’t think peace is coming at all.”
“What?”
Martyn tilts his head. The snow is falling on him, too, is the difficult part to remember. Achy numbness whispers through his spine, his ribs, wending its way towards his heart. “My lord, you’re on your last life. Bdubs, Scar, Jimmy — you can’t believe that there’ll be peace. Win or lose, this is forever.”
“When we win, there will be peace.” Ren’s voice is uncertain. “There’s honor in war, and there’s honor in what comes after.”
One of the parts of Martyn that he likes to keep tamped down is stirring, poking its head out into the cooling warmth of his chest. “Milord, there is no after. There won’t be.”
“My hand.” Behind the sunglasses, Ren’s eyebrows are slowly raising. “You should come inside, dude.”
“There won’t be an after,” Martyn says, uncomfortable conscious of how his voice is rising. “I won’t let there be! We’re not leaving. We’re — it’s red winter. We should be the ones coming to them.”
“Martyn,” Ren says, like he’s gentling a horse. “You don’t quite look yourself.”
“Milord, you need to listen to me!“ There’s a bright, crisp urgency to the world. “Everyone will be sheltering for the winter, they’ll never see us coming. We can — it was peace you wanted, right? This is your shot.”
Ren’s been drawing steadily nearer. His arm on Martyn’s feels like a shot gone off, like a branding stripe on his tricep. “I’m your king,” he says, as godawful-gentle as before. “Come with me.”
Slowly, Martyn goes. It should be easy. Always has been, in the past, to follow Ren and trust that his moral compass is better aligned than Martyn’s own. Now, though, he’s split down the middle with the desire to run, to make for outside Dogwarts’ thinly protective walls and feel the weight of the sky bear down on him.
Ren flings part of his cloak over Martyn’s shoulder and it burns worse than his hand had, somehow, burns like when Martyn’s hand had slipped while forging an iron sword and he’d seared the tender flesh of his forearm with red-hot metal. He can’t bear it any longer. “Ren, I have to go.”
“Why, dude?” Ren says. They’re a stone’s throw from the descent to their underground storage. Every step closer is like sinking into mud. The heat of it will kill him, he’s sure.
“It’s winter.” Martyn shrugs off Ren’s arm, Ren’s cloak, steps away and thanks the moon that he can breathe again. “Don’t you feel it?”
Ren draws very still. “Feel what?”
“No one’s themself during winter.” The air is refreshing on Martyn’s face, with pleasant spots of chill where snowflakes melt on his arms. “Now’s the time. No peace is coming. We must strike.”
“I can hope for peace,” Ren says, “and I can do it whether it’s winter or not.” He takes a step towards Martyn. “I don’t know who you are if you aren’t Martyn, but I know I am your king.”
Ren’s not taller than Martyn, but he has presence to him, force to back up his words even without the rest of his army. His smile is icy, familiar, the scar across his throat just visible over the edge of his cloak.
“I’ll go with you,” Martyn chokes out.
“You don’t have a choice.” Ren takes him by the arm again, and Martyn lets out a little involuntary gasp. “I’m getting my hand back, laddie.”
Part of Martyn wants to scream that he’s Ren’s hand, that nothing has changed, couldn’t Ren see he was always like this, didn’t he expect this. The other part is backfilling the space available in his lungs, his torso, is trying to figure out a way to get Ren’s claws off of him without losing a chunk of arm in the process. Everything feels too claustrophobic, too sauna-hot.
Ren has to force him underground. He keeps turning his head away as though that’ll stop the sweat from oozing out of his pores, as though it’ll stop feeling like plunging headlong into a fever.
And then it eases. Martyn breathes in and his lungs remain unblemished. There’s a pile of wool blankets under him, soft and almost scratchy. His hands turn from a bluish-pale shade back to pink. Slowly, the crisp edges of the world dissipate until each grain of stone looks mostly like the next, and Martyn blinks half a dozen times before he remembers that this is how stone is supposed to look, that it’s not supposed to sting just to look at something other than a vast expanse of snow. The furnaces crackle just behind him.
“…oh,” Martyn says, at last.
Ren’s ear’s perk up, but he doesn’t say anything.
“I think I forgot that that happens. New world, new winter.” Martyn swallows. “The cold does something to me.”
“My hand,” Ren says, voice soft with worry. “Martyn. Mine own hand.”
“Your hand,” Martyn says. “I didn’t mean to — change, Ren. He’s me, but he’s not all of me. I believe in you. In… us.”
“Winter’s not everything.” Ren turns. The smile on his face a flashbolt down Martyn’s spine, a hasty reminder of all the things he’d forgotten how to feel.
“C’mere.” Martyn tilts his head back in a half-beckoning, half-strategic gesture. Sure enough, Ren comes over, but just to wrap his arms around Martyn as he drags them both into lying down.
“I’ll keep you warm through the winter,” Ren mumbles in the curve where Martyn’s shoulder meets his neck. He’s in soft underclothes, not his heavy outerwear. Martyn must have been not quite present for longer than he’d thought. “I don’t care if it means losing an advantage.”
Martyn makes a sound low in his throat.
“No, come on,” Ren says. He noses deeper into Martyn’s neck. “This here is all the peace I could want, dude.”