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Anyone born to Faerghus can tell when the weather’s got them beat. They’re five miles out from camp when the placid, barely-sticking snowfall starts to multiply and visibility drops in a matter of minutes. Within an hour all useful landmarks will be snow-capped and indistinguishable, which would be enough trouble even if they could see further than 15 feet in front of them.
Sylvain clicks his tongue and calls it: they’ll have to wait it out. Mercedes spots the jagged scoop of a shallow cave mouth. Annette makes the best of an unfortunate turn and calls it cozy. Felix trudges in behind them, of no help at all, because he doesn’t want to be here and he certainly doesn’t want to stop.
“We should be able to leave come morning,” Sylvain says, standing just inside the entrance and assessing, his hands on his hips. “This is just pettiness. A little parting shot from winter.”
“A long goodbye,” Annette adds. “I’m surprised your metaphor leaned toward battle and not love.”
Sylvain turns, smiling. “I’m a man of many facets.”
Felix scoffs. Mercedes is spreading out her skirts, settling in. As if it’s someplace more comfortable than the loose dirt floor of a barely-there cave, crowded with too many bodies.
They have with them the makings of a bare camp. They hadn’t camped on the road—the journey wasn’t meant to be long—but they wouldn’t be themselves were they entirely caught out. Still, someone will have to find wood for the fire. Felix stands, careful of the low headroom and of the people around him.
He tracks the way everyone turns to him. As if standing were novel, a declaration.
“Wood,” he says. “For the fire.”
“Of course,” Mercedes says. “Would you like company?”
It is the last thing he wants and the thing he is faced with for the night.
“No,” he says, and manages, “thanks.”
+
His hunting knife bites wood with the same relative efficiency as it would bone. He hacks a dead branch to maneuverable pieces. The snow is falling dauntlessly and he can’t go far, only the nearest copse of trees. Even so, the air is thin and fresh and his blood warms with movement.
It is good: to chop wood, to set a task and complete it by his own power. The last night in an inn was a luxury; the village they’d scouted insisted on hospitality. It itched at him. Like he didn’t remember how to be civilized. He was sent along for protection, not diplomacy. Even a loyalist village might contain spies. They are not so far now from re-taking Fhirdiad. They cannot leave anything to chance.
The largest variable looms: their king is an unknown. Or he isn’t; or he is. His footing in the living world is unstable. Felix’s father, recently dead—Felix thinks these words exactly, cracks a branch over his knee as he does; he will not shy from it—bet on the man, or perhaps the king, and for him it was the same as betting on his country.
That’s the mouth they’re poised at. Unimaginable win or loss. Permanent consequences. It’s simpler to chop wood.
Past a certain point, talking about it isn’t useful. It’s all anyone’s wanted to do. To speak of their king and of Felix’s father. It’s been weeks, three quarters of a moon since he was interred. Felix has had to make himself scarce. He was run out of the training grounds by sympathy. His friends came bearing baked bread or a book to lend and always the offer of someone to listen.
His father’s last words seemed to tie a bow on it—he died as he lived. In service. What could Felix add to a dead man’s conclusions? If what Felix had to say would do any good, it would’ve done so while his father was still alive.
Felix sheathes his knife and gathers the wood. He walks his own line of footsteps, half filled-in with snow, back the way he came.
+
His companions are huddled shoulder-to-shoulder against the cold when Felix returns. They’ve pooled their travel rations into a sad feast laid out in front of them. Like every room Felix has walked into for the last three weeks, he feels himself alter it.
It’s the sort of delicacy and compassion and hope that they look at him with—there is something they want to give, and it is something he is too old or his heart is too malformed to receive.
He has to push awkwardly past them to the back of the cave. They shuffle to make room. He’s aware of them, with their cloaks spread out over each other like a blanket, while he stacks wood for the fire. They watch him and pretend not to. It has been this way the entire expedition.
With the wood arranged to satisfaction, Felix sets his hunting knife to flint and strikes against the scraps of tinder he carries on his person.
It is noisy, frustrating work—after his eighth or ninth useless spray of sparks, Sylvain leans over and asks, winking, “Need a light?”
“I have one,” Felix says, and Sylvain has a reply ready, but fire licks happily up the tinder suddenly and Annette leans away with a shrug.
“Sylvain was going to drag that out forever,” she says, ”and it’s cold.”
Sylvain whines and pouts, the liar, and saves Felix having to react at all. They shuffle into place around the fire. Felix eats hardtack and jerky from his pack while the others throw shadow puppets onto the walls, mostly unrecognizable. Annette’s shadows unfold as a story about a bird with a distinctive trill, no talent for flying and a lost family. Fucking hell, Felix thinks, and considers fathers, again, briefly.
Sylvain seems to pick up on the thread. He tips his head onto Mercie’s shoulder.
“You know what we ought to do,” he says.
“I have a feeling you’ll tell me,” she says sweetly.
“But for the sound of my voice, and not because you don’t already know.”
He smiles a specific half-truthful smile. Mercedes shakes her head in an oh-you gesture, rifles through her pack and produces a flask.
“Is this wise?” Felix’s voice is embarrassingly hoarse, for all he’s spoken the past hour.
“It’ll keep the chill out,” Sylvain says.
“It would pass the time,” Mercedes adds lightly, but not with particular investment.
“It would be fun,” Annette chirps.
“Fun,” Felix echoes, a bit of derision to it, nothing that would break Annette’s heart, nor deter any one of them.
Mercedes uncaps the flask and Sylvain smiles and Annette wiggles her shadow fingers against the wall. Felix has no good excuses, nowhere to go. He can’t decide whether the night would be worse sober. He searches out another shred of jerky to chew his displeasure into.
“Basilisk, then,” Mercedes says. It’s a conclusion to a discussion Felix wasn’t following, scrabbling at the bottom of his pack.
“Give us the lore, beforehand,” Annette says. “I want a story.”
Mercedes nods and takes a nip from the flask, passes it to Sylvain, Sylvain to Felix—his mouthful burns: it isn’t terrible, but it’s certainly not good—and Felix hands it off to Annette, who only barely pulls a face drinking it.
Mercedes smooths her skirts and tells the story of the basilisk. A mythic creature. Felix knows it vaguely from youth. A reptile, a legged serpent, not especially impressive, otherwise he figures it might’ve stuck in his memory more.
It’s venomous, Mercedes says. Killing plants and scorching the earth. You know its home by the death around its burrow. It’s told that a basilisk once killed a horse and its rider, even after it’d been speared—the poison crawled up the lance. The legends vary on whether its gaze kills or petrifies. But across all stories, they hunt alone: a solitary, miserable creature.
“If ever there was more than one to begin with,” Mercedes concludes.
Felix digs a fingernail into the cuticle of his thumb. He asks, “How do you kill it.”
Mercedes smiles. Her cheeks are rosy pink in the firelight. “With a mirror.”
He scoffs. He asked a dumb question and received an answer in kind. It doesn’t account for the feeling of a vice around his lungs, there and gone like a bad heartbeat.
“Alright, let’s play,” Sylvain says.
Felix hadn’t agreed to a game. He lets himself be taught anyway. He feels oddly lethargic, itching with the heat and proximity of the walls and the people, but in his limbs there’s an inexplicable heaviness.
“Heads down,” Mercedes says, “and when you look up, you find someone to look in the eye. If that someone’s looking at you, the first to say basilisk wins. Whoever doesn’t, drinks.”
“Pointless,” Felix mutters, not quiet enough: Annette gives him a sunny smile and he shifts and settles.
Then Mercedes is counting down. It catches him by surprise, somehow. He tips his chin to his chest, then a breath later he looks up and Mercedes is staring back at him from across the circle. His brain wipes clean. Her eyes are sparkling, but he’s struck by the thought that she looks older, more careworn than he remembers.
“Basilisk,” she says.
“Fuck,” he says.
She smiles and hands him the flask.
Nothing improves from there. The alcohol spreads down through him like heavy roots, in a way two sips shouldn’t be capable of. He looks next to Annette, determined to master himself. The motion seems fast and slow at once: too quick to be prepared and slow enough that he feels self-conscious, conscious in general: of her joy, and her determination to pull him into it.
He’s terrible at this in a way he should’ve foreseen. He loses this round then narrowly wins the next, also to Annette. He loses to Mercedes and her placid face, calm like a dark lake. Then his gaze lands on Sylvain and Felix is waylaid by unpiecing his expression, picking true from untrue, the way Sylvain had plastered lightness and peace over the fact that he’s inches and feet from dying, same as the rest of them.
“Basilisk, Felix,” Sylvain says, in a tone like he’s reminding Felix of the rules.
Felix stands up. The ceiling rushes to meet him, lower than he remembers.
“Felix,” Sylvain says again, and it plucks a sour note, the question in it, the subterranean concern. It’s the voice people have spoken to him with since his father died.
“It’s nothing,” Felix says, and that betrays him, he thinks, his face very warm. “Can’t I go piss without an interview first? Play your little game. I’m fine.”
Sylvain has his hands up, palms out, no offense meant. Felix scoffs. His tongue is thick in his mouth. He picks his way out of the cave, no one behind him saying anything, at least not aloud, at least not to his face.
He doesn’t need to piss. He needs air. The night folds over him. It’s a relief to be cold after the close walls and warm company of the cave. He walks until the light from it is small and then gone.
The moonlight on the carpet of snowfall is sharp and blank. Stopped among the trees, Felix thinks: fuck. He thinks it again. He crouches, suddenly, curling down and around against the feeling that demands the opposite. Outburst. Screaming. He’s not one for that. No animal, and these are not death throes. He jams his knuckles against his forehead, presses on his skull.
It’s dramatic. The alcohol having its moment, making him strange. He sees the whole thing as though from outside himself and feels stupid. This is the problem, in the first place: everyone treating their whims like they matter.
Drinking and laughing and telling stories—it distracts from the point. It won’t save anyone. Won’t change anything. It’s as productive as if they’d walked back to camp earlier in the day, groping blind in the snow.
He looks at the miserable, swimming stars, his breath misting in front of his face, and then turns to the woods. He could go back to the main camp, now. He could find the way, he’s sure of it. Or he could just. Go.
The thought crystallizes in him. He considers it. Not doing it, but already having done it. Not getting gone but being gone already. Being arrived, being elsewhere, where at least, in all his gross excess of futility, he wouldn’t have to watch his friends die.
He is supposed to be what keeps his friends from dying.
His stomach lurches and revolts. He vomits onto the snow. He wonders: what, ever, has he successfully kept?
He wipes his mouth and sits on his heels. The perfect stillness of the forest batters his ears. This, too, is pointless to consider. He tries to blink his vision clear and finds he can’t. Snow has started falling again, tiny fingertips of it, entirely silent.
He stays awhile. Thinking nothing, willing himself to think nothing, blank amid greater blankness. When he stands, there’s a moment where he’s still facing that same nothing. Not a path forward or back. Then he turns, and makes for the cave.
The fire is burning low. Sylvain’s awake with the girls seemingly asleep beside him, huddled together and breathing softly. Felix couldn’t say how long he’s been gone. His face burns with cold he’s only now feeling.
“Hey,” Sylvain says, lifting a corner of the blanket spread over the three of them. “Saved you a spot.”
Felix clicks his tongue. He shakes the snow off his coat. The whole scene swims nauseous in front of him a moment. He thinks of his father, unbidden. Of the future bearing down on them, violent with unknowns, promising hardship. He thinks that there’s nowhere, nowhere but here, for now.
He looks into Mercedes’ and Annette’s faces, no longer awake to reflect his looking back at him and confront him with their vulnerability. He looks at Sylvain, who’s waiting for an answer.
He has a choice. There’s meaning in that. And if he doesn’t believe this, he doesn’t believe anything at all.