"Yes."
He changed course immediately.
Trust, in places like this, was less a feeling than a repeated absence of argument.
They moved deeper. The wolves kept appearing and vanishing in glimpses that never felt accidental. Fresh prints would appear in front of them where no wolf had been seen crossing. Once, a pale body stood for one breath on a black stone outcrop above them, then was gone when Mikhailis looked again through the glasses. Another time he caught the motion of a tail disappearing behind a drift before he heard so much as a paw on snow. The forest felt both safer and more oppressive than the desert had. Safer because there was structure here. More oppressive because the structure belonged to something watching.
Rhaen stepped over a low fallen trunk and said, "They're either escorting us or deciding where they'll be easier to kill."
Mikhailis adjusted the pack on his shoulder. "Those are uncomfortably adjacent possibilities."
"That did not help."
