Chapter 25: Letters
The silence after Caius left wasn’t quiet. It was the loud, bustling silence of Nordane—full of hammer strikes, barking dogs, and the weary groan of ancient timber. It settled around Astrid like a familiar, heavy cloak. For the first week, she did nothing but sleep and eat, her body claiming the rest it had been denied in the tense atmosphere of Eldoria. The child within her seemed to sleep too, its movements gentle and sparse.
Her mother gave her space. Jora didn’t coddle, but she presided. A bowl of rich stew would appear. A fur wrap would be tossed over her shoulders as she sat by the fire. It was care without conversation, which was the only kind Astrid could bear.
After the fog of exhaustion lifted, the restlessness returned. She tried to train, but her balance was off, her center of gravity a shifting mystery. She drew her sword one bright, bitter morning in the training yard, the hilt fitting perfectly in her palm. She took one practice swing and a sharp, ligament-twinging protest shot up her side. She lowered the blade, humiliation hot in her throat.
“Your body is learning a new weapon,” Jora said from the porch, not looking up from mending a bridle. “It’s smarter than you are. Listen to it.”
So Astrid walked. She walked the high, wind-scoured ridges behind the hall until her legs burned and her lungs ached with the clean, knife-edged air. She visited the forge, the smoky heat a comfort, and listened to the blacksmith’s tales. She sat with the weavers, their fingers flying, and tried to make sense of her own tangled thoughts.
And she thought of Caius. Not the charming prince, but the raw, hurt man who had turned his horse back into the mist. The memory of his defeated expression was a persistent bruise. She had asked for space, and her mother had violently enforced it. She hadn't given him a choice. The fairness of it gnawed at her.
One evening, as a blizzard howled outside, sealing them in a world of firelight and shadow, she took out a piece of coarse northern paper and a charcoal stick.
Caius,
It’s snowing. The hall sounds like it’s being torn apart by giants. My mother is snoring by the fire. It’s louder than the storm.
I should start by saying I’m sorry. Not for coming here, but for how it happened. My mother’s diplomacy is a hammer. She meant to protect me, but she swung it at you. That wasn’t my intent.
It’s different here. I can feel the baby move more now. It’s strange. Like a fish turning in deep water. I tried to spar yesterday and nearly pulled myself in half. So now I just walk. I walk so much I think I’ve worn a path to the sky.
How are the timber routes?
Astrid
She sent it with the next supply runner braving the pass. She didn’t expect a reply for weeks, if at all. The waiting felt like another form of training.
His response came sooner than she thought, carried by a half-frozen rider on a Eldorian gelding too fine for the mountains.
Astrid,
Thank you for the hammer metaphor. I’ve been picturing it perfectly. It helps.
The timber routes are, against all odds, fascinating. The engineering reports are somehow more compelling than Lord Gervaise’s ballads about his prize sheep. I’ve attached the preliminary survey maps. I thought you might like to see where your trees are going. (See, I’m learning: they’re not just ‘timber,’ they’re ‘your trees.’)
Your description of the fish is better than any midwife’s account I’ve forced myself to read. Please keep telling me those things. The mundane ones. The strange ones.
It’s raining here. A dreary, perpetual drizzle that turns the courtyards to mud. The court buzzes about your ‘extended retreat.’ I tell them you’re auditing northern defensive positions. Lady Helene sniffed that it’s ‘unusually hands-on.’ I agreed.
I miss you.
Caius
P.S. Don’t pull yourself in half. One of you is quite enough.
She read it in the stable loft, hidden in the scent of hay and horse. She traced the lines of his handwriting, the elegant script at odds with the casual, aching words. He’d drawn a little, ludicrously detailed sheep in the margin. She laughed, a sudden, surprised sound that echoed in the quiet space. Then she cried, just a little, for the sheer relief of being spoken to, not handled.
The letters became a thread through the deepening winter.
She wrote about vomiting behind the woodpile at dawn. About craving pickled eggs with honey. About her mother teaching her to knit tiny, lopsided socks.
He wrote about defeating a contentious trade baron with a well-timed joke. About having a dreadful portrait of his great-uncle taken down. About reading a history of Nordane and finally understanding her reference to the ‘Frost-Kings’ she’d mentioned once.
His letters were windows into a world she’d fled. They weren’t pleading. They weren’t pressuring. They were just… there. A steady, patient presence. He was giving her the space she’d asked for, but he was steadfastly occupying a corner of it.
One day, near the solstice, she felt a kick so strong it made her gasp. She was in the weaving shed. Without thinking, she flattened her hand against the taut curve of her belly. “Alright,” she muttered. “I felt that.”
Later, she wrote to him.
Caius,
It has a heel. Or an elbow. Something hard and definite. It shoved me right under the ribs today. It’s getting strong. Real.
My mother says I’m carrying high. She says that means something, but she won’t say what. Superstition.
I dreamed of the black stone in the pass last night. The fog was alive in the dream. It’s just a dream.
Are you eating? Or just reading reports?
Astrid
His reply was swift.
Astrid,
A heel. That’s something. A part of a person. Does it feel like an invasion or a collaboration? (A genuine question, not poetry.)
I am eating. Cook is horrified by my sudden interest in northern stews. They’re all turnips and wrath. I like them.
The stone. I dream of it too. The fog there didn’t feel like weather. It felt like waiting. Don’t dismiss it. Your senses are sharper than most.
I’ve had the map room cleared. I’m having a larger table built. For planning.
Caius
The letters were a conversation in slow motion, a dance of steps and pauses. They were rebuilding a bridge, plank by plank, over the chasm they’d fallen into.
Then, the rhythm broke.
A moon cycle passed with no letter. The winter clamped down, brutal and silent. Astrid’s walks became shorter, her body a cumbersome vessel nearing capacity. The worry was a cold knot in her gut, unrelated to the child. Something was wrong. She knew it.
When the rider finally came, it wasn’t the usual post-boy. It was one of Caius’s personal guards, his face grim, his Eldorian cloak grimed with mud and something darker. He didn’t have a letter. He had a sealed scroll case and a verbal message.
“My prince bids me say he is detained by urgent matters. He sends this, and his deepest… concern.”
Astrid took the case, her heart thudding. She broke the seal in the privacy of her room.
The parchment was a map. Not of timber routes, but of the Blackwood Pass and the territories just south of it, on the Eldorian side. Several locations were marked with a small, careful ‘X’. In the margin, in his handwriting, was a note:
Sightings. Not weather. Not wolves. The descriptions match. It’s moving south. It’s testing the border. I am going to see for myself. Do not fear. But be ready.
C.
The Gloom. It was back. And Caius, the man with the reports and the jokes, was riding toward it.
The baby chose that moment to turn, a slow, monumental revolution inside her. A wave of physical pressure stole her breath. She braced her hands on the table, head bowed, as the sensation passed.
When she looked up, her eyes were clear. The fear was still there, cold and metallic. But under it was a fury, hot and clean.
He was going to face the thing from the pass. Alone. With his diplomacy and his maps.
“No,” she said aloud, the word a vow in the empty room.
She walked to the door, her body heavy but her purpose sudden and lightning-sharp. She threw it open and bellowed into the hall’s clamor, her voice cutting through the din like a blade.
“Mother! Ready the horses. And fetch the midwife. She’s coming with us.”
Jora looked up from the fire, her eyes narrowing. She saw the map in Astrid’s hand, the set of her jaw. She didn’t ask why. She just stood, unfolding her height.
“The pass is blocked with three feet of snow,” Jora stated.
“Then we go through the High Cleft,” Astrid said. “It’s longer. But we can make it.”
“You can’t ride that. Not in your condition.”
“Watch me,” Astrid said, and her green eyes held the firelight and the storm. “He doesn’t get to face our monster alone. Not anymore.”
The momentum was no longer in the letters, the waiting, the quiet hope. It was in the wind screaming at the shutters, in the fierce, answering beat of her own blood. It was in the road she would now take, leading not just to him, but into the gathering dark itself.
Jora didn’t argue. She just stared, her face a mask of hardened leather. The fire popped. “The High Cleft is a goat track in summer. Now it’s a slate roof coated in ice. You’ll slide off the edge.”
“Then we tie ropes.” Astrid’s voice was flat. “We go slow.”
“Your lungs are squeezed up under your ribs. The air gets thin up there. You could black out.” Jora took a step closer, her voice dropping to a growl only Astrid could hear. “You could bleed. You could birth a child on a frozen cliff with only ravens to hear you. Is that the story you want?”
The images were vivid, brutal. Astrid flinched. But beneath the fear, the map in her hand felt like a live coal. “The story I don’t want is him dead in the pass because I was sitting by a fire knitting socks. He has clerks and councilmen, Mother. Not warriors. He’s going to walk into the dark with a damned trade agreement.”
“His choice.”
“Our problem!” The shout surprised them both. Astrid’s hand went to her side, pressing against a sudden, tight ache. She took a slower breath. “That thing… it saw us both. It’s our debt. I won’t let him pay it alone because I’m fat and scared.”
Jora’s eyes flickered. She heard the truth in it. She let out a long, steam-venting sigh through her nose. “Fine. You’re a fool. But you’re my fool. We take the sled. The big one, with the deerhound team. You ride, wrapped in furs. The midwife, Birna, rides with you.” She pointed a thick finger. “You listen to her. If she says stop, we stop. If she says turn back, we turn back. That is the law of this journey.”
It wasn’t a question. Astrid nodded, the concession bitter but necessary. “Agreed.”
The hall exploded into motion. The order rippled out—gear, dogs, provisions. Astrid moved toward the stairs to gather her own things, but a firm hand on her shoulder stopped her.
“You,” Jora said, steering her toward a chair by the hearth. “Sit. You are cargo now. Important, infuriating cargo. Let others do the running.”
Birna arrived, a woman with a face like a kind walnut and hands that looked capable of gently pulling the moon from the sky. She didn’t speak, just placed her palm on Astrid’s belly, waiting. She felt the tightening Astrid had dismissed.
“A warning nip,” Birna said, her voice soft. “Your body is saying ‘be still.’ We are about to scream at it. This is unwise.”
“Noted,” Astrid said, meeting her gaze. “Will you come?”
Birna sighed, a sound of deep professional resignation. “Someone must. To pick up the pieces.”
Within the hour, they stood in the razor wind outside the hall. The sled was loaded, a basket of lashed leather and wood on long, curved runners. The deerhounds, six massive shaggy beasts, paced and whined in their traces, their breath pluming. Astrid let Birna and Jora bundle her into the sled’s nest of furs, feeling a profound humiliation that was quickly swallowed by a sharper worry.
She hadn’t felt the baby move since the rider came.
As if sensing her panic, a slow, rolling shift occurred deep inside. Not a kick. A full, languid turn. She exhaled, a cloud of vapor torn away by the gale. “Alright,” she whispered to herself. “Stay with me.”
Jora took the driver’s position at the back. Birna climbed in beside Astrid, tucking more skins around them. “Don’t try to be brave,” the midwife said. “If it hurts, say so. If you feel a leak, say so. Pride freezes faster than blood.”
Then they were moving, the dogs surging forward with a collective grunt. The hall vanished behind a curtain of swirling snow. The world narrowed to the backs of the dogs, the dark slash of the trail, and the towering, spectral shapes of the pines.
The ascent to the High Cleft was a lesson in agony. Every bump jolted through Astrid’s spine. The cold was a tangible enemy, slipping past the furs, needling her face. She focused on Caius’s map in her mind, on the ‘X’ marks drifting south. He would be methodical. He would approach it like a puzzle. The Gloom was not a puzzle.
“He’s clever,” she said, her teeth chattering. The words were torn by the wind, meant for Birna or maybe just the air.
“Clever men die on mountains too,” Birna replied, her eyes scanning Astrid’s face. “Breathe. Deep and slow. The baby needs the air you’re hoarding.”
They climbed for hours. The light faded into a grim, gray twilight. The trees grew stunted, then disappeared entirely, leaving them exposed on a spine of rock. The path was a treacherous glaze of wind-scoured ice, just wide enough for the sled. On their left, the mountain rose sheer. On their right, the world fell away into nothing.
Jora guided the team with low, steady commands, her body leaning into the turns. The runners hissed and screeched.
A particularly sharp turn came. The sled lurched. One runner lifted off the stone with a heart-stopping scrape. Astrid’s stomach dropped. She gripped the sled’s edge, her knuckles white.
Jora threw her weight, shouting a raw command. The dogs leaned hard. The runner slammed back down.
No one spoke. The only sounds were the wind’s scream and Astrid’s ragged breathing. Birna’s hand was on her wrist, checking her pulse.
They reached the apex as true dark fell. Jora called a halt. The dogs collapsed into the snow, panting clouds. Below, on the other side of the mountain, a shallow valley unfolded. And in the distance, pinpricks of light shimmered.
Torches.
A camp. Too small for a village. Too orderly for hunters.
“Eldorian banners,” Jora muttered, her eyes sharper than any scout’s. “At the mouth of the Blackwood.”
Caius was already there. He hadn’t waited.
Astrid struggled to sit up higher, the furs falling away from her face. The cold bit instantly. From this vantage, the Blackwood Pass was a charcoal smear against the lighter snow, a wound in the world. The campfires were a defiant, fragile gold at its lip.
A dark, viscous wave of memory washed over her—the cold that wasn’t cold, the whispers that peeled thought from bone. It was down there. And so was he.
“We go down,” Astrid said. Her voice was calm now, stripped bare by the altitude and the sight before her. “We go down now.”
Jora looked from the distant camp to her daughter’s illuminated face, fierce and pale in the gloom. She didn’t see a pregnant woman. She saw a strategist pinpointing a threat.
“The descent is worse,” Jora warned, but she was already moving to the dogs, checking harnesses.
“Then we’ll be quick about it,” Astrid said. She settled back into the furs, her hand finding the solid, living curve of her belly. Her next words were a whisper, a promise to the two hearts beating inside her. “Almost there. Hold on.”
The descent was a controlled fall. The sled skittered and slid, the dogs digging in their haunches to brake against gravity’s relentless pull. Each jarring impact traveled up through the wood and into Astrid’s bones. She clenched her jaw, riding the pain like a wild horse, her breath coming in short, sharp clouds.
Birna’s hand was a constant pressure on her arm, monitoring. “Breathe through it,” the midwife murmured, her voice a calm counterpoint to the shrieking runners. “Your body is a bundle of knots. We just can’t let it snap.”
“Trying,” Astrid gritted out.
The world narrowed to the shuddering sled, the dark mass of the dogs, and those distant, wavering torches that seemed to retreat the closer they came. The clean, sharp cold of the heights was gone, replaced by a deeper, damp chill that seeped from the direction of the Blackwood. It carried a familiar, metallic taste on the wind.
They hit the valley floor with a final, teeth-rattling lurch. The snow was deeper here, muffling sound. The dog team slowed to a panting trot, weaving through the skeletal remains of a birch grove. The camp resolved from pinpricks into defined shapes: two large tents, a handful of smaller ones, a perimeter of parked wagons. The Eldorian banner—a silver stag on deep blue—hung limp from a central pole.
Sentries saw them. A shout went up. Figures emerged from tents, silhouetted against firelight, hands going to sword hilts. Northerners on a sled, at this hour, in this place, meant only trouble or madness.
Jora brought the sled to a halt twenty paces from the nearest fire. The deerhounds flopped down, steam rising from their fur in great gusts. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the crackle of flames and the harsh sound of Astrid catching her breath.
A man stepped forward. Not Caius. A guardsman with a captain’s insignia, his face wary. “Identify yourselves.” His voice was tight, his eyes scanning the dark trees behind them.
Before Jora could speak, Astrid pushed the furs back and struggled to sit up. “Where is he?” she called out, her voice raw from the cold. “Where’s Caius?”
The captain’s eyes widened. He knew her. Recognition warred with disbelief on his face. “My lady?” He took a step closer, then stopped, his gaze dropping to the unmistakable swell of her form beneath the furs. His professional composure cracked. “Gods. What are you—?”
The flap of the largest tent flung open. Caius stood there, framed in lamplight. He wore a travel-stained tunic, no cloak, his dark hair disheveled. He held a rolled map in one hand. He looked older, the lines around his eyes carved deeper by fatigue and tension.
His eyes found the sled. Found her.
The map fell from his hand, unrolling in the snow. He didn’t seem to notice. He stared, his expression cycling through shock, confusion, and a dawning, furious understanding. The perpetually amused prince was gone. Something harder, and far more afraid, stood in his place.
He crossed the space in a few long strides, snow crunching under his boots. He ignored Jora, ignored Birna, his entire world narrowed to Astrid’s face, pale and dusted with snowflakes.
“You,” he said. The single word was loaded, fractured. “You’re here.”
“Your maps arrived,” she said, meeting his stare. Her chin lifted. “You don’t get to investigate our monster solo. That wasn’t the deal.”
“The deal?” A disbelieving laugh escaped him, sharp and humorless. He gestured at her, a frantic, sweeping motion. “Look at you, Astrid! You crossed the High Cleft? In this?” His voice rose, edged with a fear he couldn’t control. “That’s not a daring ride, it’s a suicide wish! What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking you’d get yourself killed playing scout!” she shot back, her own fear transmuting into anger. It was easier than the other thing, the cold dread pooling in her gut. “You have clerks, Caius. Not fighters. That thing doesn’t care about your trade agreements.”
They were shouting at each other in the frozen silence of the camp, every soldier pretending not to hear. The intimacy of their letters vaporized in the raw, open air.
“I have fifty armed men,” he snapped, his light blue eyes blazing. “And a plan. Which was to observe, to understand, not to charge in! What’s your plan? To go into labor on the front lines?”
“My plan is to not let that thing into our world!” She tried to heave herself up, but a deep, clamping ache in her back made her gasp, sinking back into the furs.
The sound punctured his anger instantly. His face drained of color. “Astrid?”
Birna moved, her hands going to Astrid’s sides, her face professionally blank. “The excitement is not helping. Everyone, shut up.” She directed this at Caius with the blunt authority of someone who’s delivered generations of arguing nobles.
Caius knelt in the snow beside the sled. The fight left him, leaving pure, unvarnished terror. His eyes searched hers. “Are you—? Is it—?”
“I’m fine,” she breathed, though the ache was subsiding into a dull, ominous throb. “Just… winded.”
He reached out, his hand hovering over the furs covering her belly, then stopped, unsure of his welcome. The gesture was so vulnerable it hurt to look at. All his princely polish was sanded away. Here was just a man, terrified for the woman carrying his child, a woman who’d just sledded down a mountain to find him.
“You’re the most infuriating person I’ve ever met,” he whispered, his voice thick.
“You sent me a map marked with evil and expected me to knit,” she whispered back.
A faint, reluctant smile touched his lips. It vanished as he looked over his shoulder toward the inky line of the Blackwood. “It’s closer. The sentries… they report sounds. Shapes in the fog that don’t resolve. No attacks. Just… presence. It’s watching the camp.”
The dread in Astrid’s gut solidified. She knew that tactic. It was the same as before in the pass—a slow, psychological leaching. “It’s testing your perimeter. Looking for fear. For a weak mind.”
“It will find a banquet,” Caius said grimly, standing. He offered her his hand. “Can you walk? You need to be by the fire. We need to talk. Without shouting.”
She took his hand. His grip was warm and solid, anchoring her as she carefully extricated herself from the sled. Her body felt huge and ungainly, every muscle protesting. Together, they moved toward the large tent, a slow, laborious procession.
Inside, it was spartan: a camp bed, a table strewn with more maps and reports, a brazier glowing with coals. The air was warmer, smelling of charcoal and ink. He helped her sit on the edge of the bed.
“The letters…” he began, running a hand through his hair. “They were a lifeline. Then the scouts started coming in with their stories. I had to come see. I couldn’t sit in a stone palace while this… this memory crept toward my borders.”
“Our borders,” she corrected softly. She looked at the maps. His careful ‘X’ marks formed a loose semicircle, drifting south like a stain. “You’ve charted its movement.”
“It’s methodical,” he said, leaning over the table, his finger tracing a path. “It avoids open ground. It prefers the tree line, the gullies. It’s learning the land.” He looked at her, his expression grave. “It’s hunting. Not for food. For something else.”
The baby turned again, a heavy, sluggish motion. Astrid placed a hand on her side. “It’s after what we took from it,” she said. The truth of it crystallized as she spoke. “Last time, we were just in its way. This time, it’s seeking us out. It’s angry.”
A sudden, shrill scream tore through the night outside the tent. Not a battle cry. A sound of pure, mindless terror.
It was cut off abruptly.
Caius was moving before the silence returned, snatching up a sword leaning against the table. Astrid tried to stand, but the deep throb in her back seized, a band of iron tightening around her spine. She froze, breathless.
He was at the tent flap, looking back at her, conflict tearing at him. Duty to his men. Duty to her.
“Go,” she forced out. “See what it is.”
“Jora! Birna!” he yelled, and then he was gone, plunging into the shouting chaos outside.
Astrid sat alone, the coals popping in the brazier. The warmth felt like a lie. The cold was inside now, in the memory of that severed scream. It was here. The game of watching was over.
From outside, Caius’s voice rose above the din, not shouting orders, but roaring a single, raw command to his soldiers. “Hold your lines! Look at the man beside you! See his face! Do not look into the fog!”
He was using the only weapon he had left against a thing that fed on fear: connection. It was a fragile shield. And somewhere in the pressing dark, the Gloom was waiting for it to crack.