Page 131 of A Tale of Ice and Ash
Chapter Twenty-One:
The Morning After
Cole was gone when she woke, the bed arctic without him.
One day, we’ll wake up together,she thought wistfully, reaching out to grab her clothes.
They weren’t on the chair where she left them. For one long, horrible moment, she thought that Cole had reverted to his old ways and hidden them from her in an attempt to force her to walk around the camp half-dressed, but then she found them folded in the bed beside her. He must have put them there to warm them up for her.
Her chest glowed at the thought, and she hugged them before pulling them on over her head and heading outside.
The campsite was awash with white. The logs had been dug out of the carpets of snow, and rebels sat around it, nursing bowls of porridge. Merry stirred the cauldron.
“No Garnet?” asked Eirwen, fetching a bowl.
“Nope.”
“Did she go home last night?”
“Haha, no.”
“Then where is she?”
“She and Onyx went for a walk last night and have not yet returned.”
“Oh,” said Eirwen. “Should… should we be worried?”
Wren and the Huntsman both snorted. “They’re fine,” they said.
“It’s areallylong walk…” said Juniper, appearing at her elbow.
“Hmm. Yes. It is. I wonder what on earth they could be doing.”
There was a snort from behind her, and Cole appeared. He leaned over her and shovelled a spoonful of her porridge into his mouth before running back to the relative safety of the campfire. Eirwen tried not to smile, and joined him a few minutes later.
“You could have stayed longer last night after all,” she said, as quiet as she could.
“I value my life,” he whispered back. “But… I would have stayed all night, if I could.”
Eirwen took the end of her spoon, and traced the wordsone dayin the snow, before quickly stamping it out.
Cole smiled, and poked her in the ribs.
“Ah, good, you’re awake,” said Onyx, plonking himself on the log next to her.
“Where have you been?” asked Eirwen.
“What do you mean? Been here all morning.”
Garnet grinned from the space beside the cauldron, humming a tune under her breath like she’d been there the entire time too.
“Well, good morning to you too. What’s our plan for today?”
“Our plan for the day is to look over our options. A full-scale assault would still be risky. She may still have control of the shades that are left; we can’t rule it out. We also don’t know what object she picked up and I suspect we’ve lost our man on the inside.”
Cole looked down at his feet. “I could probably still get in and find out what’s going on, getting out might be a little trickier if she discovers I’m there, but she’s not going to kill me–”
“You arenotgoing back in there,” snapped Eirwen.
