Cold woke him first—deep, bone-smart, patient as winter.
He lay half in the shallows with one arm hooked around a jut of root, the river tugging at him as if it hadn't made up its mind. For a time, he let it tug. Listening. The world spoke in small ways along the bank: reeds ticking together, a rook complaining somewhere upriver, water gnawing at stone. Nothing heavy. No steady tread. No bear.
"Still here," he said, breath fogging faintly. His tongue tasted of silt and iron.
He rolled onto hands and knees and crawled higher onto the bank, dragging his satchel after him. The leather squelched, dark with water, twice its proper weight. He set it down and coughed until his ribs hurt. When the fit passed, he checked what mattered.
He unbuckled the sword first. Sand had crept beneath the bindings; grit rasped as he worked the scabbard loose. The blade slid free, duller than it should be but whole. He wiped it on his tunic and felt the fabric give up another wet breath against the steel.
"Not ideal," he muttered. "But you'll live."
The satchel had swallowed half the river. He tipped it, watching a stream pour from the seams. Hook and line: present. Whetstone: cold, smooth, unbroken.
The morning felt thin. The sky wore a color that wasn't yet day and no longer night, a pale band laid along the trees that promised light if he lasted long enough to see it. He stood, and the world tilted. He steadied himself against the rough bark of a alder and took stock.
You're soaked through. You don't have a shelter. Find cover. Heat. Dry the blade. Dry yourself. Do not get stupid.
He found a narrow seam in the riverbank where the land had slumped and left a crooked shelf under a tangle of roots. It would do—short enough that nothing large could crawl in without scraping, deep enough that he could curl inside it and coax a small heat without the wind peeling it away.
He shrugged out of the tunic and wrung it until water ran in a steady thread from the hem. The cold bit, quick and impartial. He hung the tunic on a low branch that leaned into the seam, then worked his boots off and turned them upside down. Mud and water drooled out like the insides of an oyster. He pressed his hands under his arms until the ache retreated a notch.
"Fire," he told himself. "Small. Low. Smart." He glanced up the bank, then downriver. The trees kept their counsel.
He gathered what would light: dry heartwood shaved from the center of a broken branch; papery curls from beneath a leaning stump; a pocket of tinder hidden where last year's reeds had died and gone to husk. He knelt inside the seam and set a tiny bed between two stones, breathing slow as he coaxed the first ember from steel and stone. The spark kissed the curls, then sulked, then—at last—took. He fed it slivers: nothing thicker than a finger, each placed like a promise he meant to keep. Smoke crept along the roof of the hollow and slipped away with the draft.
He held his hands to the glow and didn't talk for a while. Words would have stolen warmth he couldn't spare.
When feeling returned to his fingers, it came like needles. He cursed softly and flexed them, then set the sword across his knees and worked the whetstone in small, patient strokes. Stone sang to steel—quiet, steady—until the edge began to answer. He remembered his father's hands as he moved, remembered how the blade rested there like a tool and not a legend.
"You'd tell me to keep moving," he said to the fire, softer than he meant to. "Don't let the cold do the thinking."
The fire offered no opinion beyond the small, faithful sound of wood surrendering to heat.
He lifted his head at a whisper of weight in the brush. Not heavy. Not careless. He watched the seam's mouth and saw nothing. Then—there, on the damp strip of sand—a print set fresh over his own, smaller than his palm and neat as punctuation. Another beside it, just as clean. The tracks angled down to the water and vanished where the river licked them flat.
He breathed out through his nose. "Scouts," he said—or thought he did; the word hardly left his mouth. The wolves had followed his fall as if the river were a path they knew and he an object of passing interest. Or a problem to keep an eye on.
He ate nothing. Hunger sat with him anyway, polite and persistent. He dried the tunic as best he could, forced himself back into it, and stamped enough warmth into his boots to lace them. He kicked sand and mud over the embers until the seam smelled like wet stone and nothing else.
"Move," he told himself. "Now."
The river walked with him for a while, steady and uncomplaining. Downstream, the banks opened to small terraces of gravel where willow and alder crowded each other for space. He kept to the places that left no story—slippery stones, shallow water—so anything with a nose would have to work harder than he did.
Twice he stopped and listened because stopping was a lesson he wanted to keep. Once the pause bought him a glimpse: a gray shape farther up the bank, still as a cutout, ears forward. Not large. Not Fenrir—he would have known without knowing. This one watched him the way a hawk watched a field: patient, mildly curious, unwilling to waste energy.
"I'm watching you too," he said, and let the river swallow the words.
By midday, a thin sun pushed through and set a shine on the water. The light found him, too, and began to draw the damp from his clothes. He walked until his legs demanded tribute, then claimed a flat stone warmed by that stingy sun. He stripped his tunic again and set it beside him. The wind nosed at the cloth and thought better of it.
His satchel had dried enough to be a satchel again. He untied it and laid the contents where the light could do some work. Hook and line: fine. Whetstone: fine. The little cloth bundle where he kept the flint and a stub of twine: wet but willing.
He thought about food and decided he wanted it more than he wanted to stay perfect. The river here broadened and slowed around a bend, pooling before shouldering through a pinch of rock. He waded to his knees where the current lazed and held still. Fish forgot quickly if a shape stopped becoming a shape. His father had said that once, with one eye on him and one on the water.
"Forget me, then," he whispered. "I'm not here."
He was a poor reed for a long time. Then the shadow came and lingered, and his hands moved without asking permission. The hook took flesh, and he had a fish the length of his forearm slapping cold water against his wrists.
He wanted a second. Greed argued with sense. He gave the first to shore and tried again, and when the river made him wait too long he made himself stop. He cleaned the fish with quick, ugly cuts and wrapped the meat in a leaf he didn't know the name of but suspected wouldn't kill him.
He didn't dare a fire there. He ate two strips raw because he needed the strength more than he needed the comfort, then put distance between himself and his story.
The river began to lift its voice in the afternoon, louder without being angrier. That meant falls somewhere ahead or a narrow place where the water punched itself through like a thief slipping a crowd. The ground rose and fell and rose again. He climbed where the bank demanded it, boots skidding on grit, hands finding holds not made for hands.
Midway up one of those climbs, he found sign.
Claw scores raked a pine trunk just off the trail, so high he felt foolish to measure them with his eyes. Sap bled in clear beads, fresh as a cut he'd just made. Beneath the tree, the earth had been turned in fat slabs. A scat pile crowned the mess, black with berry skins and threaded with hair.
He said nothing for a long breath, then, "All right."
He checked the wind with a wet finger and didn't trust the answer. It came fickle along the gorge, bending to stone and returning with other voices. He angled upslope, away from the river's channel and the straight path anything big would use if it liked to move like a river itself. The slope made his thighs burn. He let them burn. Better that than become a story the wolves told each other in careful tones.
When he topped the rise, the world opened in a way that made him stop. The river ran far below, thundering through a narrow throat of basalt. Beyond it, the opposite ridge stepped away in layers, each greener and more silent than the last. The air smelled of resin and something faintly sweet he could not name.
He set his palm to the ground and felt it humming with distance.
"Shelter," he said. "Dry place, tight mouth." He turned his head slowly until he found what he wanted: an overhang where an old slide had shaved a cut out of the slope and left a stone lip strong enough to turn rain. He made for it, cautious, lazy with his feet to keep pebbles from spidering downslope.
Under the overhang the air kept its own cool, drier than the world around it. He set his things where he could see them all at once. He listened. He heard nothing that sounded like a decision.
The quiet didn't last.
A sound carried up the gorge that wasn't river. A heavy step, regular as a drum you heard through a wall. It came and went, losing itself in the white roar, finding him again when the water's voice dipped between surges.
He belly-crawled to the lip of the overhang and looked.
At first, he saw only the moving white where the river murdered itself against stone. Then the shape lifted out of the trees along the far bank—the bear, or a bear big enough that the difference meant nothing. It moved with a certainty that didn't hurry. For a while it was only a shape. Then it chose a place where the water laid itself shallow over a spill of rock and stepped in.
The river talked to everything that entered it, but it talked to that weight differently. The current folded and slid around the bear's legs as if it had met this problem before and lost. The animal lowered its head and drank, dark fur wet to the elbow. When it finished, it stood with its nose above the spray and watched the upstream pass of foam.
The boy didn't realize he'd been holding his breath until the ache forced it out. The bear turned its head as if the sound of that breath had crossed the gorge. He felt the look land on him the way you feel a thrown stone strike the ground near your foot.
He didn't move. The bear didn't either. The stare had no malice in it. It had no patience, either. It was the look of something that owned a place and knew it, the way a mountain knew it could wait out everything that touched it.
"Drink and go," the boy whispered. "I'm not here."
The bear lifted its muzzle and tasted the air. Then, with the same absence of hurry, it turned and stepped out of the river, shook once so that water leapt in an arc tight as a thrown net, and slid between the trees until it was only a memory where light had been.
His hands hurt. He realized he'd had them clenched so long the nails had bit the skin. He worked his fingers open, one by one.
"New rule," he said, very quietly. "Don't piss off mountains with fur."
He sat there a while longer, letting the thunder in his chest match the river's.