Chapter 21. Patience is not my virtue
Silence.
Not the blessed silence of solitude that reigned in his father's library, but a lingering, oppressive silence, broken only by the howling of the wind and his own heartbeat in his ears. We've been lying here for hours. The snow had already dusted us, and the ice had frozen the folds of our camouflage capes. The cold slowly but surely seeped through the layers of fabric, clinging to the skin with icy fingers.
And downstairs... nothing.
He entered the hut and did not appear. There was no movement behind the shutters. Not a single sound. The hut stood as a silent, gloomy rebuke to our expectation. There wasn't even smoke coming out of the chimney, so it wasn't burning. Sitting inside in the dark and in the cold? Or... He wasn't there anymore? Maybe he left a long time ago by some secret passage, leaving us lying in a snowdrift like idiots?
I clenched my teeth, feeling a familiar, fierce impatience boil up inside. I hated doing nothing. I hated waiting. Every second wasted felt like a personal insult.
Ragnar stirred nearby. I felt, not heard, his muffled growl. He endured because it was the Patriarch's will and mine. But his patience was also running out. He's a man of action, just like me. Lying in wait for the target to reveal himself is not his style. His style is to break in the door and find out everything directly.
And more and more often, this thought began to seem to me not so crazy.
I clung to the powerful telescope again, studying the silent walls of the hut, the snow-covered clearing, the dark line of the forest over and over again. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Damn. Thoughts spun in my head at breakneck speed. We're wasting time. Did he sense us? Gone? Or is he just sitting there waiting for us to prove ourselves?
The option that he was just sleeping peacefully was not even considered. No. Such a creature does not sleep. It either acts or calculates.
Another gust of icy wind, another handful of stabbing snow in the face. Enough.
My mind, already tired of fruitless observation, began to build a new logical chain. We won't achieve anything by continuing to lie here. We'll just freeze and let our guard down. We need to step back. Come back here tomorrow, changing tactics. It is possible to install motion sensors around the perimeter. Or...
Or to do what I so longed for, but couldn't afford to do alone.
I'm slow so as not to attract attention (although who was I kidding? If he was there, he had seen everything for a long time), crawled away from the edge of the cliff and made a sign to Ragnar and the trackers who came up – to move away.
We crawled to a safe distance, got to our feet and moved away from this cursed place with a quick, silent step.
"Nothing,— Ragnar breathed through his teeth, brushing off the snow. "He's sitting like a groundhog in a hole." Or he skipped out.
"He's there," I said quietly but confidently. "I can feel it."
"Then what are we waiting for?" His voice rang with long—pent-up rage. — We're taking it by storm. Or I'll go alone and smoke it out.
—No,— my voice came out as sharp as a whip. "He's not alone. Do you remember the girl? We don't know who she is. If we break in there, he can... Kill her. It's stupid to consider her a weakness. She can be a trump card. Or part of his power. We don't know. We can't take any chances.
Ragnar grunted sullenly, but did not argue. He saw her eyes. And he couldn't figure out the riddle either.
We were walking back to the camp, and a new plan was forming in my head. More daring. More risky.
—Tomorrow," I said, interrupting his silent thoughts. "We'll be back tomorrow." But not the four of us.
Ragnar looked at me with interest.
"I'll talk to my dad,— I continued, already mentally building an argument. "He needs to see it for himself." To see them. His authority... his decision... The council will listen. And if he comes with me... We can make another decision. More direct.
The thought of Solomon seeing everything with his own eyes made my heart beat faster. He'll understand. He must understand. This anomaly, this "Ghost" with its outlandish companion... It was more than just a threat. It was a puzzle. And to solve it, it needed not brute force, but cunning. A subtle approach.
And who could be thinner than the Patriarch of the Crimson Clan?
—Tomorrow,— I repeated more firmly, looking at the darkening peaks of the mountains beyond which our estate lay. — We'll decide everything tomorrow.
And at that moment, I almost convinced myself that it would be like that. Almost.