It was cold.

That was, the bitter kind of cold that seeped into lungs and through even the thickest of coats, though perhaps that was because she had only stitched it together hastily on the edge of an inn bed in very little light, eyes half on her work and half on the windows. Perhaps that was because she hadn’t been smart on the way back. There were no torches to look for now on the empty dirt path, though her fingers were still aching with the aftermath her threads had left. She would look at them later, when she couldn’t taste her own blood in the crevices of her teeth. When she was safe.

She ran her hands over the double stitches, prodded a thumb into the edge of a layer, and—ah. An unsteadily stitched thread. She would have to fix that soon, and hoped with a tight crush of the cracks in her palms that soon didn’t conflate itself with dead.

It was hours before she made it fully out of the amber glow of the last city’s edge and into the deep shadow of the forest, a smear across the horizon of slowly-darkening green and the golden crackle of the sky.

Thick soil bent underfoot, damp and nearly-black and rich with the scent of safety; there were the poles and the winding steps, and a small group of houses sat atop them like a peculiar flock of birds, if birds’ eyes glowed and if only one of them were awake. Soil became wood and wood became a mat of woven leaves spread across the porch, short enough to lead her straight to the door.

She adjusted her bag on her shoulders, glared into the half-dark like it would help the ache of being so awake, and knocked. The person who opened the door had shoulders like the slope of the hills and examined her with narrow eyes for a long moment. Thamarai decided she could not force her expression into sheer calm and pinched her mouth into a frown instead.

“It is,” she said, Commons words stumbling over her tongue, “very cold.” At that, they blinked, gave a sharp nod of finished scrutiny, and let her in.

The town on the edge of the border was entirely made up of sharp, broad wood to make up for the torrential rain, all tied together on shelters lifted into the sky and only grounded by the guardian wooden pillars below them, carved with the many languages of the country and carefully painted with woven ink. It was usually bustling, but tonight it was empty: of all she could see, there were two people in the kitchen and a handful of elders and injuries that needed slow tending, and not a footfall besides. The person who had opened the door guided Thamarai through the maze of the shelter with directions Thamarai could only half-understand, and to a corner of a stairwell where they held up a sheet—quite uselessly, Thamarai thought—and let her change into something dry and borrowed.

“You can dry your clothes there,” the person told her, gesturing at an empty rack by a metal stove. “I’ll find Murshida.”

Thamarai took off her coat, then boots, then soaked-through undershirt and pants in the methodical way that her mother had always taught her, and draped them over the rack bar her coat. It was near to falling apart at the seams and only stayed together by way of her aching molars and thickly calloused fingers, and it was struck through with a horrible case of rushed packing. She was uselessly trying to untangle red and green thread when Murshida finally came, holding two mugs of chai and with her expression carefully tucked into the corners of her face.

“I was expecting you three weeks ago, you know,” Murshida said finally. Thamarai closed her eyes and raised her brows, flattening her mouth into an exasperated line even though she knew that it meant Murshida had been worried. She took the small comforts of mundanities in stride.

“There were more soldiers on the street than I expected,” she admitted, falling into her mother tongue, and took the proffered mug of chai. “Jannat’s shelter was gone.”

“Gone?”

“The streets were filled with ash. I couldn’t recognize a single person the entire way through the city.”

Murshida’s expression crumpled only for as long as it took Thamarai to look down at her chai and back up again. “I’ll need to find some volunteers to look.”

“You could,” Thamarai began, thumbing the rim of the mug, “send me?”

Murshida blinked. “You’ve just travelled for months to get here after spending weeks helping fix canals and dodging soldiers, and now you want to go straight back to Angkor Khsaoy?”

“All the better. My mind is fresh; I know which ways I could go, now—”

“You’re exhausted. You could tell us, and the others would go down the routes you suggest instead.”

“I could see if there was—”

“Nothing,” Murshida told her sharply. “You will find nothing there but death. What do you think you’ll see there? The only thing you’ll receive is a slit throat,” Murshida paused, leaving space for the or worse, and reached out to take Thamarai’s hand. “We stay out of things like this. Jaan. We don’t touch their occupations more than we have to. Why do you want to go back?”

“I heard—” Thamarai hesitated. “There’s a wedding. They’d been there to make the dresses for the entourage, and it was delayed when the occupation came, but if there’s even a chance—” she broke off, bitter terror digging into the back of her tongue, and Murshida looked at her with eyes that held something Thamarai couldn’t decipher but was the only thing she had been searching for.

Murshida’s voice took on resignation softer than the clouds overhead. “You really think they could be there.” Thamarai raised her shoulders in answer. “You would die for people who may not be here any longer?”

“I don’t want to spin out my thread—here, alive—wondering if they were too.”

They both took a sip of their chai without another word.

When their cups were empty Thamarai took Murshida’s with a gentle clack, the shiver of porcelain brushing against warm skin and pads of fingers. “Are you going to let me go?”

“Would anything stop you even if I told you no?” Murshida countered. Thamarai gave her a smile and lifted her eyes to see Murshida smiling back, eyes crinkling in the way they had since Thamarai had first known her.

“I’ll come back. I always do,” Thamarai promised her. The lines by Murshida’s mouth deepened like they always did whenever Thamarai said it, betraying all her fondness.

“You always do say that,” Murshida said. She pressed a hand to Thamarai’s arm lightly. “You can go once you’ve gotten adequate rest—” which Murshida was always the judge of— “to get there alive. Let me mend your coat in the meantime.”