The boy had always been a little different from his siblings and he knew it made his mother worry, especially when he had started spending so much time with the guardians. Not the big, burly, in your face kind, but the smaller, quieter ones that made a habit of keeping their own presence low. The sort that would sneak in and deal with a problem, then be long gone again before you ever realised they'd been there. He was barely a novice, and he should have stayed in Torbine with Kagehide and Muramasa, but they had urged him to go after his mother and look after his siblings. He could only take that to mean that they might have plans on joining him later.
Jayse had quickly grown tired of their noise, however, and made his exit as silently as he entered, appearing now and then so they knew he was still alive, before melting between the snow and the trees once more. He preferred to travel by night anyway, and it was much easier to survive of carrion if you weren't fighting four other mouths for the scraps that others had left behind. He had noticed when they seemed to branch off to the east, the ghost of a familiar smirk passing his lips as he continued to the west. She had always described the willows as west of the mountain and now, he thought he could just make out the canopies against the star-dusted sky, no light to speak of for the darkness of a new moon.
She had been by recently, his father too. He almost thought that he might have heard her howl this morning as he was putting his head down to rest, but now the night was upon him, and it was time to move.
North, or west?