Ash sat down again and snuggled up against Lissar's back, with her head on her shoulder, as she had done before the hearth in their old... "No!" said Lissar.
"Whatever it is-it is over with. Ash and I have escaped, and are free." Her words sounded hollow, but the defiance in them: drove the horror back a few paces, and she lay down again and fell again into sleep.
It was daylight for a while, and then dark, and then daylight again. And then Lissar began to recognize that she was waking up for good, that she was desperately thirsty, that she was so hungry that her head hurt and there was a bitter taste in her mouth, and that she needed to relieve herself. She dragged herself reluctantly to a sitting position. Ash lay in a tiny round knot beside her, near enough that Lissar could feel the heat rising off her fine-haired body, and watch the short hairs gently separate and then lie softly together again with the rise and fall of her breathing.
Lissar was never quite unsurprised at how small a sleeping creature Ash could make of herself when she was curled up her tightest, with her long limbs folded expertly into the hollow of her belly and her flexible spine curved almost into a circle.
Lissar staggered upright, wakened with dreadful thoroughness by the pain in her hip, went to the door and opened it. A little heap of snow immediately fell in on the floor. Snow lay, in a beautiful, smooth sweep of eye-bewildering white (she blinked, closed one eye), across the little clearing that the hut stood in, and disappeared into the blue shadows under the trees. The sun was shining, the view was mesmerizing, the more so by her own exhaustion and the knowledge that she and Ash would not have survived the first night of the blizzard if Ash had not found this haven for them.
The weight of this knowledge seemed to hold her in place like the stiff, resisting weight of ceremonial robes ... she frowned. What an odd thought: ceremonial robes.
Heavy with gold braid they had been, with glints of colored stones.
She looked down at her filthy, flannel-clad self, and wished to laugh; but could not. Pain and hunger had stolen her lucidity; and she an herbalist's apprentice.
Almost she could remember her master's name: R ... Rinnol. That was it. Lissar had been lucky, for she had not wanted an apprentice; but Lissar was a friend of her niece, and Rinnol had agreed, very grudgingly at first, to take her on.
The snow was over her knees beyond the lip of roof that sheltered the hut's door and narrow wooden porch. She waded, barefoot, only just past the corner of the hut before she squatted; she would have to see if the hut yielded anything she could use for boots. Ash emerged and bore her company at the hut-corner; when she was standing again her ears and tail came up and for a moment.Lissar thought she would go bounding through the snow like a puppy. But then the tail and the head dropped again, and she sighed, and almost crept back inside the little house. Only then did Lissar notice how dull and flat her once-shining coat looked in the sunlight.
A memory came to her, of chasing her beautiful dog around a walled garden; she was herself running freely, neither hip hurt, her eyes focussed easily, adaptably, without thought, and she stretched out both whole, strong arms to make a snatch at Ash as she spun around a corner and leaped entirely over her person. Lissar let the memory fade. She did not wish to remember more; the guardian panic hovered, watchful, in one corner of her mind; she did not want it disturbed.
She went back indoors. Ash was sitting, unhappy head hanging, by the dying fire.
She opened and closed her mouth, almost thoughtfully, as if trying to remember something-or trying to rid herself of a memory of something. She looked at Lissar beseechingly.
Lissar looked around the tiny room. A table stood against one wall with a tiny shuttered window over it; a bed was shoved against the wall the wood-pile stood on the other side of. The door and the fireplace took the other two walls. Next to the door were cupboards. Under the table stood a bucket. Lissar took it outdoors and began shovelling snow into it. She had to stop often, because her fingers burned and turned red, and her feet went almost instantly burning-cold, without the comfort of numbness.
A bucket of snow warmed by the hearth yielded a depth of water about equal to the length of one finger joint. She drank one sip-lowering the bucket after just the one sip was one of the hardest things she had ever done-and gave the rest to Ash. Then she went outdoors and began digging up more snow.
She was trembling with weariness by the time neither she nor Ash was thirsty any more. She had tried eating snow, but it hurt her throat and made her head and stomach ache. There was a little water left in the bucket when she sat down in front of the fire and almost fell asleep again, but she knew she did not dare to, not yet. She needed to investigate the cupboard by the door. Fearfully she opened it, for she knew that their lives lay within it, and she dreaded to find it empty.
Stale brown flour. Some kind of meal, spotted with small dark flecks, with legs.
Dried meat, old and black and lightly fuzzed over with a greenish fungus. Some tiny, wizened, almost black roundish items she recognized by smell as onions and apples.
Some squashy potatoes bristling with pale dry sprouts with brownish tips. Tears of relief blurred her eyes. It occurred to her to wonder whom the hut was for, and whether its usual occupant-or the person who had stocked it, perhaps for just such an occasion as being snowbound-might return and be angry at the trespassers. But she could not think about imaginary owners for long. Her head swam; she gripped the cupboard door and rested her throbbing head against it, feeling the hot tears creep slowly down her face, tasting the salt on her lips. She stood just breathing in the amazing aroma of food. Of life continuing.
Ash stood up slowly and stiffly and walked over to stand beside her, her nose pointed hopefully at the cupboard, and a new light was in her eyes.
Lissar's meat-broth was dull, the broth watery and the meat tough, her flatbread a soggy, crumbly, burnt disaster; but she and Ash ate every scrap and drank every drop, and fell asleep again. Lissar woke up suddenly and violently in the middle of the night, when her abused bowels declared that they could no longer cope; but she ran for the door with better strength than she had had since ... before her life began.
She knew that she was not accustomed to much snow, but as she did not think of her old life or of her future she did not think about the snow either, beyond the fact that it was there. It was there, and it went on not only being there but adding to itself, till it lay halfway up the window over the table in their hut, which was the direction of the prevailing wind; Lissar opened the door very cautiously each morning till she could see how much of it was going immediately to fall in on her.