The moon was three-quarters full and bathed the snowfields in cold silver so bright I could see my shadow. As I stood leaning on the weathered rail used for tethering horses, taking deep gulps of the frosty air, trying to banish my terrors with space and freedom and the beauty of the night, I heard a muffled cry from inside the hut. The door flew open, and Lara stood outlined in the doorway, her blanket clutched around her shoulders, her moonlit face dazed and bewildered, pale with panic. No sneer. No curling lip. “The fire,” she mumbled. “Something woke me and it flared up.”
A spare, eloquent moment. No wonder she always stayed so far from the hearth. “I’m sorry,” I said. “The scraps I’d thrown on must have caught. I didn’t think of it waking you.” Didn’t think of the horror flame must raise in her, a necessity for life, yet always a reminder of her agony. “Forgive me. I’ll watch until it’s safely banked again.” Of course she would seek cold darkness to soothe her nightmare, as I sought light to ease my own.
“Why were you messing about with the fire? What are you doing out here?” Suspicion and mistrust followed close on regained composure.
“Summons of nature,” I said, shifting my eyes to the moonlit crags. Her boots crunched across the snow until she was standing so close I could sense her breath on my cloak. I had never been a good liar.
“You’ve been out here too long for that. Too long for one who gets frostbite if he’s more than three steps from the coals.” She stood beside me, her head scarcely reaching my shoulder. “You’re shaking now. Why—”
Her abrupt silence forced me to look at her. She was staring at my hands that rested on the rail. I’d been in such a hurry that I hadn’t put on gloves, and so grateful for the moonlight that I hadn’t noticed the cold. Quickly I snatched my twisted, ugly appendages back into my cloak, then fixed my eyes on the moonlit peaks. Her boots crunched again, and it was a cold hour until I could force myself to go back inside. I couldn’t explain why I hated it so fiercely that she had seen.
Nothing changed after that night. Lara did not mention my hands, which was fine with me. Even if she were capable of it, I did not want her pity, any more than she would want mine. She had more words for sniveling weakling than dragons had for wind. No service I offered was welcome, and no word I spoke was met with anything but derision. The only reference she made to the night’s exposure was three days later, when she threw an awl, two rolls of leather thongs and strong sinew, and a stack of leather pieces down in front of me, telling me to thread the lacings through the edges so my Rider’s breeches wouldn’t fall off. “I don’t have time to do all of it,” she said with an unreadable expression. “Are you capable of doing your part, as you claimed?”
“I can do whatever I need to do,” I said. And so I did. Slowly. Painfully. Mumbling curses as the awl slipped out of my grasp a hundred times for every successful hole. Trying to will the thongs and sinew through the tool and the stiff, oiled leather, when a hundred clumsy attempts had me wanting to beat my head on the table. Such a small endeavor, yet for three days it loomed far larger than anything having to do with sentient dragons or the redemption of a people. I utterly forgot where I was and what I was doing and what were the true measures of accomplishment and failure.
I would have preferred to fight my battles outside of Lara’s view, but she never said anything. Never watched me. Never seemed to take notice of my driving frustration or my seething anger or my sporadic outbursts of satisfaction at my all-too-rare successes. At first I was sure it was purest Ridemark contempt. But when she wordlessly laid a second stack in front of me while I still stared in exhausted triumph at the first, I glanced up quickly in dismay. On her lips was the glimmer of a smile. It was so faint, such a remote and inconceivable grace, that I called myself seven names for a fool. Most likely she was enjoying the sight of a Senai struggling with such mundane labors ... but it hadn’t looked like that sort of smile.
Our work went on, preparing for the equinox, the day the ancients said the eye of the world began to widen with delight at its bride, the earth—the day Elhim lore said the dragons would stir from their winter’s sleep. Lara was quite serious about keeping track of the days. On the wall above her sleeping pallet she had used coal to mark off a crude calendar, and each morning she carefully checked off another square. She had certain days noted with circles and half circles and crescents which I took to be phases of the moon, the equinox with a large X, and other days with marks of no easily discernible shape. One of the latter fell at the beginning of my fifth week with her.
All that day she seemed distracted and nervous, absolutely unlike herself. We worked on my armor, and for once I accomplished more than she. The greaves were done, ready to lace about my legs. The breeches were done, thick and stiff and uncomfortable. I was sitting on the floor wrestling with the first two pieces of the vest and the sinew that would bind them together, the material so much stronger than leather laces, and so much thinner, and far more difficult to grasp.
“I’m going out for a while to ... to check the traps,” Lara announced in late afternoon, tossing aside the stiffened wool she had been shaping into a helm.
“I checked them this morning,” I said. “Only two fox kits not fit to keep.”
“You let go more than you keep,” she said in irritation, throwing on her cloak and shouldering her bow. “And you’d eat the same thing every meal of the year. I’m tired of cheese and oatcakes, so I’m going to find something better. I’ll be out past nightfall.” I knew better than to question the sense of such a venture.
“I would never doubt you can take care of yourself,” I muttered, my frustration at the task she had set me forcing my words louder than I might otherwise have said them. She heard me and turned blazing red, which was another mark of an unusual day. At any other time she wouldn’t have listened, or if she’d listened, she wouldn’t have cared. The door slammed so hard behind her that a pot of oatcakes fell off a shelf, and the flat, dry cakes shattered into crumbs on the floor.
I dropped my work and gazed idly about the hut, puzzling over the strange course of the past weeks. It was then I noted the mark on Lara’s calendar. I examined it more closely than I’d dared before, and the splotch on this day resolved itself into a D.
Dragon? Departure? Discovery? All our work at lists of words prompted a torrent of possibilities.
The sun slid lower in the thin, watery blue of the sky. I salvaged a broken oatcake and melted a slab of cheese on it.
Deviltry? Deception?
An icicle, the last holdout against the afternoon warming, splintered on the stone doorstep, shattering the stillness.
Duplicity? Danger? Death?
I donned my cloak and set out after Lara in the failing light. Though an hour had passed since her departure, it was easy enough to follow her, for though the remaining patches of snow were crusty and brittle, they were better walking than the muddy strips of meadow in between. Interesting that the small, firm boot prints went nowhere near the trees where our traps lay. I trotted at a good pace, first skirting the meadow, then climbing a steep track up the ridge at its eastern end. By the time I reached the top, the first stars had poked through the deepening blue. The bloated bulge of the moon pushed over the eastern horizon beyond a landscape wrinkled like an old man’s face with rocky ridges like the one on which I stood. Lara’s trail led me deep into the narrow valley between one ridge and the next. I bore south around rocky slide areas and stunted pine trees growing out of the rock, their roots scarcely grasping the dry slopes. The going was tricky in the dim light until the moon rose high enough to take up its hotter brother’s duties in the sky.