“The best ones will be about as big around as your thumb and as long as possible.”
“Why? What do you want them for?”
His brother acted mysterious, but Sithas willingly gathered the wood as soon as daylight illuminated the valley. He spent the rest of the day gathering provisions for the first leg of his trek, checking his own equipment, and stealing sidelong glances at his brother. Kith-Kanan pretended to ignore him, instead whittling away at the pine branches, weaving them into a tight pattern, even pulling threads from his woolen cloak to lash the sticks together firmly. Toward sunset, he finally held the finished creations up for Sithas’s inspection. He had made two flat objects, oval in shape and nearly three feet long by a foot wide. The sticks had been woven back and forth into a grid pattern.
“Wonderful, Kith—simply amazing. I’ve never seen anything like them! But ... what are they?”
Kith-Kanan smiled smugly. “I learned about them during that winter I spent in the Wildwood.” For a moment, his smile tightened. He couldn’t remember that time without thinking of Anaya, of the bliss they had shared, and of the strange fate that had claimed her. He blinked and went on. “They’re called ‘snowshoes’.”
Instantly Sithas saw the application. “I lash these to my boots, right?” he guessed. “And then walk around, leaving footprints in the snow like a giant?”
“You’ll be surprised, I promise. They’ll let you walk on top of the snow, even deep powder.”
Indeed, Sithas wasted no time pulling on his boots and affixing the snowshoes to them with several straps Kith had created by tearing a strip from one of their cloaks. He tripped and sprawled headlong as he left the cave but quickly dusted himself off and started into the woods on a test walk. Though the snowshoes felt somewhat awkward on his feet and forced him to walk with an unusually wide-spread gait, he trotted and marched and plodded through the woods for nearly an hour before returning to the cave.
“Big feet!” One-Tooth greeted him outside, where he had left the giant.
“Good feet!” Sithas replied, reaching up to give the giant a friendly clap on the arm.
Kith awaited him expectantly.
“They’re fantastic! I can’t believe the difference they make!” Kith was forced to admit, as he looked at his exhilarated brother, that Sithas no longer seemed to need the assistance of anyone to cope with the rigors of the high mountain winter.
Determined to begin his quest well rested, Sithas tried to force himself to sleep. But though he closed his eyes, his mind remained alert. It leaped from fear to hope to anticipation in a chaotic whirling dance that kept him wide awake as the hours drifted past. He heard One-Tooth snoring at the cave mouth and saw Kith slumbering peacefully on the other side of the fire. Finally, past midnight, Sithas slept. And when he did, his dreams were rich and bright, full of blue skies swarming with griffons. * * * * * Yellow eyes gleamed in the woods, staring at the fading fire in the mouth of the cave. The dire wolf crept closer, suppressing the urge to growl.
The creature saw and smelled the hill giant slumbering at the mouth of the cave. Though the savage canine was huge—the size of a pony, weighing more than three hundred pounds—it feared to attack the larger hill giant. Too, the fire gave it pause. It had been burned once before, and remembered well the terrifying touch of flame.
Silently the wolf slinked back into the woods. When it was safely out of hearing of the cave, it broke into a patient lope, easily moving atop the snow. But there was food in the cave. During the lean winter months, fresh meat was a rare prize in this mountain fastness. The wolf would remember, and as it roamed the valleys, it would meet others of its kind. Finally, when the pack had gathered, they would return.
Sithas’s first expedition, to the west, lasted nearly four weeks. He pressed along snow-swept ridges and through barren, rock-boundaried vales. He saw no life, save for the occasional spoor of the hardy mountain sheep or the flying speck of an eagle soaring in the distance.
He traveled alone, having persuaded One-Tooth—only after a most intricate series of contortions, pantomimes, threats, and pleas—to remain behind and guard Kith-Kanan. Each day his solitude seemed to weigh heavier on him and become an oppressive, gnawing despair.
Winds tore at him every day, and as often as not, his world vanished behind a shroud of blowing snow. The days of clear weather that had followed Kith’s injury, he now realized, had been a fortunate aberration in the typical weather patterns of the high mountains. Winter closed in with a fury, shrouding him in snow and hail and ice.
He pressed westward until at last he stood upon a high ridge and saw ground falling to foothills and plains beyond. He would find no mountainous refuge of griffons in this direction. The route he followed back to Kith-Kanan and One-Tooth diverged somewhat from the trail he had taken westward, but this, too, proved fruitless.
He found his brother and the hill giant in good spirits, with a plentiful supply of meat. Though Kith could not yet bear his weight on his leg, the limb seemed to be healing well. Given time, it would regain most of its prior strength. After a night of warmth and freshly cooked meat, Sithas began his search to the north. This time his quest took even longer, for the Khalkist Range extended far along this axis. After twenty-five days of exploring, however, he saw that he had left the highest summits of the range behind. Though the trail northward was mountainous and the land uninhabited, he could see from his lofty vantage that it lacked the towering, craggy summits that had been so vividly described in Kith-Kanan’s dream. It seemed safe to conclude that the valley of the griffons did not lie farther north.
His return to camp took another ten days and carried him through more lofty, but equally barren, country. The only significant finds he made were several herds of deer. He had stumbled across the creatures by accident and watched them race away, plunging through the deep snow. It was with a sensation approaching abject hopelessness that he plodded over the last ridge and found the camp nestled in its cave and remaining very much as he had left it. One-Tooth was eager to greet him, and Kith-Kanan looked stronger and healthier, though his leg was still awkwardly splinted. His brother was working on an intricately carved crutch, but as yet he hadn’t tried walking with it. By now the food supply had begun to run short, so Sithas remained for several days, long enough to stalk and slay a plump doe. The deer’s carcass yielded more meat than either of his previous kills, and when he returned to camp with the doe, he was surprised to find Kith waiting at the cave mouth—standing and waiting.
“Kith! Your leg!” he asked, dropping the deer and stepping quickly to his brother’s side.
“Hurts like all the fires of the Abyss,” Kith grunted, but his teeth, though clenched, forced his mouth into a tight smile. “Still, it can hold me up, with the help of my crutch.”
“Call you Three-Legs now,” observed One-Tooth dryly.
“Fair enough,” Kith agreed, still gritting his teeth.
“I think this calls for a celebration. How about some melted snow and venison?” proposed Sithas.
“Perfect,” Kith-Kanan agreed.
One-Tooth drooled happily, sharing the brothers’ elation. The trio enjoyed an evening of feasting. The giant was the first to tire, and soon he was snoring noisily in his accustomed position outside the mouth of the cave.
“Are you going back out?” Kith asked quietly after long moments of contented silence.
“I have to,” Sithas replied. They both knew that there was no other alternative.
“This is the last chance,” Kith-Kanan observed. “We’ve come up from the south, and now you’ve looked to the north and the west. If the valley doesn’t lie somewhere to the east, we’ll have to face the fact that this whole adventure might have been a costly pipe dream.”