Every night, Master Kit came by, sticking his head into the shelters of snow and ice, assuring them that their progress was good and their strength was enough. It was the trick of the spiders, but for the time that he was there and for several hours after, it seemed plausible that they might survive.
There were no women with the army apart from herself. All the camp followers and tradesmen and fortune-tellers had been scraped off by the rough knife of winter. Nor could she warm her little shelter with her own flesh alone. It gave her an excuse to bring Vincen in with her. There was neither sex nor the desire for it. She was worn too thin to even consider that, as, she hoped, was he. But bodies offered other comforts than release, and having him there was as near as she could hope to coming home.
“I think we may die here,” she said, her head resting against his chest.
“We won’t,” he said, his voice as empty as habit.
“Might rather we did,” she said. “I’m not sure how much longer I can go on. Life alone may not be worth the effort.” She was joking, at least in part. She did wonder how much it would take for her dark humor to slide into simple truth.
“Not life,” Vincen said. “Soup.”
“Soup?”
“It’s how I stay strong through this. Life’s too big. Too abstract. Can’t bring myself to want it in particular. Soup, though? A good rich bowl of soup is just a little further down the road somewhere.”
“God,” Clara said. “And a pipe with some fresh leaf.”
“Pie. With Abitha’s cold crust and cheese and beer.”
“You’ve convinced me,” Clara said, shifting against his body as if she might burrow into him for warmth. “Let’s live.”
“I will if you do,” he said, but she was already halfway to sleep. The ice seemed comfortable as a feather bed, and her hands and feet were all terribly far away. No dreams came, only a deep velvet darkness and a sense of terrible weight dragging her down. She woke to the tapping of the camp’s caller on the iced wall. On Wester’s advice Jorey had banned use of the speaking horn until they were someplace less prone to avalanche. She rose, chewed a bit of leather the length of her thumb that was breakfast, and the march began again.
Only today, it grew worse.
The first sign of trouble didn’t catch her attention until much later. The second came when the leaden march passed a widening in the landscape, the mountains stepping a bit apart before they closed ranks again. Jorey and Marcus Wester and half a dozen of the highest-ranking of Jorey’s men stood together at the side of the column. Clara’s footsteps slowed, faltered, and turned.
Jorey’s face was thin, his eyes sunken. He seemed on the verge of tears. The others—his men, the noble blood of Antea—were little more than corpses who hadn’t had the good sense to rot yet. Only Wester seemed to have his faculties fully about him, and they were his words that found her first.
“If we try to sleep, the best we can hope is a third dead by morning. The smart bet’s more.”
“What’s going on?” Clara demanded. She had no rank or authority, but they were all past that now. Marcus nodded to her and lifted his chin, pointing with it to the landscape all around them.
“Listen,” he said.
When she heard it, she realized she’d been hearing it for some time. A high, merry tinkling sound like a thousand mice playing chimes. It seemed to come from all around her, to rise up from the ground itself and shimmer down from the mountains.
“The thaw’s here,” Marcus said. “We can’t build a decent shelter with wet snow. We’d wind up sleeping in puddles, and that makes waking up come morning less likely. Add that it’s hours, not days, before some unfortunately warm breeze gets up to the peaks. Once the melt starts there, all this is going to spend a week as a particularly unpleasant river.”
“What can we do?” Clara said.
“Forced march,” Jorey said, his voice low and sepulchral. “We don’t stop for the night. We don’t stop at all. We only keep walking until Bellin.”
“It’s not much farther,” Marcus said. “We can do this.”
“Not all of us,” Jorey said.
“The ones that can’t are dead anyway,” Marcus said. “As their commander, the best thing you can offer them is a chance to rise to the occasion.”
Jorey’s head sank to his chest. Clara felt his weariness and distress as if the ache were her own. She wished there were a way to take him in her arms, to comfort him. She had the mad fantasy, gone as soon as it came, of calling for her servants to bring the carriage close as she’d done when her children were no more than babes. Too late for that now, and in so many ways.
“No choice means no choice,” Jorey said. He lifted his head, and his eyes were hard as stone. “Send the word. We’ll break before sundown, but just for food and water. Then we keep on.”
“As if we had food,” one of the other men said with a hollow laugh. None of the others picked it up.
That night, she walked. The darkness came on slowly, and then all at once. The trickling carried on for a time, then stopped as the free water turned to ice. The surface of the snow they passed by had changed. She saw already the texture of it shifting from smooth, unbroken white to a dirtier form, specked where the crystals had broken down and been remade. Beneath the surface would be paths of ice like the branches of inverted trees, clear and hard and cutting through the soft and white.
She could see them all around her, like spirits from the grave. Ice-souls returning for one terrible night before the thaw came in earnest and washed away living and dead alike. She heard their voices chattering like the meltwater and recognized as if from a great distance that she was dreaming. Asleep and walking at the same time. She was half surprised that knowing alone didn’t wake her, but it all went on as she pushed one foot out ahead of the other, and then again, and then again. Forever and only in the single, painful moment.
She observed her mind slowly falling apart, at first with horror and then with an almost childlike curiosity. It was like watching an animal being butchered for the first time, seeing all the bits of her self come apart. She didn’t realize she’d stopped walking until someone tugged her arm. In the darkness, Vincen was nothing more than a shadow and a scent. She would have known him anywhere.
“Can’t stop now, m’lady,” he said. His voice sounded rough. “Soup.”
“Soup,” she agreed, and she walked.
Dawn was turning the snow to indigo when the mountain began to glitter.
She thought at first it was another hallucination conjured by her failing mind, but one of the soldiers ahead of her lifted his arm and pointed. And then another. A ragged, sore-throated cheer rose until the commanders gestured for them to be quiet. It would be sad, after all, to have come all this way through all this terror, and be buried by an avalanche there before the candle-lit windows of the free city of Bellin.
In her little rooms carved from the living stone and heated by a single black iron brazier, Clara ate until she was nauseated, ached like she’d been beaten, and slept like a woman sick with the flu. It might have been half a day or half a month before her mind regained itself and her body found its strength again. She rose from a string-and-cloth cot that seemed grander just then than any bed she’d ever slept in. Thin windows carved into the stone wall filtered in a pale sunlight. She washed herself at the little tin basin for what felt like the first time in years and braided her still-wet hair. Bruises blotched her legs and arms, and she had no recollection of where they’d come from. Her leathers and wools vanished, she put on a thick wool robe the color of corn silk and a pair of boots picked by someone with a daintier imagination of her feet than her body could support.