Well…not so scary. In the first days of her imprisonment (he hated it when she called it that), Meoraq had announced that they were each going to get two full wardrobes, which meant that not only did he want the two of them to pee in a bucket and keep it, but he also killed pretty much every animal he saw. She called it wasteful and kill-happy and bitched about it right up until the time they got snowed in for thirty-three days straight. They still had two whole xauts and half a kipwe packed in snow, and yet, when she’d left the cave this morning, she’d told him she was going hunting and he didn’t argue. He didn’t believe her—he’d made that plain with a hard stare and flat spines—but he didn’t argue.
They did a lot of not-arguing these days, which was not the same as not arguing, but it wasn’t arguing either, so that had to count for something. And arguing, she had discovered to her surprise, didn’t have to be the same as fighting. They hadn’t fought in forever, not even when they’d been snowed in for so long. This was due in large part to Secret Rule Number One: No matter what ass-headed thing he’s going on about, if his neck turns yellow, shut up and apologize. It worked, mostly. Oh, there were nights when they managed not to touch even in that narrow bed, but they always woke up tangled together. She wasn’t out here now because she was mad at him or felt like proving that he wasn’t the boss of her or anything like that. She just…wanted to see the road.
And now she wanted to climb down and stand in it.
So she did, creeping along with pained care. The wind had blown all the loose snow around, hiding all the nooks and juts where she needed a handhold, hiding deadly pockets of ice as well. She’d had a couple of bad falls just walking the well-traveled trail between the cave and their waterfall; she wasn’t getting stupid clear out here alone.
The snow at the bottom was hard and crusty on top, soft and slushy underneath. She balanced on its surface for only a second or two before punching through and sinking in past her knees. Undaunted, Amber pulled her snowshoes off her back and stepped into them. Now the snow held her.
She walked out a little ways, testing each and every step with her spear before she placed her snowshoe, but she didn’t go far. Snowshoes had been her idea and even her first clumsy pair had worked great, but they tricky to walk in and hell on her ankles. Looking at the pass, she tried to imagine using them not just for an hour or two—difficult enough—but for days on end.
She could do it, physically. She hated using the fucking things and she probably wouldn’t be able to stop bitching about them after the second day, but she could do it. What she wasn’t sure about was what would happen if they got two or three days out and then the snow started melting. Snowshoes did not work in slush.
Lost in thought, Amber did not see the thuoch until it was nearly on top of her, which could have been very bad except that it hadn’t seen her either. It trotted along the eastern slope in defiance of gravity, its long body rolling in its unnatural, humping gait. She watched it, admiring its effortless speed and slinky grace over the icy rock and snow.
When they’d first come to the mountains, the thuochs were still mostly brown, but now it was whiter than the old snow it walked on. Meoraq had killed two white thuochs for her, saving the pelts because he said he wanted to make her a ‘good’ coat. Better, presumably, than the overtunic she was wearing now, which she’d made from the kipwe hide. And which in all honesty looked like a total shit-cake after she’d scraped all the quills off, but it had been the first thing she’d ever made all by herself and she was proud of it, damn it. It didn’t need replacing, not even with a pretty, soft, white thuoch-fur coat. Although she could probably make a much better one now that she’d had some practice. And it would almost certainly be warmer.
No more than ten meters away, the thuoch finally saw her. It froze and immediately assumed a posture of defense and threat, all its fur spiking out to make it appear double in size. At the same time, its lower jaw dislocated and dropped open in an unnatural gape that had creeped her out tremendously the first time she’d seen it.
The thuoch shook its fur and yowled at her, but Amber didn’t move. She kept her spear in her hand and ready, in case the beast should decide to charge, but she didn’t think it would. She could see the two tiny black beads tucked away behind the thuoch’s bristling flank that were the eyes of its half-grown cub. Those eyes were the reason the thuoch wouldn’t charge across the treacherous ice. They were also the reason Amber wouldn’t take home her third winter-white thuoch pelt to finish her coat.
The two females stared each other down, but eventually the thuoch brought its jaws together. It slunk rapidly away to the western slope, snarling, keeping itself between Amber’s spear and its cub until they were out of sight.
The wind blew stale snow into their footprints. Amber watched until all hope of tracking them down was gone. At last, with a final wistful glance at the road, she turned around and headed home.
Home. She’d have to stop thinking of it like that. She wasn’t even sure when she’d started, but she had to admit that the little cave, with all its crude amenities, already felt more like home than her memories of any of the apartments she’d shared with Nicci and their mother. So far, she’d been able to stop herself from thinking too hard about what was going to be ‘home’ after this endless hike was over, but she could feel it creeping in a little more each day. Meoraq, of course, refused to speculate too wildly until God told him what He wanted them to do, but they’d had too many snowed-in days for her not to know about his home—his House—back in the west.
It unnerved her to think of it too deeply. Not just a city full of lizardmen, but just the house itself. The place he described…a wedge of the entire city from the outer wall to the inner ring, housing hundreds of families, thousands of people. There would be servants everywhere and so many rooms he couldn’t count them for her. And as much as she did not want to be wandering in this rainy wasteland full of man-eating porcupines forever, the idea of living in a place like that didn’t seem like much of an improvement. It was possible to avoid thinking about it for as long as they were stuck here, but once they were moving again…
Meoraq had admitted that he didn’t know precisely where the temple was, but he seemed to think it wasn’t far, once over the mountains. “Half a brace,” he kept saying, which meant eighteen days, give or take. Half a brace, unless something else happened, and he could finally stand there in his empty temple and meditate until he felt good about going home. Then she’d have to think about all those rooms and servants and lizardpeople everywhere she looked, but until then, she could still pretend she had options.
Until then, she could pretend they were leaving to look for Nicci.
The sun was getting low behind the clouds and the light was leaving at its usual alarming speed. Nocturnal mimuts were emerging from their craggy burrows, like furry footballs bouncing over the ice. Amber speared a few, drained them of the gross stuff, and tied them into a brace (half a brace and he’ll hear what he’s come to hear half a brace and i’ll have to give up on her forever half a brace) to carry them home.
Almost home.
Meoraq was by the fire when she came in, winding homemade sinew-thread onto a short length of stick. Restocking his mending kit, she was sure. Sometimes he went pretty far out of his way to keep busy, but this at least was something she could see the use of. Four sets of clothes made for a lot of sewing. There had been a good twenty-day stretch at the beginning when sewing, sex, and sleeping had been all they did. And fight, of course, but fighting had a way of turning into foreplay for Meoraq, which annoyed Amber no end if it was an argument she really cared about, so she’d learned to just let him be an arrogant ass…and he’d learned to let her be an unreasonable bitch, probably, but they made it work.
