Exile

XIII

‘I’m done.’

Ammenor leaned against a twisted pine. It stood alone on exposed ground. The wind and cold had stunted and bent it.

They had been walking for a good hour. Wren did not know how these things usually went, but suspected that a single squirrel was a miserable haul. Ammenor hung his head and closed his eyes as he sucked in the mountain air.

Wren clasped the edges of her blanket about her neck. She rubbed at her cheeks. Her feet were almost numb now.

‘There are two more snares down there,’ Ammenor said.

He gestured towards the wide open, rock-strewn land ahead. Wren looked where he pointed, frowning in suspicion. She could guess what he was about to say and did not like it.

‘See that broken tree?’ he asked her. ‘The stump?’

Two or three hundred paces further on stood a chest-high stump of a tree that had been blasted by lightning or snapped by the wind. Wren said nothing.

‘There’s a snare on the far side of it. Then another the same distance on, in a straight line. It’s in a gap between two juniper bushes, beside a stream.’

He glanced at her expectantly. Still she said nothing.

‘I have good days and I have bad days,’ Ammenor said. ‘That’s what the entelechs get you. Today’s not as good a day as I thought it was.’

She felt a sliver of pity for him.

‘You can find your way back to the Cold Men?’ he asked her.

She thought about it and, not without reluctance, nodded.

‘Be kind enough to check the last snares for me,’ Ammenor said. The words hung in that imprecise space between statement, instruction and request, having a bit of each about them. ‘Do that and you can have another night of shelter and food.’

Wren did not know whether he was trying to lose her or whether he truly needed her help. In the end, she chose to believe the latter. And she did, she was sure, know her way back to his cottage so what harm could come of that belief?

‘Thank you,’ Ammenor said quietly as he pushed himself away from the tree.

She watched him walk heavily back the way they had come. He did look exhausted. His shoulders were low. His limp was worse, more marked, than it had been before. Wren pursed her lips. He might not be the man she had hoped and needed to find but that was not entirely his fault. He was who he was; it had been her dreams and longings that tried to make him something else. She could hardly blame him for not answering the question she had shaped her life into.

Then he glanced back over his shoulder and called out, ‘Gather some firewood on your way back, would you?’ And Wren decided she might be able to spare a little blame for him after all.

She found the first snare without any difficulty, there at the base of the blasted tree. Empty like all the rest.

The second was not so easy. Between juniper bushes beside a stream, Ammenor had said. The stream was nothing more than a feeble trickle in a tiny channel winding its way between turf and rocks. He had neglected to warn her that there were dozens of low, scrubby junipers strewn along its banks though. Dozens and dozens and dozens.

Wren doggedly kept searching longer than was entirely reasonable. She never found the snare. Beyond the little stream, the ground grew rough and uneven. It was a confusing muddle of rocks and grass and lichens and snow patches, all the different shades and textures conspiring to disorientate the eye. The sprawling junipers hid traps, and eventually she stubbed her toe, hard, on a stone.

Cursing, she straightened. For the first time since she had parted from Ammenor, she lifted her gaze towards the horizon. Until that moment she had been watching her footing, searching the ground. By coming down here she had emerged from the shielding wall of a long, high spur and could only now take in a huge sweep of the hills and mountains in a single glance. That was what she did, and as she did it she saw the Huluk Kur. All of them.