Andana Frostedge's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Andana Frostedge dragged the man through the snow by his wrists, and the trail behind them ran red. She had found him slumped against a pile of broken branches at the edge of the pines, where someone had tried to build a fire and failed. The branches were too wet to burn. He had bled into them while he waited. She got him past her leaning wall and laid him by the fire pit at the center of the half-built waystation. Then she saw the wound under his coat, a deep gash along his ribs, already hot to the touch. She had nothing. No bandages, no herbs, no salve. She had been building walls all season, alone, because no one else placed shelters at the tundra's edge and people kept dying out here every winter. Walls did not stop bleeding. She pressed her palm to his side and felt him shake under her hand. His pack lay where she had dropped it. She tore it open. Inside was a folio of loose sketches, page after page of green-skinned faces drawn in charcoal, her own kind, rendered by a stranger's hand. Beneath the folio she found a small clay jar sealed with wax, and a roll of clean linen. He had been carrying his own cure and had not reached it in time. She broke the wax. The jar smelled of pine resin and fat. She did not know the maker or the recipe. She packed it into the wound anyway and bound him tight with the linen. She fed the fire until her face burned. Outside, something heavy moved through the snow, then stopped at the open side of the waystation. A furred animal stood there on too many short legs, a stout brown body watching her with calm eyes. It did not come closer. It did not leave. She let it watch. She had no strength left to chase it off, and it had no teeth bared. By dawn his fever broke. He slept. The bleeding had stopped. Andana sat against the leaning wall and looked at the sketches spread by the coals, at the faces of people she had never met who looked like her. The man would live. He would wake and speak and leave, and she would watch him until he was out of sight, the way she watched all of them. Then she would go back to the wall. One traveler had carried what he needed and almost died anyway. The waystation needed more than walls. It needed a shelf, and on the shelf, what she had not had tonight.