Andana Frostedge's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

The man slept by the fire pit while Andana followed his trail back through the snow. She walked an hour before she found the animal standing in the lee of a stand of pines, reins dragging, breath steaming in the cold. It was a tall beast, long-necked and goat-faced under a thick coat of fur, fitted with a saddle and heavy bags. It let her come close. She put a hand on its flank and felt it lean into her palm. Whoever had ridden it here had trained it to wait. She opened the saddle bags. Dried meat. A flask. A folded oilcloth. At the bottom, a worn leather pouch with a crown stamped into one corner, the seal of a kingdom she had only heard named in traders' talk, a place far to the south where green-skinned folk were stories, not neighbors. Inside the pouch were coins and a folded paper bearing the same seal in wax. She did not need to read it to understand. The sketches in his pack had not been a traveler's curiosity. Someone with money and a stamp had sent him north to find people like her. She crouched in the snow and held the pouch until her fingers ached. She led the animal back by a long route, breaking her own tracks where she could. At the waystation the man still slept. She watched him for a while. He might wake grateful. He might wake and write a report. She could not know which, and she could not wait to learn. She walked past the leaning wall to a thicket of scrub she had cleared brush from last summer, a dense tangle taller than she stood. Inside the thicket was a hollow she had never meant to use for anything. She worked through the afternoon. She cut a low frame from spare poles, lashed a door of split planks, and packed the walls with brush until the shape disappeared into the bush. From ten paces it was only a snarl of branches. She moved the sketches and the sealed pouch inside first. Then the saddle bags. Then she led the animal around behind the thicket and tied it where the pines would hide it from the open ground. When the man woke, he would find the waystation as he had left it, a fire pit and a leaning wall and a woman building shelter for the lost. He would not find his mount, his papers, or the drawings of her face. Andana stood at the small wooden door and pressed it shut. The waystation would still take in every traveler who came. The bush behind it would hold what the waystation could not afford to keep.