Andana Frostedge's Arc

Chapter 4 of 8

The man slept again after the soup, the scarf bunched under his hand. Andana stepped to the door and pushed it open a finger's width. The wind pushed back. The sky over the tundra had gone the color of wet iron, and the first hard flakes hit her face like sand. A blizzard was an hour out, maybe less. She turned and looked at the west wall. It leaned more than it had that morning. The top log had shifted a thumb's width toward the fire pit. If the wall went down in the night, it would fall on the man and the coals together. She pulled her furs tight and went out. Behind the shed she kept a heap of broken branches and twisted limbs she had dragged from the tree line over weeks. She hauled armloads of them to the leaning side and jammed the jagged ends into the snow at the wall's base. Then she went for the bigger pile, the one of cracked stone blocks tangled with old trunks. She rolled the heaviest stones one by one until her shoulders burned. She wedged trunks between the stones and the wall like braces on a broken leg. The wall stopped moving. It still leaned. It would not fall tonight. The fire was the next problem. Wind through the door gap would kill the coals by midnight. She carried more stones to the fire pit and built them up around the flames in a rough dome, leaving a low mouth at the front for feeding wood and a small hole at the top for smoke. She packed snow against the outside to seal the cracks. When she lit a fresh log inside, the flame steadied and pulled clean. Beside the pit she stacked what she had gathered that week: split pine, a bundle of dry boughs, two clay jars of melted fat, a sack of oats, and a covered pot of water. Enough for two people for one long night. The man's corner needed work. The blue sleeping roll sat too close to the leaning wall. Andana dragged her painted trunk from the far corner and set it lengthwise as a barrier between the roll and the propped wall. She pulled a second fur from inside the trunk and laid it over him. She moved the low board with the cup and bread to within his reach on the safe side. Now if the braces failed, the trunk would take the first weight, not his chest. The wind found the door and shoved it wide. Andana threw her shoulder against it and dropped the bar. The shed shook once and held. She stood with her back to the wood and listened. The propped wall creaked but did not move. The fire breathed inside its stone shell. The man slept on. She sat down by the oven mouth and watched him. The waystation had passed its first hard test. One wall still leaned, and the kingdom's man still slept under her roof with a false name in his ear. Morning would bring both problems back. The night was hers.