Andana Frostedge's Arc

Chapter 6 of 8

Andana sat between the two sleeping men until the wind dropped near dawn. The fire had burned low. She fed it and broke the seal on the leather tube she had taken from the small man's coat. Inside was a rolled parchment, soft at the edges from long carrying. She unrolled it across her knees and saw a coastline she knew, a route inked in heavy black, and four small crosses marked along the trail north. Four. Two had reached her door. Two were still out there. The map named the green-skinned settlements the southern kingdom believed it would find, and the route ended at her fire. She rolled the map tight and slid it back into the tube. She could not keep guessing. By spring, more would come. Some would be lost travelers who needed her wall and her coals. Some would be men with sketches of her face folded in their packs. If she could not tell one from the other, the waystation would become a trap she had built for herself. She had set two things outside the shed for this. The first was the bundle of dried moss and grass she kept stacked by the door, the kind a Sakari child was taught to lay on a host's fire as thanks for shelter. Any northern traveler would know to take a handful and bring it in. A southern man would walk past it. The second was the animal pen behind the leaning wall, where her shaggy pig-faced beast stood tied. The creature went still around men who carried harm. She had watched it do so twice already. She woke the small man first, because he was weaker and easier to read. She gave him water and asked him to fetch kindling from the bundle by the door before she fed him. He went out on stiff legs. Through the gap in the boards she watched him stop at the bundle, pull a fistful of moss, and tuck a sprig behind his ear the way a child would. The pig-faced beast did not flinch when he passed. A long blue-grey shape slid from under the woodpile, an eelmouse hunting in the thaw, and the small man stepped around it without a grab. He came back inside with the moss in both hands. She woke the first man next. She asked him the same favor. He pulled on his boots and went out. He walked past the bundle without a glance. At the pen, the shaggy beast lowered its head and stopped breathing. He stood at the door a long moment before he came back empty-handed and said he had not seen any kindling worth bringing. Andana smiled and poured him a cup. She knew now which one to keep and which one to lose on the trail. By noon she would walk the first man out under the sky and not walk him back.