Andana Frostedge's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

Andana was banking the fire for the walk out when the beast screamed. It was a short, flat sound, not the noise it made for men. She dropped the poker and grabbed her knife. The small man sat up on his mat. The first man did not stir; she had put a heavy dose of root in his last cup. She shoved her feet into her boots and pushed through the door into the blue dark before dawn. The blizzard had thinned but the wind still cut. Snow blew in a low curling ribbon around the pen, and the ribbon carried the smell of wet fur. Tracks pressed the drift in a wide ring, four sets, maybe five, crossing and crossing again. One set came within a stride of the woven sticks. The pig-faced beast stood in the center of the pen with its head low and its yellow eye fixed on the far side of the wall. It was not still the way it went still for hunters. It was braced. She knew what losing the beast meant. Without it she could not tell the next lost traveler from the next sketch-carrier. The waystation would turn on her by spring. She ran back inside and grabbed every pitch-soaked stake she had cut for the roof line, an armful of them, and the striker from the hearth. She drove the stakes into the snow around the pen in a rough circle, close enough that a wolf would have to cross fire to reach the sticks. Her hands shook on the striker. The first stake caught, then the second. Wind killed the third twice before it took. She was working the fifth when a grey shape slid along the drift behind her, low and fast. She turned with the knife out. The shape stopped at the edge of the light and showed teeth. "Left of you." The voice came from the shed corner. The small man stood there in her spare coat, a short knife in his good hand. "Two more behind the woodpile. I smelled them from the door." He walked out to her, slow on his stiff legs, and set his back to hers at the pen wall. "Light the rest. I will watch the gap." She lit the sixth stake and the seventh. The ring closed. The grey shape backed off. Another yelped and broke for the trees. Inside the pen the beast let out a long breath and lowered its head to the straw. They stood in the torchlight until the sky went grey. The tracks stayed in the snow, but the wolves did not come back. Andana looked at the small man over her shoulder. He was steadier than he had been at her door. "Varek," he said, when she did not ask. "Snowscar. I can walk by noon." She nodded. She had kept the beast. She had also, without meaning to, kept him.