Andana Frostedge's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

The wolves were gone by dusk, but the hunter still slept inside the shed with root in his cup. Andana sat by the fire pit and watched Varek clean his knife. She had kept him alive. He had kept her beast alive. That balance had to hold one more day, because the hunter would wake at first light and start asking where his mount was. She told Varek what she needed. Someone had to walk the hunter off into the cold country tomorrow, on a wrong path, far from the shed. Varek set the knife down and said he would do it. He took a folded square from his inside pocket and pressed it into her palm. It was a child's map, soft at the creases, drawn in bright ink. Small houses. A blue lake. A dotted road between two hills. "A family gave me this," he said. "They wanted to know where I would take them. I have carried it for two winters." He closed her fingers around it. "You keep it until I come back. If I do not come back, it is yours." Andana pushed it into her coat against her ribs. She believed him then. A man does not lend that kind of thing lightly. They went out into the black cold with a lantern hooded low. Varek pulled a weathered signpost from behind the woodpile, three painted arrows on a stake, the kind traders nailed at crossings. He had scraped the letters himself. He drove the post into a drift at the mouth of the wrong draw, pointing north and east, away from every green village he knew. Then he walked backward from the post in a wide, wandering line, pressing boot prints into the crust. He set them uneven, the way a tired man walks. He scuffed one heel. He dropped a torn strip of cloth on a bush. Back inside, Varek opened his journal at the fire and wrote by the low light. He copied a false route in his own hand, with landmarks that did not exist and crossings that led to open ice. He wrote a start time for the morning and a note about a green village two days out. He left the journal open on the trunk where the hunter would find it when he searched the shed. Andana watched the ink dry. She checked the child's map against her ribs again. It was past midnight when they finished. Varek sat against the leaning wall and closed his eyes. Andana banked the coals. The hunter breathed slow under the root. The false prints were laid. The sign stood in the drift. The journal waited on the trunk. In four hours Varek would rise, wake the hunter with a story about a fresh trail, and walk him out. Andana pressed her hand flat over the folded map and let herself, for the first time in weeks, plan past tomorrow.