Dagna Boulderback's Arc

Chapter 7 of 17

The strange marks kept Mikhael bent over the hide long after dark. He carved them into the blue ice, wiped them, and carved them again. Dagna watched from her furs. Each time he tried to read a mark aloud, she corrected him. Each time, his shoulders dropped a little lower. She saw the trouble. He knew the marks now. He needed to work them alone, without her voice at his ear. "Stop," she said. "You carve to please me. Not to learn." Mikhael set down the charcoal pen. "I don't want to make mistakes." "Mistakes are how the hand learns." She pushed herself up against the rock. Her heart knocked hard. "You need a place I'm not. A place with cold and quiet." He frowned. "There's no such place here." Dagna thought of the peaks. Then she remembered another spot. "There is. Half a day's walk. A cave my people carved. Old marks cover its walls. Real ones, cut in stone." She had not seen it in twenty winters. Her legs could not carry her there now. But his could. At dawn Mikhael loaded a sled. He took the sealed hides, the pens, and a clear block of blue ice for practice. Dagna walked him to the mouth of her hollow. The wolf watched from the frost. "Walk toward where the warm wind starts," she said. "The cave opens in the rock face. You'll know it. The stone around the door is carved deep." He hesitated. "You should come." "My heart won't climb." She gripped his arm. Her fingers shook. "Go. Cut the marks wrong a hundred times. No one watching. That's how you'll own them." He went. Dagna sat in the cold and waited two days. On the third night he returned. His face was raw with wind. A long cut crossed his cheek. Behind him, at the edge of the firelight, stood a white cat. Sabre fangs curved past its jaw. It watched Mikhael with pale eyes, but it did not creep closer. "It followed me from the cave," Mikhael said. "It kept its distance. I think it lives there." He dropped the sled and knelt by the fire. "Dagna. The walls. There are marks that match the strange ones on the hide. Whole rows of them." Her breath caught. "You read them?" "Some. Not all. But I worked alone." He pulled out the ice block. New marks covered it, cut clean, joined right. "I got them wrong twenty times. Then I got them." Dagna took the block in her hands. The joins held. He had done it without her. But the cat still watched from the dark. And the cave that could teach him now had a guard. Mikhael would need to go back. The knowledge she needed most was carved on walls a beast had claimed.