Dusty Spellwood's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The bay carried Dusty deeper into the glacier's shadow. The colored hoofprints held for another mile. Then the wind came off the ice wall in a hard, flat sheet, and the snow under him lifted and moved like a river. When it settled, the crust was smooth again. No prints. No brand-light. Nothing. Dusty pulled the bay up. He turned in the saddle. Behind him, his own tracks were already filling. Ahead, only white. The warmnight blooms on his hem still gave off heat, but the sun sat low, and the cold pressing on his face had teeth now. An hour, maybe less, before dark. He climbed down and walked a slow circle, hunting any dent in the crust. He found nothing. He tried a wider circle. Still nothing. The stallion's trail was gone, and with it his reason to be alive out here. He was about to swing back up when he saw the petal. It lay on the snow ten paces off, pink, curled at the edge, out of place as a coin in a river. He walked to it. Past it, another. Then a scatter of blue and red petals, running in a soft, winding line across the crust, away from where the wind had scoured the trail bare. He knew warmnight blooms when he saw them. These were the same petals stitched into his hem. Someone had laid a path. Dusty led the bay along it. The petals curved between two pressure ridges and dropped into a small hollow. There, tucked against the ice like it had grown out of the glacier itself, stood a cabin. Stacked ice blocks. Weathered timber beams. A crooked stovepipe. Warm light bled from a small square window. He was thirty feet off when the door opened and a puppy tumbled out into the snow. Brown and white, ears too big, tail going. It planted itself in front of the bay and barked once, pleased with itself. Dusty crouched. The puppy shoved its cold nose into his palm. Behind it, the doorway stayed open, but no one stepped out. He looked past the puppy at the dark inside the cabin and felt his stomach tighten. Someone lived here. Someone had strung petals across a glacier for a lost rider to follow. He looked back the way he had come. His tracks were gone. The stallion's trail was gone. The sun was a red line on the ice. He tied the bay to the timber post beside the door. He unstitched one warmnight bloom from his hatband and tucked it behind the puppy's ear, so he'd know it again. Then he picked the puppy up, stepped over the threshold, and shut the door behind him. He had lost the stallion. He had found something else, and he did not yet know whose house he was standing in.