Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 24 of 39

Elaria stepped off the packed drift and onto open ice. The wind hit her at once. It cut through her coat and pulled heat from her hands. In the crook of her arm she carried the ice cooler she had shaped from her own cold, its frostcloth lining sealed under a hinged lid. Inside, the sprite lay quiet. The blue thread in Lia's chest was thinner than it had been at the shelter. Elaria walked. The slope was long and slick. She kept her eyes on the far spire — a stone cross set with pale crystals that caught what light the sky gave. It marked the chapel roof. It did not seem closer. At a hundred paces she checked the cooler. A seam along one wall had gone glassy and wet. Her body's heat was leaking through the ice she had made. The frostcloth beneath her arm was damp. Lia's wings had lost their edge. The container was failing. Elaria set the cooler on the snow and pulled cold from her palm again. She patched the seam, thickened the lid, ribbed the sides. It cost her. Her fingers went numb past the knuckle. When she lifted the cooler she staggered. She could not stop again. The patch would hold for minutes, not more. She ran. The slope tipped and she slid the last stretch on her heels, one arm braced across the lid. Halfway down she stopped and gathered loose blocks of glacier ice from a broken ridge. She stacked them fast — six, eight, ten — and drove her knife shaft into the top with a strip of her under-tunic knotted to it. The cloth froze stiff in the wind. A marker. If she fell, if someone came, the line back to the shelter would be plain. Then she ran again. The cross grew. She could see the chapel walls now, blue stone banked with drift, a low door half-buried. The cooler wall clouded under her arm. She heard nothing from inside it. She reached the door and threw her shoulder against it. The snow gave. She fell through into still air. The wind cut off. The dark inside was warmer than the slope by only a few degrees, but it was enough. She set the cooler on the stone floor and opened the lid. Lia lay curled, small, dim. Elaria packed the lining with fresh snow from the doorway and shaped a new inner shell around the sprite with what cold she had left. The blue thread held. Then it brightened. One notch. Two. Elaria sat back against the wall. Her hand would not close. The crystal in her coat pressed against her ribs. She had reached shelter. Lia was alive. Outside, the wind rose. Somewhere under her coat, the warmth crystal had begun, very faintly, to grow warm.