Linny Marsh's Arc

Chapter 15 of 22

Linny walked south through the trees with the sun over her left shoulder. Her feet stopped hurting again an hour in. She stamped hard at every step, trying to feel the ground. She could not tell if her toes were still there inside the wraps. She pushed the thought down. Warmth first. She had to be under a roof before dark, or she would sit down in the snow and not stand up. A branch cracked behind her. Not wind. Wood on wood, slow and deliberate. She turned. Between two trunks stood a thing built out of the forest. Bark for legs. Antlers stacked with ice. Pale blue light ran under its hide like water under river ice. One eye burned the same color. It watched her without moving, the way the gray creature had watched her, but this thing was bigger and it was not kind. She ran. She ran clumsy on numb feet, slipping, catching herself on trunks. Behind her the wood-thing came at a walk that ate ground. She heard it breaking branches it did not need to break. It wanted her to hear. She saw the stand first as a dark square in the trees. A hunter's platform, old, three boards nailed to a pine, a rope ladder swinging beneath it. She hit the ladder at a run. The bottom rung snapped under her boot. She caught the next one with both hands and pulled. Her arms shook. Her wraps slipped. She got one knee up. A rope frayed and dropped her a foot before it held. She climbed the rest on her elbows and rolled onto the boards. Below her the creature stopped at the base of the tree. It lifted its head. The blue eye found her. It did not climb. It settled on its haunches in the snow and waited. Linny crawled to the far corner of the platform. She dug in her coat pockets. Two stubs of charcoal. A folded oil rag. She broke the rag into strips. She scraped bark off the boards with her knife into a small pile. She stacked her last dry kindling — three twigs and a splinter of pine — over the bark. She struck the knife against a flint stub. Sparks. Nothing caught. She struck again. The rag smoked. She bent low and breathed on it until her lungs hurt. A thread of flame took the bark. She fed the fire twig by twig. Her hands came back first. Then her face. She pulled off her boots and made herself look. Her toes were white at the tips but pink underneath. She had them. She still had them. Below, the wood-thing had not moved. It would wait out the night. Linny pulled her coat tight and fed the fire another sliver of charcoal. She had shelter. She had heat. She had her feet. The ridge was still south, and morning would come, and the thing at the base of the tree could wait as long as it liked.