Linny Marsh's Arc

Chapter 17 of 22

Linny walked south through snow that reached her shins. The ridge lay somewhere beyond three days of forest. Between her and the ridge was the country where the wood-and-ice creature had cornered her. She had seen its blue eye. She had felt it decide not to kill her yet. She did not think it would decide the same way twice. By noon she reached a dense stand of frost-laden trees. Icy branches laced the canopy overhead. The trunks stood close, the snow between them shallower where the boughs had caught it. She stopped at the edge and listened. Nothing moved. That was the problem. In this forest, nothing moving meant something watching. She knelt and scooped a handful of ash from her pocket, the last of last night's fire. She smeared it on her cheeks, her neck, the backs of her hands. It would not hide her scent. It might dull her shape against the bark. She cut a strip from her coat hem and tied it around her boots to muffle the crunch. The coat was down to the lining now. She went into the cluster. She kept to the trunks. She stepped only where a bough had dropped snow, so her prints sank into old falls, not fresh. She did not look for a straight path south. She looked for the path that kept the most wood between her and any open ground. Halfway through, she heard it. A crack, high up. Ice splitting on a branch. She froze against a trunk and did not breathe. The crack came again, closer. Then a third time, farther off. It was moving parallel to her, not toward her. It knew she was in the cluster. It was waiting for her to break south into open snow. She changed her mind. She turned west instead, deeper into the trees, and walked until the light began to fail. The cluster ended at a frozen streambed. She followed the streambed south under the overhang of its bank, where the snow was thin and her prints did not show. She walked past dark. She walked past feeling in her feet. She walked until the trees thinned and she could see, through the branches ahead, the long dark line of the ridge. She crouched in the last of the frostwoods and looked back. Nothing followed. No blue eye. No crack of ice. She had cut wide of it. She had traded a day and half her coat and every step of feeling in her toes, and she had cut wide of it. She crossed the open ground to the ridge at a run. She did not stop until she was over it. On the far side, the wind dropped. The snow was thinner. She sat down against a rock and pulled the four folded pages from her inside pocket and held them. She was going home. She was coming back.