Veyra Flintstep's Arc

Chapter 11 of 14

The sled ran easy down the ridge. Veyra held the raptor's harness and watched the pole line shrink behind her. Twenty poles across the worst turn. Four blue strips on each. A cache stocked in the cliff crack below. She had come off the mountain with work done. She should have felt lighter. She did not. Giloa walked at her shoulder through the low pass. He noticed her face before she spoke. "You're chewing on something," he said. "If I fall in a crevasse tomorrow, no one finds the line." He walked three steps. "No." "The poles are up. The cloth fades in two winters. Who knows the order after me? Who knows the shelter is under the third pole from the shelf?" "I do." "And if we both fall." Giloa did not answer. That was answer enough. They reached the village by dusk. Veyra did not go to her own fire. She went to the shaman's hut and stood at the door until Shahndiin waved her in. Shahndiin sat cross-legged by a low flame, mixing something in a clay bowl. The blue names on her arms shifted in the firelight. "I need ink," Veyra said. "The kind that holds. And a hide. Something that won't rot." Shahndiin set the bowl down. "For what." "A map. Every pole. Every turn. The cache in the crack. The bad snow on the west face. If I die, someone else walks the road." Shahndiin studied her. "You have kept it in your head." "My head burns with me." Shahndiin rose. She took a folded skin from a shelf and a stoppered horn from a hook. She laid both in Veyra's hands. The horn was heavy. "The ink does not fade," Shahndiin said. "Draw once. Draw true." Veyra worked at the chieftain's long table that night, because the light was better there and because Barren Meadow let her sit without questions. Giloa sat across from her and named turns as she drew. The eastern pass first. The marked bend with its poles and cloth. Then the western ridge. The shelf. The worst turn. The twenty poles in order, each one numbered. The cliff crack, three paces east of the third pole. The bad face above the traverse. The line she had not yet marked, drawn as a dashed track waiting for spring. She finished near dawn. Her hand cramped around the reed. Giloa rolled the hide and tied it with a cord. "Two copies," he said. "Two," she agreed. She would draw the second tomorrow. One for the chieftain's hall. One for her own pack. The knowledge was out of her skull now. It lay flat on hide, in ink that would not fade. If she fell in the spring, the road would still be there. The line waited to be finished, but it would no longer die with her.