Veyra Flintstep's Arc

Chapter 9 of 14

The storm broke on the second morning. Veyra pushed the sled aside from the mouth of the crack and looked out. The slope had changed. The shelf was gone, spread down the ridge in a fan of hard snow. The trail below was buried. The way up was open. She turned back into the cache and counted what they had used. Two torches from the bundle. One jar of pitch, half gone. A quarter of the dried meat. A handful from the salted sack of lingonberries and pine nuts they had opened the first night. The frostward vial Shahndiin had pressed into her pack sat untouched on the shelf. She had not needed it. The next traveler might. Giloa came up beside her and looked at the shelves. "Thin," he said. "Thin," Veyra said. What the old guard had left would not carry a stranger through a storm like the one they had just sat out. Not now. If she loaded the sled and rolled out with what remained, the next person who crawled into this crack would find bread and no fire, or fire and no food. They would die a foot from the wall. She sat on her heels and worked it out. They had climbed the ridge to plant poles. The poles were still stacked along the wall, forty of them, and the dye bundles under the shelves. That was the work. But the work would kill someone if she left the shelter bare behind her. "We split the load," she said. "Half the poles go up. Half stay. We come back with more." Giloa did not answer at once. He looked at the sky through the crack. "Season's short." "I know." "Twenty poles won't mark the traverse." "Twenty poles will mark the worst of it. The rest waits." He thought about it, then nodded once. He began pulling poles off the stack and setting aside twenty for the sled. Veyra opened her own pack. She set out the strips of dried meat she had carried for the climb and stacked them on the shelf. She set the sack of lingonberries and pine nuts beside them. She placed Shahndiin's vial upright against the wall where a cold hand would find it. Giloa watched her without speaking. Then he unslung his own pack and added a coil of tinder and a folded hide. They harnessed the raptor and tipped the blue sled out through the mouth of the crack. The load was lighter now. The raptor took the grade without straining. Veyra looked back once at the dark seam in the cliff. It held enough for one traveler through one storm. That was what a waystation was. She would need to come back before the season closed. She would need more than she had. But for now, she needed to clearly mark the half-hidden entrance with the blue strips. No one would die in that crack this winter.