Andana Frostedge dragged the man through the snow by his wrists, and the trail behind them ran red. She had found him slumped against a pile of broken branches at the edge of the pines, where someone had tried to build a fire and failed. The branches were too wet to burn. He had bled into them while he waited. She got him past her leaning wall and laid him by the fire pit at the center of the half-built waystation. Then she saw the wound under his coat, a deep gash along his ribs, already hot to the touch. She had nothing. No bandages, no herbs, no salve. She had been building walls all season, alone, because no one else placed shelters at the tundra's edge and people kept dying out here every winter. Walls did not stop bleeding. She pressed her palm to his side and felt him shake under her hand. His pack lay where she had dropped it. She tore it open. Inside was a folio of loose sketches, page after page of green-skinned faces drawn in charcoal, her own kind, rendered by a stranger's hand. Beneath the folio she found a small clay jar sealed with wax, and a roll of clean linen. He had been carrying his own cure and had not reached it in time. She broke the wax. The jar smelled of pine resin and fat. She did not know the maker or the recipe. She packed it into the wound anyway and bound him tight with the linen. She fed the fire until her face burned. Outside, something heavy moved through the snow, then stopped at the open side of the waystation. A furred animal stood there on too many short legs, a stout brown body watching her with calm eyes. It did not come closer. It did not leave. She let it watch. She had no strength left to chase it off, and it had no teeth bared. By dawn his fever broke. He slept. The bleeding had stopped. Andana sat against the leaning wall and looked at the sketches spread by the coals, at the faces of people she had never met who looked like her. The man would live. He would wake and speak and leave, and she would watch him until he was out of sight, the way she watched all of them. Then she would go back to the wall. One traveler had carried what he needed and almost died anyway. The waystation needed more than walls. It needed a shelf, and on the shelf, what she had not had tonight.

The man slept by the fire pit while Andana followed his trail back through the snow. She walked an hour before she found the animal standing in the lee of a stand of pines, reins dragging, breath steaming in the cold. It was a tall beast, long-necked and goat-faced under a thick coat of fur, fitted with a saddle and heavy bags. It let her come close. She put a hand on its flank and felt it lean into her palm. Whoever had ridden it here had trained it to wait. She opened the saddle bags. Dried meat. A flask. A folded oilcloth. At the bottom, a worn leather pouch with a crown stamped into one corner, the seal of a kingdom she had only heard named in traders' talk, a place far to the south where green-skinned folk were stories, not neighbors. Inside the pouch were coins and a folded paper bearing the same seal in wax. She did not need to read it to understand. The sketches in his pack had not been a traveler's curiosity. Someone with money and a stamp had sent him north to find people like her. She crouched in the snow and held the pouch until her fingers ached. She led the animal back by a long route, breaking her own tracks where she could. At the waystation the man still slept. She watched him for a while. He might wake grateful. He might wake and write a report. She could not know which, and she could not wait to learn. She walked past the leaning wall to a thicket of scrub she had cleared brush from last summer, a dense tangle taller than she stood. Inside the thicket was a hollow she had never meant to use for anything. She worked through the afternoon. She cut a low frame from spare poles, lashed a door of split planks, and packed the walls with brush until the shape disappeared into the bush. From ten paces it was only a snarl of branches. She moved the sketches and the sealed pouch inside first. Then the saddle bags. Then she led the animal around behind the thicket and tied it where the pines would hide it from the open ground. When the man woke, he would find the waystation as he had left it, a fire pit and a leaning wall and a woman building shelter for the lost. He would not find his mount, his papers, or the drawings of her face. Andana stood at the small wooden door and pressed it shut. The waystation would still take in every traveler who came. The bush behind it would hold what the waystation could not afford to keep.

Andana came back from the thicket with cold hands and a problem she could not outrun. The man would wake soon. He would feel for his pack, his pouch, his sketches, and find none of them. If he asked her where they had gone, she had no answer ready that did not begin with a lie. She crouched by the fire pit and watched his chest rise. She could not invent a thief out here, where the snow held no tracks but her own. So she would not explain the missing things at all. She would give him so much care that asking felt rude. She pulled her own sleeping roll from the corner and unrolled it beside him, the thick blue one with the two pillows she had carried up from the south years ago. She eased him onto it and tucked the folds around his shoulders. Then she set a low board within reach of his right hand. On the board she placed a cup of clear water, three slices of yesterday's bread, and a small bowl of lentil soup kept warm by the coals. She tasted the soup herself to be sure it was not too hot. A patient woke to food. A prisoner woke to questions. The scarf was harder. She took it from the chest under the leaning wall and held it a moment before laying it across the foot of the roll. It was hers, the only soft thing she owned, embroidered in pink and blue by a woman whose name she had stopped saying aloud. It still smelled of the chichewa bark she packed it in against moths. She folded it once and set it where his hand would find it when he reached for the cup. Let him think a kind woman lived here. Let him build that woman in his head before he built any other. He stirred near dusk. Andana sat across the fire with her hands open on her knees so he would see them first. His eyes opened, found the cup, the bread, the bowl. Found the scarf. He touched the embroidery with two fingers and brought them to his nose. Something in his face loosened. He looked at her and said thank you in a southern accent, careful and low. She nodded and passed him the water. He drank. He did not ask about his pack. He did not ask about his animal. He asked her name, and she gave him one, and the lie set clean between them like a stone laid in a wall. The waystation had its first guest, and Andana had bought herself another day to decide what he was.

The man slept again after the soup, the scarf bunched under his hand. Andana stepped to the door and pushed it open a finger's width. The wind pushed back. The sky over the tundra had gone the color of wet iron, and the first hard flakes hit her face like sand. A blizzard was an hour out, maybe less. She turned and looked at the west wall. It leaned more than it had that morning. The top log had shifted a thumb's width toward the fire pit. If the wall went down in the night, it would fall on the man and the coals together. She pulled her furs tight and went out. Behind the shed she kept a heap of broken branches and twisted limbs she had dragged from the tree line over weeks. She hauled armloads of them to the leaning side and jammed the jagged ends into the snow at the wall's base. Then she went for the bigger pile, the one of cracked stone blocks tangled with old trunks. She rolled the heaviest stones one by one until her shoulders burned. She wedged trunks between the stones and the wall like braces on a broken leg. The wall stopped moving. It still leaned. It would not fall tonight. The fire was the next problem. Wind through the door gap would kill the coals by midnight. She carried more stones to the fire pit and built them up around the flames in a rough dome, leaving a low mouth at the front for feeding wood and a small hole at the top for smoke. She packed snow against the outside to seal the cracks. When she lit a fresh log inside, the flame steadied and pulled clean. Beside the pit she stacked what she had gathered that week: split pine, a bundle of dry boughs, two clay jars of melted fat, a sack of oats, and a covered pot of water. Enough for two people for one long night. The man's corner needed work. The blue sleeping roll sat too close to the leaning wall. Andana dragged her painted trunk from the far corner and set it lengthwise as a barrier between the roll and the propped wall. She pulled a second fur from inside the trunk and laid it over him. She moved the low board with the cup and bread to within his reach on the safe side. Now if the braces failed, the trunk would take the first weight, not his chest. The wind found the door and shoved it wide. Andana threw her shoulder against it and dropped the bar. The shed shook once and held. She stood with her back to the wood and listened. The propped wall creaked but did not move. The fire breathed inside its stone shell. The man slept on. She sat down by the oven mouth and watched him. The waystation had passed its first hard test. One wall still leaned, and the kingdom's man still slept under her roof with a false name in his ear. Morning would bring both problems back. The night was hers.

The wind came in full an hour later. It shook the door against the bar and pushed snow through every gap in the wall. Andana fed the fire through the low mouth of the stone dome and watched the man sleep. The shed held. She had begun to believe she would only have to keep one secret tonight. Then the pounding started. The blows were low on the door, weak, then weaker. Andana stood. The man on the floor did not stir. She lifted the bar a finger's width and put her eye to the gap. A shape was slumped against the carved wooden staff she had driven into the snow as a marker at the entrance. The staff was painted in pale blue and pink, the only bright thing for miles, and a gloved hand was wrapped around its shaft. The pounding came again from a fist she could barely see. She knew the choice the second she opened the gap. If she left the door barred, the stranger died on her threshold before morning. If she pulled him in, he would see the sleeping man across the fire and the sleeping man would see him. Two strangers under one roof, and one of them carrying sketches of her face. She thought of the propped wall, the stone dome, the oats. Enough for two for one night. Not three. She lifted the bar and dragged him in by the shoulders. He was small and stiff. Snow caked his beard. A cardboard box was crushed under his coat against his chest, the printed animals on its side soaked dark, the crackers inside broken to dust. She set him down by the fire mouth, far from the painted trunk and the sleeping man's corner. When she pulled his coat open to check for frostbite, a sealed leather tube slid out of an inside pocket. She knew the seal before she touched it. The same southern mark as the pouch in the thicket. A second one. They had sent a second one. Andana sat back on her heels. The first man slept on, his hand still on her scarf. The new man's chest rose, shallow but steady. She slid the leather tube under her own furs against her ribs. Then she dragged him by the boots into the narrow space between the stone fire dome and the braced wall, where the dome's bulk would block the line of sight from the sleeping roll across the room. She piled a fur over him so only his face showed to the heat. When the first man woke, he would see a half-dead traveler by the fire. He would not see the tube, and he would not see the box. Not yet. She barred the door again and sat down between the two sleeping men. The night was no longer hers.

Andana sat between the two sleeping men until the wind dropped near dawn. The fire had burned low. She fed it and broke the seal on the leather tube she had taken from the small man's coat. Inside was a rolled parchment, soft at the edges from long carrying. She unrolled it across her knees and saw a coastline she knew, a route inked in heavy black, and four small crosses marked along the trail north. Four. Two had reached her door. Two were still out there. The map named the green-skinned settlements the southern kingdom believed it would find, and the route ended at her fire. She rolled the map tight and slid it back into the tube. She could not keep guessing. By spring, more would come. Some would be lost travelers who needed her wall and her coals. Some would be men with sketches of her face folded in their packs. If she could not tell one from the other, the waystation would become a trap she had built for herself. She had set two things outside the shed for this. The first was the bundle of dried moss and grass she kept stacked by the door, the kind a Sakari child was taught to lay on a host's fire as thanks for shelter. Any northern traveler would know to take a handful and bring it in. A southern man would walk past it. The second was the animal pen behind the leaning wall, where her shaggy pig-faced beast stood tied. The creature went still around men who carried harm. She had watched it do so twice already. She woke the small man first, because he was weaker and easier to read. She gave him water and asked him to fetch kindling from the bundle by the door before she fed him. He went out on stiff legs. Through the gap in the boards she watched him stop at the bundle, pull a fistful of moss, and tuck a sprig behind his ear the way a child would. The pig-faced beast did not flinch when he passed. A long blue-grey shape slid from under the woodpile, an eelmouse hunting in the thaw, and the small man stepped around it without a grab. He came back inside with the moss in both hands. She woke the first man next. She asked him the same favor. He pulled on his boots and went out. He walked past the bundle without a glance. At the pen, the shaggy beast lowered its head and stopped breathing. He stood at the door a long moment before he came back empty-handed and said he had not seen any kindling worth bringing. Andana smiled and poured him a cup. She knew now which one to keep and which one to lose on the trail. By noon she would walk the first man out under the sky and not walk him back.

Andana was banking the fire for the walk out when the beast screamed. It was a short, flat sound, not the noise it made for men. She dropped the poker and grabbed her knife. The small man sat up on his mat. The first man did not stir; she had put a heavy dose of root in his last cup. She shoved her feet into her boots and pushed through the door into the blue dark before dawn. The blizzard had thinned but the wind still cut. Snow blew in a low curling ribbon around the pen, and the ribbon carried the smell of wet fur. Tracks pressed the drift in a wide ring, four sets, maybe five, crossing and crossing again. One set came within a stride of the woven sticks. The pig-faced beast stood in the center of the pen with its head low and its yellow eye fixed on the far side of the wall. It was not still the way it went still for hunters. It was braced. She knew what losing the beast meant. Without it she could not tell the next lost traveler from the next sketch-carrier. The waystation would turn on her by spring. She ran back inside and grabbed every pitch-soaked stake she had cut for the roof line, an armful of them, and the striker from the hearth. She drove the stakes into the snow around the pen in a rough circle, close enough that a wolf would have to cross fire to reach the sticks. Her hands shook on the striker. The first stake caught, then the second. Wind killed the third twice before it took. She was working the fifth when a grey shape slid along the drift behind her, low and fast. She turned with the knife out. The shape stopped at the edge of the light and showed teeth. "Left of you." The voice came from the shed corner. The small man stood there in her spare coat, a short knife in his good hand. "Two more behind the woodpile. I smelled them from the door." He walked out to her, slow on his stiff legs, and set his back to hers at the pen wall. "Light the rest. I will watch the gap." She lit the sixth stake and the seventh. The ring closed. The grey shape backed off. Another yelped and broke for the trees. Inside the pen the beast let out a long breath and lowered its head to the straw. They stood in the torchlight until the sky went grey. The tracks stayed in the snow, but the wolves did not come back. Andana looked at the small man over her shoulder. He was steadier than he had been at her door. "Varek," he said, when she did not ask. "Snowscar. I can walk by noon." She nodded. She had kept the beast. She had also, without meaning to, kept him.

The wolves were gone by dusk, but the hunter still slept inside the shed with root in his cup. Andana sat by the fire pit and watched Varek clean his knife. She had kept him alive. He had kept her beast alive. That balance had to hold one more day, because the hunter would wake at first light and start asking where his mount was. She told Varek what she needed. Someone had to walk the hunter off into the cold country tomorrow, on a wrong path, far from the shed. Varek set the knife down and said he would do it. He took a folded square from his inside pocket and pressed it into her palm. It was a child's map, soft at the creases, drawn in bright ink. Small houses. A blue lake. A dotted road between two hills. "A family gave me this," he said. "They wanted to know where I would take them. I have carried it for two winters." He closed her fingers around it. "You keep it until I come back. If I do not come back, it is yours." Andana pushed it into her coat against her ribs. She believed him then. A man does not lend that kind of thing lightly. They went out into the black cold with a lantern hooded low. Varek pulled a weathered signpost from behind the woodpile, three painted arrows on a stake, the kind traders nailed at crossings. He had scraped the letters himself. He drove the post into a drift at the mouth of the wrong draw, pointing north and east, away from every green village he knew. Then he walked backward from the post in a wide, wandering line, pressing boot prints into the crust. He set them uneven, the way a tired man walks. He scuffed one heel. He dropped a torn strip of cloth on a bush. Back inside, Varek opened his journal at the fire and wrote by the low light. He copied a false route in his own hand, with landmarks that did not exist and crossings that led to open ice. He wrote a start time for the morning and a note about a green village two days out. He left the journal open on the trunk where the hunter would find it when he searched the shed. Andana watched the ink dry. She checked the child's map against her ribs again. It was past midnight when they finished. Varek sat against the leaning wall and closed his eyes. Andana banked the coals. The hunter breathed slow under the root. The false prints were laid. The sign stood in the drift. The journal waited on the trunk. In four hours Varek would rise, wake the hunter with a story about a fresh trail, and walk him out. Andana pressed her hand flat over the folded map and let herself, for the first time in weeks, plan past tomorrow.