“Hey, I don’t trust that look,” said Breadlee as Fern snatched him and inspected his length with a critical eye. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”
She crumpled the paper and stuffed it under the tumble of logs. Setting the flat of his blade against the lip of the brazier, she briskly drew him back with a terrible rasp of Elder steel on stone. Blue-white motes of flame sheeted into the bowl, snapping and bouncing with cold fire.
“Ow! Youwerethinking it! Stop that! This is . . . this is sacrilegious!” howled Breadlee.
Fern ignored him, dragging him mercilessly against the stone and shedding fountains of sparks onto the paper and cold wood.
“Come on,” she hissed. “Light,you bastard.”
As though her command had been heard by a forgotten god of campfires, a thread of smoke puffed into being amidst a sudden burst of light.
She slumped onto one of the cold benches and stared with blurred vision into the growing blaze as the first tentative fingers of heat reached out to embrace them all.
“Sacrilege,”sulked Breadlee where she held him loosely in one paw.
“Oh, hush,” she mumbled and stuffed him into the pocket in her cloak.
The flames spread, crawling along the wood with increasing hunger as smoke twirled up and out the oculus to be torn apart by the wind.
“Good for you,” whispered Astryx. “You managed after all.”
The elf’s eyes were closed, but that wan smile had returned. Fern might have imagined it, but she thought the rasp in the Oathmaiden’s breath had eased a little. Her face seemed less bloodless, too, although perhaps that was only the effect of the growing glow of the flames.
Then Astryx’s hand slipped from her chest and flopped to rest against the floor.
The bracelet of wire on her wrist loosened even as Fern watched, as though the meager heat were melting it. With a metallicpopit sprang open and clattered to the stone.
Fern gasped and struggled back to her feet to do . . . well, she wasn’t sure what.
Zyll’s voice stopped her, though. “Is still live-ly.”
And Fern could see the feeble beat of blood in Astryx’s throat.
“Is time for sleep-ling,” said the goblin, who had crowded close to the fire. Her green nose was chapped and dripping, and she held her hands with fingers splayed toward the heat. Her own bracelet was still locked tight around her wrist.
Fern dimly wondered whether Zyll would disappear in the night. Then she decided that this was a concern for a Fern who was not stranded in a desolate mountain range with a half-dead elf and no reasonable idea of how any of them would survive the following day.
Gingerly taking her seat again, Fern tucked her cloak beneath her behind, for what little good that did. The heat slowly penetrated her fur, though, which began to steam. She wanted nothing more than to sleep as her eyes unfocused, lids fluttering against exhaustion.
“Fuck,” she muttered. Fern glared at her satchel on the floor nearby.
With more grunting than was strictly necessary she climbed down from the bench, then hauled the bag back up beside her to withdraw a sheaf of paper and a pencil with fingers just beginning to prickle with returning life.
Dear Viv,
I’m sorry.
—she wrote.
And if you are reading this, there’s this fucking orc I want you to kill.
Fern hadn’t intended much more than that, but in very little time, she filled three entire sheets of paper with lines crabbed by the cold.
She jammed her letter back into the satchel, which promptly slumped over beside her as though it were just as exhausted as she. She couldn’t be bothered to right it.
A huff of a laugh escaped Fern’s lips as she glanced to her left at the pile of scrap cloth and orange hair crowded against her ribs, wheezing and whistling in its sleep.
She was dimly aware of a flitter of paper as the rising heat drew breaths of icy air through the entryway, but was already collapsing to the side as a tide of weariness rose to consume her.
