I continue to check our surroundings as I move, listening carefully above the sound of his scrabbling, wary of the silence now that the breeze has stopped.
As I draw closer, the bright threads I spotted against the tree’s bark become clearer.
They look like spun silver. The finest metal.
But not heavy, like metal would be; some of the threads lift in the breeze.
I’m close enough to reach out and catch several in my hand to keep them from floating away.
That’s when I finally see what rests on the other side of the tree.
First, a pale shoulder and an arm, both bare and exposed to the elements. Then the side of a slender torso clothed in a beaded dress that catches the light, a garish sparkle in this place of death.
And strands of silver hair falling across a face that snatches the breath from my chest.
Her eyes are closed, her head is tilted toward her left shoulder, and her cheeks are pale.
I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as this woman.
Or as terrible as the thick streak of dried blood that extends from her forehead down the left side of her face.
Her chest rises and falls as she quietly breathes into the frosty air.
She’s still alive.
Chapter 4
Ihave to get her out of the snow.
Dropping to my knees beside Skirra, I dig frantically into the ice that’s piled up around the woman’s body and is currently burying her to her hips.
If I don’t free her, she’ll continue freezing to death.
I can’t yet tell where her legs might be. They could be stretched out in front of her or folded beneath her. Either way, the freshness of the snow built up around her waist tells me she was dumped here recently, probably in the night.
Whoever brought her here left her to die.
They would have known she was still breathing, but they fucking left her to perish. She can’t be any older than I am.
The burning fury that I’ve been pushing away since I first saw the bodies in this pit rises again. The heat of anger comes, once again, from my heart and the well of light that exists within it.
But always, I hear Father’s warning in my mind: Your deep light is finite. Once burned, it’s gone.
So again, I push it down.
The outline of the top of the woman’s legs becomes visible and it’s finally apparent that they’re folded beneath her.
But I also now realize that, while her right hand rests across her stomach, her left hand is fully submerged in snow.
Fingers and toes are the most vulnerable to the cold and the first to succumb to flesh death.
Her left hand could be black with it already.
If it is, the only way to stop the rot from entering her blood would be to cut off the affected limb.
Her feet are in danger too, but possibly less so because there’s a chance some of her body heat has filtered down to them.
The impulse to take hold of her torso and wrench her out of the snow is strong, but if I don’t free her hand first, the upward pressure could snap her frozen fingers right off.
