Anji hadn’t seen Oliver in days, cooped up in the basement as they were. After what felt like an eternity the snow and ice had receded, and with reluctant permission from her parents she’d ventured outside to find him. She’d opened the door, creaking and crackling with melting ice still clinging to the wood, and stepped out to find the cat stiff against the brick wall of the shop across the alley. She’d just been reaching toward his ice-coated fur when her mother appeared and snatched her wrist away. But at the sight of Anji’s stricken face, she’d pulled her into a hug and let Anji cry into her shirt.

Anji had tossed and turned on her pallet in the loft at home, waiting for the release of sleep, but hardly finding it. Oliver’s lonely, frozen form stained her memory from then on. She could see it still, even trudging up the sheer incline of the mountain underfoot, and wondered whether Oliver had been as cold as she was now, at the end.

It had been her fault, of course, not bringing him in, letting him die alone and scared with her so close. She’d begged her parents to let her out to look for him, but they’d refused. She should have ignored them and done the right thing, but she hadn’t. And now Molli was dead because of her. If they’d just gone up the pass when the Hawk had told them to, if they’d just left before the storm and the spiders and the vortex had hit, if she’d just been a little bit less concerned for her own comfort, the horse may have lived. They could have made progress away from the storm and still let her rest, in the lee of one of the large rocks they’d already passed, in the shadow of what looked to be ruins looming ahead. The only consolation to Molli’s death was the fact that the poor horse didn’t have to freeze her ass off alongside Anji any longer.

The Hawk had directed them up the slope, past rocky outcroppings growing heavier with snow until they’d found a long, crooked trail that ran the length of a deep chasm yawning to Anji’s right. Another mountain towered across the gap, its crenellations glowing orange as the sun sank toward the western horizon.