On the path that led up a steep incline to the crumbling foot of the glacial shelf stood a hatless woman. She wore a rumpled, dirty uniform and grasped a bloody falcata in her gloved left hand. Her dark red hair was pulled back into a braid and pinned in a coil at the back of her head. Fresh red welts marked a sun-weathered face brushed with freckles. Blood oozed down her cheek and neck. Someone else’s blood was splashed across the front of her uniform coat, and drying blood soaked her knees, as if she’d knelt in blood. Her right sleeve was torn to ribbons, exposing a bleeding shoulder and arm. Her ragged breath came in gouts of mist in the freezing air.

Behind her a man with curly black hair as lush and thick as Bee’s knelt to crank back the ratchet of a crossbow. He had two bolts remaining in his quiver but no other visible weapon. Four dead dire wolves littered the path, marking the trail of a pursuit. About fifty steps above lay a dead man in a soldier’s kit. His corpse was mottled crimson, his belly slashed open and spilling guts. A dying wolf twitched beside him, pink spume riming its muzzle. A falcata had been thrust up to the hilt into its right eye, the tip sticking out through the back of its neck.

High up on the path, three shaggy wolves nosed into view, sniffing the air.

The woman spoke. “More are coming.”

The man looked first at her and then higher, up the trail, to the wolves. Both had muzzles smeared with viscera, as if they’d been eating. With the loaded crossbow, he rose to stand beside her. She was tall, big-boned, and confident in her strength even in the face of snarling death. He was a little shorter, with a build meant to be stocky but made lean by privation.

I recognized them. His youthful, smiling face adorned the portrait in my locket: Daniel Hassi Barahal, the man who considered himself my father. I had never seen any likeness of Tara Bell, but despite the dark red hair and blue eyes, she looked so like me that I knew she had to be my mother.

“If it’s necessary to hold a last rear guard to get the boat out, you and the others must leave me.” She spoke as a shopping woman with many more errands ahead might remark that the family could afford fish for supper but not beef.

“I think it unlikely we shall do so.” I admired the warmth of his laugh. He had deep lines at his eyes, the mark of a man who would rather joke than scowl. “Who will mend our clothes if we don’t have you to do it for us?”