The second the cold hit my naked skin, my body nearly doubled over, but I was quickly covered by the clothing donations from the others. I was swimming in them; even Diaval’s, who was short like me, hung from my body and sagged. But they were warm, and truly that was all that mattered.

“Are you okay, Janneke?” Seppo asked, concern filling his voice.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine. I don’t exactly know how I’m fine, but I’m fine.”

I turned to Soren, but he wouldn’t face me. His shoulders sagged forward, and he was muttering a string of curses under his breath. When I reached for the usual golden strings that tied us together in my mind, I found they had turned a dark, almost black, blue. I could barely breathe through the despair and loathing sitting on my chest as the scene of me falling in the ice went along over and over again in his head. His thoughts went past in a stream too fast for me to fully read—but I got the gist anyway. All insults. All directed toward himself.

I ached to talk to him, but we couldn’t do it on the gauntlet.

“We should start up again,” I said.

“You sure?” Diaval said. “You’re feeling up to it?”

“Doesn’t matter if she is,” Lydian said. “We can’t stay on this path. No shelter. We don’t want to be out in the open when it gets dark.”

With that, he began his delicate walk across the thin ice, and I followed with the others behind me. Soren was at the end of the train, almost dragging himself along. I winced at the sight.

“So, can you see them?” Lydian asked, not looking at me.

“See what?”

“Look at the ground.”

Scowling at his tone, I did as he said and looked at the ground. The icy ground and the wind blowing the frost around distracted me as it hid what looked like an invisible dome around us and anything blown by the wind redirected to above us and the other side below.

But that wasn’t what caught my eye. What caught my eye was the bloodred stain on the ground. Like someone had taken a paintbrush covered in blood and quickly applied it in a long line going forward, twisting and bending, until it was out of my sight.

“Those are the pathways you see,” I said to Lydian.

“And now you see them too,” he said. “If you look closely, you’ll see thousands of little lines coming out of everything, you, all the people around you, every tree, shrub, stone, and twig.”

“We don’t have stones, trees, shrubs, and twigs,” I responded, mainly to antagonize him.