Katsa was not tired. She felt the strength of her arms and legs and the quickness of her blade. She felt most acutely the slowness of their pace. At times she wanted to hoist the child over her shoulder and run up the mountainside at full tilt. But Katsa suspected that eventually on this mountain she would need every bit of her Graceling strength; and so she must not exhaust herself now. She curbed her impatience as best she could, and focused her energies on providing for the child.

THE MOUNTAIN LION was a gift, really, coming as it did at the beginning of the first true snowstorm they encountered.

The storm had been building all afternoon. The clouds knitted together. The snowflakes swelled and sharpened. Katsa made camp at the first possible place, a deep crevice in the mountain sheltered by a rocky overhang. Bitterblue went off to collect kindling, and Katsa set out, her dagger in her belt, to find them some dinner.

She struck a path upward, over the sheet of rock that formed the roof of their shelter. She headed into one of the clumps of trees that grew skyward on this mountain, roots clinging more to rock than to soil. Her senses were alert for any movement.

What she saw first was the slightest flicker, in the corner of her eye. A brown flicker up high in a tree, a flicker that curled and lifted, different somehow from the way a tree branch moved; and the limb of a tree that swung in an odd way—bounced, really, not as a wind would move it, but as if something heavy weighed it down.

Her body moved faster than her mind, recognizing predator and comprehending itself as prey. Instantly her dagger was in her hand. The great cat plunged, screeching, and she hurled the blade into its stomach. As she dropped and rolled away, its claws tore into her shoulder. Then the cat was upon her, great heavy paws slamming her shoulders against the ground and pinning her to her back. It came snarling at her, claws swiping and teeth bared, so fast that it was all she could do to keep her chest and neck from being ripped apart. She wrestled with its hopelessly strong forearms and swung her head away as its teeth came crashing together right where her face had just been. It slashed her breast savagely. When its teeth lunged for her throat Katsa grabbed its neck and screamed, pushed its snapping jaws away from her face. The animal reared above her and raked her arms with its claws. She saw a flash of something in its stomach, and remembered the dagger. Its teeth descended again and Katsa swung out, smashing its nose with her fist. It recoiled for the merest second, stunned, and in that second she reached desperately for the dagger. The cat lunged again, and Katsa thrust the dagger into its throat.

The cat made one horrible hissing, bubbling noise. Then it collapsed onto Katsa’s chest, and its claws slid away from her skin. The mountain was quiet, and the lion was dead.