She noticed the shivering then, the violent shivering, and panic consumed her, racked her dull mind awake. The child must not sicken now, not now that they were so close to safety. She reached back and grabbed Bitterblue’s boots. She screamed her name. But then she heard Bitterblue’s voice, crying something in her ear; and she felt the girl’s arms snake around her front and hold her tight. The line below her breasts where Bitterblue’s arms encircled her felt different suddenly. Warm, oddly warm. Katsa heard her own teeth chattering. She realized that it was not the girl who shivered. It was herself.

She found herself laughing, though nothing was funny. If she couldn’t even keep herself alive, there was no hope for the child. She shouldn’t have let this happen; she’d been mad to bring them into Sunder this way. She thought of her hands and held them up to her face. She opened her fingers, forced them to open, and cursed herself when she saw her white fingertips. She shoved her fists into her armpits. She willed her mind to think clearly, lucidly. She was cold, too cold. She must get them to the place where the trees started, so that they could have firewood, and protection from the wind. She must start a fire. Get to that place, and start a fire. And keep the child alive. Those were her needs, those were her ends, and she would keep those thoughts in her head as she ran.

BY THE TIME they reached the trees, Bitterblue was whimpering from numbness and cold. But when Katsa collapsed to her knees, the girl unwound herself from the halter. She fumbled to remove the wolf furs from her own back and wrapped them around Katsa’s body. Then she knelt before Katsa and tugged at the straps of the snowshoes with her chapped, bleeding fingers. Katsa roused herself and helped with the straps. She crawled out of the snowshoes and flung off the bags, the quiver, the halter, and the bow.

“Firewood,” Katsa said. “Firewood.”

The girl sniffled and nodded and stumbled around under the trees, collecting what she could find. The wood she brought back to Katsa was damp with snow. Katsa’s fingers were slow and clumsy with her dagger, unsteady with the shivering that racked her body. She had never in her life had difficulty starting a fire before, never once in her life. She concentrated fiercely, and on her tenth or eleventh try, a flame sparked and caught a dry corner of wood. Katsa fed pine needles to the flame and nursed it, directed it, and willed it not to die, until it licked at the edges of the branches she’d assembled. It grew and smoked and crackled. They had fire.

Katsa crouched, shivering, and watched the flames, ignoring fiercely the stabbings of pain they brought to her fingers and the throbbing in her feet. “No,” she whispered, when Bitterblue stood and moved away to find more firewood. “Warm yourself first. Stay here and warm yourself first.”