Katsa built up the fire, slowly, and as she leaned over it, and as it grew, her shivering quieted. She looked at the girl, who sat on the ground, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her eyes closed, her face resting on her knees. Her cheeks streaked with tears. Alive.

“What a fool I am,” Katsa whispered. “What a fool I am.” She forced herself to her feet and pushed herself from tree to tree to collect more wood. Her bones ached, her hands and feet screamed with pain. Maybe it was for the best that she’d been so foolish, for if she’d known how hard this would be, perhaps she wouldn’t have done it.

She returned to their campsite and built the fire up more. Tonight the fire would be enormous; tonight they would have a fire all of Sunder could see. She shuffled over to the child and took her hands. She inspected the girl’s fingers. “You can feel them?” she asked. “You can move them?”

Bitterblue nodded. Katsa yanked at the bags, and groped inside them until she found the medicines. She massaged Raffin’s healing ointment into the girl’s cracked, bleeding hands. “Let me see your feet now, Princess.” She rubbed warmth into the girl’s toes and buttoned her back into her boots.

“You’ve made it across Grella’s Pass,” she said to Bitterblue, “all in one piece. You’re a strong girl.”

Bitterblue wrapped her arms around Katsa. She kissed Katsa’s cheek and held on to her tightly. If Katsa had had enough energy for astonishment, she would have been astonished. Instead, she hugged the girl back numbly.

Katsa and Bitterblue held on to each other, and their bodies crawled their ways back to warmth. When Katsa lay down that night before the roaring fire, the child curled in her arms, not even the pain in her hands and feet could have kept her awake.

Part Three

The Shifting World

Chapter Thirty-one

THE INN SAT in what passed for a clearing here in the south of Sunder, but would have been called a forest anywhere else. There was space between oaks and maples for the inn, a stable, a barn, and a patch of garden; and enough open sky to allow sunlight to flicker down and reflect the surrounding trees in the windows of the buildings.

The inn wasn’t busy, though neither was it empty. Traffic through Sunder was always steady, even at winter’s outset, even at the edge of the mountains. Cart horses labored northward pulling barrels of Monsean cider, or the wood of Sunder’s fine forests, or the ice of Sunder’s eastern mountains. Merchants bore Lienid tomatoes, grapes, apricots; Lienid jewelry and ornaments; and fish found only in Lienid’s seas, north from the Sunderan port cities, up into the Middluns, to Wester, Nander, and Estill. And southward from those same kingdoms came freshwater fish, grains and hay, corn, potatoes, carrots—all the things a people who live in the forests want—and herbs and apples and pears, and horses, to be loaded onto ships and transported to Lienid and Monsea.