“Symbols aren’t good for much if we can’t read the book,” Luna said.

Roh stared at the map for nearly an hour, flipping back and forth between the pages. The symbols showed up again – this time, each had their own page – later in the section, tucked into a corner on a page with more of the circular illustrations.

“Ora Dasai would know what this meant,” Roh said, frustrated.

“He isn’t here,” Luna said. “So we better figure this out.”

“I was supposed to die an old man in an orchard,” Roh said.

“I was supposed to marry a farmer,” Luna said. “Not everything happens the way it’s supposed to.”

Kadaan led their small party, and Roh only saw him at night after meeting with Luna, when they shared the same tent, but little else. Roh kept his hat on all the time. His bare scalp itched, and his ears burned with cold.

Roh had never known such a spare existence. They were mired by a windstorm over a frozen river whose breadth spanned a valley. They retreated inland and dug themselves into snow caves. They were stranded for a week, and killed and ate two of the bears. Kadaan cut everyone’s rations.

And at night… the nights were the worst. The sanisi and the bears patrolled the edges of the camp for the invaders. Most nights, they found them. Two sanisi died.

Then one morning, Kadaan took Roh to the top of an icy plateau and pointed north.

“There,” he said.

Roh gazed out over a white, ice-encrusted plain to the churning crush of ice floes in what must have been a harbor. There was a black spire jutting up from behind a pulsing gray wall. The frozen sea made eerie structures on three sides of the tower, great ice sculptures that clung to the hold as if carved by master craftspeople.

Kadaan sent a man ahead to scout. When he came back, he and Kadaan conferred for a few moments. Then Kadaan waved them all forward. “I’m afraid the invaders got there before us,” he said.

As they walked to the tower, bodies became visible within a hundred yards of the walls. The only reason they hadn’t seen them sooner was because the snow had claimed them, covering the churned-up ground, the bloody trails of the dying, the detritus of spent arrows and crossbow bolts, the discarded weapons of the dead.

As they neared, the frosty forms of the dead emerged from the snow heaps: a boot heel, the edge of a coat, a clawed fist frozen forever to the hilt of a weapon. The bodies had been so long on the tundra that they didn’t look real. They were pasty imitations of people, stiff and grotesque, bloodless.