Sura's head jerked down; her jaw seemed to be swinging loose, the muscles in her cheeks slack. Erwal, watching in horror, felt as if she would faint; it was as if she saw the whole tableau, Sura, the child and the snow, from a great distance.

Sura opened the hands which had cupped the child's. Detached fingers lay like tiny jewels on Sura's callused flesh. The child whimpered, stirred against its mother. Sura jerked her hands back, so that the frozen pieces of flesh fell to the snow. She pulled her blanket tight around her and ran, oblivious to the drifting snow.

Erwal bent and scooped up the tiny fingers, the fragments of palm and wrist.

When she returned to the teepee, Damen had woken. Wrapped in a blanket, he held a pot of water over the fire with wooden tongs, and he scowled at the draught Erwal made. The smoke from the fire, disturbed, swirled around the teepee walls in search of the vent at the apex.

Erwal, wrapped in her furs, felt like something inhuman, a gigantic animal intruding into this place of warmth. She pushed away the furs, hauled off her frozen leggings and huddled near the fire; Damen wrapped a heavy arm around her until the shivering stopped. When the water boiled Damen poured it over fragments of mummy-tree bark. Erwal sucked at the thin, steaming tea.

Then she opened her hand.

Damen picked up one tiny finger. His face gray, he studied the tiny nail, the knuckle's bloodless termination. Then he took the rest of the fragments from Erwal and dropped them into the fire. "Whose child?"

"Borst and Sura; I met her at the tree stand with her slops. I have to go to her, Damen."

"Do you want me to come?"

"...No. It's best if I go alone, I think. You keep the teepee warm." She drank her tea, deeply reluctant to don her furs once more. "Damen, we can't go on like this. Every year is worse than the last. I suspect the trees are starting to die, and even the mummy-cows aren't immortal."

"I know, love. But what can we do? We have to survive until the Sun recovers, and then--"

"But what if it doesn't recover? It's been failing since your grandmother's day. Allel told us so herself. And now -- Damen, it's only early autumn, but the blizzard out there is blind; if we're not careful the teepees could be snowed over before the winter's out." She shivered, imagining tiny pockets of warmth lost in the snow, the humans within suffocating, cooling, calling to each other.

"The Sun will recover," Damen said wearily.

She said urgently, "But we don't have to wait here to die. Teal said--"

"No." He shook his massive head, his gray beard scraping over his chest.

"But he told us there was a way out of here," she insisted. "The Eight Rooms. He found them, saw them. Your grandmother believed him."