Sky. Snow. Sky. Rock. Kiem heard himself yelling. On one frantic, painful rotation he caught sight of the black shape shooting through the air over them—

it had miscalculated the tackle. He tried to yell again, but one of the rocks knocked the breath out of his lungs. On his next glimpse he saw the bear land on the snow and scuttle away into the trees.

Jainan pushed himself up the moment they stopped, a stone’s throw from a stand of trees. “What was that?” he said, fighting for breath. “It moved like a lizard!”

“Bear,” Kiem said, looking around warily for anything that could be used as a weapon. “Let’s back off slowly—it’s got our scent now, it’ll come back.”

“That’s not a bear!”

“Pretty sure it couldn’t be anything else!” Kiem said. “Quick, we need a rock, or a—”

“Here.” Jainan pushed the end of what seemed like an entire fallen tree branch into Kiem’s hand.

“What—right,” Kiem said. He examined the branch, keeping a wary eye on the trees where the bear had disappeared. “I guess we can wave sticks. If we’re threatening enough, it should leave us alone—Jainan?”

“Just over here,” Jainan said, from a few yards away. He had picked up another branch and was methodically stripping it of twigs and leaves.

Kiem spun around at another sound, but it was just snow shifting in the groove gouged by their fall. “Okay, I think we should really get away from the trees.” The back of his head hurt and he’d pulled something in his leg. The bear was presumably skulking somewhere in the copse, but they hadn’t hurt it, so it

would still think of them as easy prey. “Into the open. Down here.” He pointed down the slope, where a wide swathe of open space stretched between two straggling edges of a pine wood. There was a frozen river running along one side of it.

Jainan came away from the trees, weighing the branch in his hands. “Is that ice going to hold us?”

“We don’t have to cross it,” Kiem said. “Just follow its banks so it can’t come up behind us. Let’s go.” He waved Jainan in front of him and followed him, checking back over his shoulder every couple of steps. “If you see it, yell and look threatening. It’s not that dangerous if we can scare it off.”

“Not that dangerous,” Jainan repeated. He grounded the end of the stick beside him as he walked, while Kiem kept his—still with the leaves on—raised by his side, in the hope that looked threatening. “But that one attacked us. Do these things kill people?”

“Sometimes,” Kiem said. “Occasionally.”

“So, yes,” Jainan said. His hand moved over the branch restlessly. “You could have mentioned these before.”

“I didn’t think we’d meet any!” Kiem said. “They’re pretty rare this far north.