Winter Study

moved her left foot fractionally to ease her thigh muscles. The ice did not shift alarmingly. Maybe the seam was refreezing. It wouldn’t take much, she thought hopefully. The urge to jump was almost overwhelming. Body and mind craved action. They also serve who only stand and wait was an understatement. Waiting was a purgatory a nonbeliever could not pray her way out of. Trusting in the kindness of strangers was another.

“How’s it going?” she asked to take her body’s mind off just yelling “Fuck it!” and leaping for the good ice.

He looked up, his hood thick with snow, his shoulders white with it. “Good,” he said. “Another minute. Hang on.”

The work of his hands had driven thoughts of the oversized wolf from his mind. The linking of the three chains had relieved him of the necessity of getting near where the ice had broken. He sounded manly, strong, stand-up. It was hard to believe not too many minutes ago he was poised to leave her to her fate or, worse, watch while it visited itself upon her. He wasn’t afraid now, Anna realized, and that made him brave. Except brave didn’t count if one wasn’t afraid. Without fear to burn away the dross and transform it from baser metal, bravery was merely stupidity or poor impulse control.

“They should hold,” he said and held up the three chains attached to each other by the steel-jawed traps.

It would work, Anna told herself. All Bob had to do was lay one end of the chain to one side of her, then walk the other end around the break and pull till the chain gently eased over her island. She’d pick it up; on the count of three, he’d jerk as she leapt. It would work.

The dull pull of a muscle trying to cramp moved out from the twitch above her knee. If she waited any longer, she would not be able to execute the straight-backed deep knee bend and rise without tottering after she picked up the chain. Inside the Sorels, she flexed toes grown numb from lack of movement. “Let’s get going,” she said. “My legs are starting to cramp.”

Bob hurled a trap at her.

“No!” she heard herself shout. Ten pounds of metal struck her in the chest. Clamping her arms across it, she fought for balance. The ice tilted. Her boots began to slide. White lake and sky rushed past as she fell backward. Her head struck lake ice. Her brain slid forward inside her skull. Her chin smashed into her chest, slamming her teeth down on her tongue.

For an instant, she carried the burden of her life in the balance, trying to decide whether to hold tight to the trap or throw her hands back over her head, get as much of her on the solid surface as she could. The physical world did not slow down while she made up her mind.

The backpack pulled her down.

The ice island tilted.

Water so cold, she felt it only as a blow slammed into the side of her face.

12

The ice did not flip, dumping her like a man in a ducking booth, the way Anna had seen it in her mind’s eye. The lake chose to savor her rather than swallow her whole. The ice slab fell away with terrifying slowness, a grinning maw opening at her heels.

She thrust the metal trap from her and threw her arms wide, trying to catch the beast’s throat. The island of ice was too wide, and only one mittened hand reached the serrated edge. On her back, a beetle with a backpack as a carapace, helpless to save herself, she was sliding, sliding down, under the ice, pulled by her own weight and the hunger of the lake. Then the lake couldn’t wait. The slab under her gave all at once.

Light flashed past, a white streak four inches wide; the edge of the break. Fighting the drag of her pack, she kicked and pawed her way upright and clutched at the surface ice. In sodden mittens, her hands were pulpy, worthless.

Clutching at straws.

A burst of energy that drove a scream from her lips lifted her enough that she managed to get her right arm as far as the elbow onto the surface. Balling her mittened hand into a fist, she drove it hard into the shallow snow and pressed her sodden sleeve against the ice.

Freeze, God dammit. If her sleeve, her glove – any part of her – would adhere to the ice, she might be able to pull herself out. Grabbing the end of the other mitten with her teeth, she pulled. Freezing water crashed against her teeth with the subtlety of brass knuckles. Biting down, she pulled her hand free of the mitten and reached through the fractured water to press it to the ice by her elbow. Flesh might freeze faster than fabric.

“Bob!” she screamed. “Where the fuck are you?”

Hell would freeze over.

The sleeve of her coat was sticking, freezing to the good ice.

Carefully she dragged on the arm. She could see herself moving infinitesimally closer to the edge but was losing feeling. Cold was killing her body while her mind watched. A quarter of an inch; an eternity.

Ice canted steeply toward a white sky. Flakes of snow, scarcely differentiated from the universe they fell through, showed clear for an instant, like magic, like the pictures in the mall that flashed from two dimensions to three with a flash of the mind. Then the sky grew too steep. Her hand was not in front but above her. She hadn’t grabbed the solid ice; she’d grabbed onto the edge of the floating island and it was rotating with her weight. Through frost-rimed eyelashes, she watched each thread of her sleeve as it pulled free of the ice. Her pack was battened on her back, dragging her down, hungry like the lake was hungry. Sentient and indifferent.

Frantically she wrenched her gloved hand from its last tenuous connection with the ice and pounded on the buckle of her chest strap. The push-button release opened and the strap came free. The pack lifted, drifted from her.

She had won; she would make it.

Straps followed the pack toward the bottom of the lake, tugging down her arms, pinioning her elbows to her side, prying the end of her sleeve from its tenuous marriage with the ice, her hand from where it battered ineffectually at the buckle of her hip belt. Water closed over her. The narrow margin of sky receded as she sank. She forced her eyes wide to keep the light in them. Cold burned her sclera like acid.

Kicking with more force than she’d believed she had in her, she moved upward. Half a foot, a foot, the light grew stronger.

The Sorel boots filled with water. Her feet moved as if through freezing mud. Then she couldn’t move them at all. Wriggling eel-like, she tried to struggle out of the bondage of the shoulder straps, but her coat had swelled with water, the fabric stuck to the webbing. Desperately she pummeled at the release on her hip. Anna fought till her last gasp of air put the last of its oxygen into her blood and her lungs began to push against her rib cage, shoving the panic of their need through her bones and into her heart.

The hip belt released, and she used the last of her air to kick for the surface. Then she stopped. Fell back and down and back. The drag on her hips gone, but the pack still holding her fast to her upper arms, pulling her headfirst toward the bottom of the lake.

The light grew watery and faint. Anna watched as her feet floated up past her eyes.

The cold that had hammered into her face and neck soaked through the layers of clothing. At first, it seared her flesh, then it didn’t. Icy fingers crept up her legs, down the neck of her parka. Her feet were gone to it already, she couldn’t feel them.

One arm came free of the confining straps, the hand with the bloated mitten. Anna watched it as it drifted out from her body. Above it, the irregular half-moon shape of light was no bigger than the palm of her hand.

Oddly detached, she watched it shrink to the size of a half-dollar. A gentle bump stopped her fall. She rested on the bottom of the lake, the moon of light feeble in the liquid sky. Quiet surrounded her. Her breathing stopped, her heart starved and pounded throughout her body, a frenetic drumbeat in a deaf world. The water was so clear she could see gravel on the lake bed, a vestige of weeds as unmoving as if sculpted in stone.

Dropping arrow straight from the world above was a single line, inked black against the gray of the water. At its end, a D was written in crushed script. The foothold trap on the line of kinkless chain. She had wanted to trap a wolf with it, wanted to stroke its living fur and feel its breath. Cruel to want