“But what happens if we escape with our friends?” Lelia asked.
“WHEN,” I said. “Not ‘if.’ When you escape with your friends.”
“When,” Lelia said dully, not buying into my optimism.
“You’re going to take them back to the cave,” I said.
Lelia frowned. “What ca– ”
Then she realized exactly what cave I meant.
“Where I found you?!” she said, her eyes bugged out in disbelief.
“Yes, exactly,” I said.
“But that is over two days away from here!”
“No, it’s two days if you sleep at night, but you won’t be able to,” I cautioned her. “As soon as you free your friends, you’ll need to get back to the cave as fast as possible. You’ll have to keep moving all night long. The skiris won’t stop chasing you, so you can’t stop. But you’ll have the snowshoes. You’ll be able to move faster than they can. And the snowshoes you have now are better than the snowshoes you and I used when we came down from the cave, so you might be able to get back in less than one day and night.”
Lelia looked supremely unhappy. “What about you?”
“I’ll be right behind you, just in a different part of the forest. Don’t worry about me – just get back to the cave. The only problem is, I can’t spare any ropes for you to use. Do you think you can get up the cliff to the cave without any ropes?”
She looked doubtful. “I don’t know.”
I pulled out a twig I’d brought from the forest specifically for this purpose, and leaned it against a rock at 45 degrees. “Do you think you could find a thin, fallen tree in the forest, and all of you could carry it to the cave and climb up it?”
Lelia’s eyes suddenly lit up.
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Yes, probably.”
“Good,” I said, happy that she was at least entertaining the possibility that the plan could work.
Because if they didn’t believe it would work – if they didn’t have hope to sustain them through the hard parts – then it was going to be a hell of a lot harder to pull off.
“Look, the sun’s setting,” I said to the women. “It would be sui– uh, it would be really dumb to try anything in the dark. I suggest we spend the night up here, and then we move forward with the plan first thing in the morning.”
Fieria nodded. “I agree.”
It was settled.
We moved further back along the goat path and bundled ourselves up in our furs for the night.
As darkness fell and the temperature dropped, all I could think of was those three, poor women exposed to the elements.
Well, this would be the last night they had to suffer.
…if everything went according to plan.
Lelia and I snuggled together under our furs. It was too cold to have sex, so we just held each other tenderly. I softly caressed her hair and whispered reassuring things in her ear until she fell asleep.
It took me a lot longer.
The next morning we awoke with the sunrise. We ate a hasty breakfast of deer jerky and raw berries, then went over the plan again. I had each of the women repeat what they were going to do until I was sure they could handle it.
Then I turned to Lelia. She handed over the climbing harness, which I would need for my plan to work.
She was sobbing.
I wiped tears from her cheeks and smiled. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
“Be careful,” she pleaded.
“I will,” I said, and kissed her. “I’ll see you soon.”
Oona and Mazaria gave me their spare quivers of arrows. In addition to the two I already had, I now possessed 60 arrows.
That should be enough.
I made sure they had the extra snowshoes for the women they would save.
Then I kissed Lelia one last time and set off back down the goat path, leaving the six women to await my signal.
30
I went back along the path until I reached the overhang where all the women had climbed up using my rope – the rope which was now in my backpack.
From there it was a simple climb to the bottom using my ice axes and crampons.
I moved through the woods until I reached the slopes where all the logging had occurred. I kept to the trees until I reached the opposite side of the gorge, the left cliff.
Then I began climbing.
The left half of the gorge was significantly different from the other side where Lelia and the others were now, awaiting my signal.
To make things clear, let’s talk only about the left half of the gorge.
It had two sides: the fort side, and the opposite side that went into a sheer drop of hundreds of feet down to a valley filled with trees. Let’s call that the drop side.
The fort side had tall cliffs bordering the canyon for a while, but then they turned into the same gradual slopes created by snowdrifts that Lelia and the other women were going to use as part of our plan.
You could climb the fort side fairly easily if you were willing to plow through a shit-ton of snow – or if you had snowshoes.
But the drop side… Jesus. It was treacherous.
From the topmost ridge where the fort side switched over and became the drop side, there was a 90-degree plunge of at least 700 feet.
Which was absolutely perfect for what I needed.
When you’re a dude with a bow and arrow facing off against a fucker with a gun, you need cover.
And a 90-degree drop of 700 feet was essentially the best cover I could get, given the circumstances.
Here’s the thing: the drop wasn’t exactly straight down.
A guy with a gun could theoretically stand on a cliff that was straight as a knife’s edge and shoot straight down and hit somebody.
But this cliff wasn’t straight as a knife’s edge. Far from
