He paused. His jaw tensed and his hands curled into fists, as if he were fighting something internal. Then he let out a long breath and slumped. “It seems I have no choice.”
She swooped in and tucked her arm around him again, bracing him until he staggered up to standing at her side. His body was rigid and tense wherever she touched him. No matter. He didn’t have to relax, only survive. Together, they hobbled slowly toward the cave. The wind cut out as soon as they entered, and although it was still freezing and also smelled far worse than it had outside, Elodie breathed a sigh of sheer relief. Safety, at last.
She carefully lowered Tal to sit against one of the slightly-damp walls. The air here was caustic with the bite of mildew, rotting vegetation, and decaying…something. Perhaps a wild animal or two had sheltered here during the last snowstorm and then perished. It wasn’t the most encouraging thought. “Maybe it will smell better in here once we start the fire,” she murmured.
The cave was laden with gloom and her eyes were still adjusting, but she spotted a gleam of silver and heard the rasp when Tal unsheathed one of his swords. She stilled for a moment, feeling like that hare must have when the deadly debris was hurtling toward it. She keenly felt the absence of the dagger’s weight at her waist and recalled, too late, that Tal had never returned it to her. Had she misjudged him after all, and he was as prone to betrayal as she ought to have suspected? Was this the moment he would turn against her? Surely he knew how foolish that was. Surely his need for her outweighed his obvious distaste for her company.
Tal exhaled a breath that turned to mist and hung in the air between them. “I’ll keep watch,” he explained, eyes on the cave’s entrance. “It smells bad in here because something carnivorous has been using this as a den. Hopefully it won’t return before the blizzard is over.”
Elodie’s dread evaporated. It left behind a vast tiredness that weighted her marrow and made her want to curl up and sleep right where she stood. Fear, she reflected, was exhausting. She much preferred the weightless exhilaration of her sled ride.
“Of course,” she replied, managing to sound mostly normal and not as if she’d momentarily been planning how she might kill him before he could waylay her.
She fled back into the blizzard. Three steps out of the cave, she stumbled on one of the bits of bloodied clothing that Tal had used as a blanket before their crash, and she stopped to wrap it around her head like a macabre scarf. Then she went in search of the wood. She forged through the growing blank whiteness of the storm for as long as she dared, periodically returning to the cave with her armfuls of kindling and occasionally another piece of the lost clothing, before Tal stopped her.
“The blizzard has grown too much,” he said. “Stay inside now.”
Irritation prickled. She filed that away under the category of things she’d learned about herself: she didn’t like being ordered about. But he was right, so she stomped the snow off her boots and dropped her current load of firewood atop the rest.
Time to start the fire. Purposefully not looking at Tal, and trying to seem as decisive as possible, she unhesitatingly grabbed a chunk of wooden floor tiling about the size of her arm. She sat down on the freezing rock and placed the wood in front of her, then reviewed what facts she could infer about fire-starting. Ideally, she’d have some sort of magical mechanism that could provide a spark, or a piece of…what was it? Some sort of stone that could be struck to make a flame? Flint, that was what it was called. But she had nothing like that, so it would have to be friction that would start her fire. The question now was how to create enough friction to actually make a spark.
She dared to quickly glance at Tal. His attention was fixated on the cave’s entry in a way that told her the whole of his attention belonged to her current activities. Her skin prickled in embarrassment and she snatched up another piece of wood at random—a long piece of door framing—and rubbed it as fast and hard as she could against the side of the floor tile.
A smothered choking sound alarmed her. She glanced up, and in the dim gray light saw that Tal was laughing at her. From his shocked expression, the laughter had caught him by surprise as much as it had her, and she had only a moment to marvel at how completely humor had transformed his features before his gaze went hard again.
On the heels of her surprise flashed a jolt of anger—how dare he mock her efforts to save them both?—before that too quickly fizzled out under the weight of her tiredness and worry and shame. She dropped the wood, turned her face away from him, and cried.
She did it without making a sound. It was easy, as if she had practiced it often. Her tears did nothing to ease the turmoil of feelings twining around her chest, and the tracks of wetness on her cheeks only chilled her further. Crying was foolish. She should stop immediately.
She couldn’t.
A long moment passed. “Are you giving up?” Tal asked, his tone a challenge. “I hadn’t thought you the type.”
“Be silent,” she snapped, but her voice was too strangled to make the command as sharp as she wanted it to be.
There was a long quiet. In it, Elodie felt Tal realize that she was crying, and debate what, if anything, he ought to do about it. Her shame curled its roots deeper. She was not some defenseless maiden who needed to guilt a boy into saving her. Except, apparently, she was. She had proven utterly useless; she had failed to rescue their only food
