calmly and patiently went about the business of feeling for a tinder box. Later she would wonder at her certainty of its existence; the person who had laid the fire might have been expected to carry so precious a thing as a tinder box on his or her person. But it was there for her to find, and she found it after not too many minutes, to one side of the hearth, where there was a small pile of extra wood as well. She braced her weak hand, struck a spark, and lit the fire. It flared up with a smell of mouse nests.
She knelt by it long enough to be sure it would catch, and then stood up and went back to the still-open door, and stared out at the falling snow, feeling more peaceful than she had for weeks; since before she and Ash had gone on their journey. Since before she had begun to fear whatever it was that had happened, that had sent them away. She could remember no more of it than that, but she remembered that much without any gaps, and without any rush of panic. She had come to this small peace within herself, that she would not try to remember, and that therefore her memory's guardians need not drain her small energy store by leaping to defense, leaving her sick with weakness.
This was her life now; it had begun with this journey. 'My name is Lissar,' she said to the quiet snow; and then she shut the door.
TWELVE
SHE AND ASH SLEPT FOR A VERY LONG TIME. SHE WOKE TO ADD
wood to the fire, and then slept again. They both had fallen down in front of the fire, a luxury so unheard-of that no further questions about their new shelter's possibilities could arise in their minds at first. The floor was hard, and cold, but neither so cold nor so hard (at least not so mercilessly irregularly hard) as the ground they had slept on for many days past.
Lissar dreamed she was melting, that her hair ran in rivers, her fingers and toes were rushing streams, her eyes overflowing pools. And as the sound of water grew wilder and wilder she heard something wilder yet behind it: joy, she thought, the joy of being alive, and she moved in her wet earthy bed to embrace it; but when it came to her it was neither joy nor life but ... she woke, screaming. Ash had sprung to her feet and was looking dazedly around, looking for the bear or the panther, her poor staring ribs pumping her breath like a bellows.
'I'm sorry,' said Lissar. 'It was only ... a dream.' It was slipping away even as she spoke; she could no longer remember what it was about, only that it had been horrible. The horror welled up again, but no images accompanied it; just blank, unthinking terror and revulsion. She shuddered with the strength of it, and put out a hand to seize a stick of wood, felt the dull prick of its bark against her palm gratefully. She tossed it into the fire and thrust her face so near that her eyes wept with the heat.
Ash sat down again and snuggled up against Lissar's back, with her head on her shoulder, as she had done before the hearth in their old... 'No!' said Lissar.
'Whatever it is-it is over with. Ash and I have escaped, and are free.' Her words sounded hollow, but the defiance in them: drove the horror back a few paces, and she lay down again and fell again into sleep.
It was daylight for a while, and then dark, and then daylight again. And then Lissar began to recognize that she was waking up for good, that she was desperately thirsty, that she was so hungry that her head hurt and there was a bitter taste in her mouth, and that she needed to relieve herself. She dragged herself reluctantly to a sitting position. Ash lay in a tiny round knot beside her, near enough that Lissar could feel the heat rising off her fine-haired body, and watch the short hairs gently separate and then lie softly together again with the rise and fall of her breathing.
Lissar was never quite unsurprised at how small a sleeping creature Ash could make of herself when she was curled up her tightest, with her long limbs folded expertly into the hollow of her belly and her flexible spine curved almost into a circle.
Lissar staggered upright, wakened with dreadful thoroughness by the pain in her hip, went to the door and opened it. A little heap of snow immediately fell in on the floor. Snow lay, in a beautiful, smooth sweep of eye-bewildering white (she blinked, closed one eye), across the little clearing that the hut stood in, and disappeared into the blue shadows under the trees. The sun was shining, the view was mesmerizing, the more so by her own exhaustion and the knowledge that she and Ash would not have survived the first night of the blizzard if Ash had not found this haven for them.
The weight of this knowledge seemed to hold her in place like the stiff, resisting weight of ceremonial robes ... she frowned. What an odd thought: ceremonial robes.
Heavy with gold braid they had been, with glints of colored stones.
She looked down at her filthy, flannel-clad self, and wished to laugh; but could not. Pain and hunger had stolen her lucidity; and she an herbalist's apprentice.
Almost she could remember her master's name: R ... Rinnol. That was it. Lissar had been lucky, for she had not wanted an apprentice; but Lissar was a friend of her niece, and Rinnol had agreed, very grudgingly at first, to take her on.
The snow was over her knees beyond the lip of roof that sheltered the hut's door and narrow wooden porch. She waded, barefoot, only just past the corner of the hut before she squatted; she would have to see if the hut yielded anything she could use for boots. Ash emerged and bore her company at the hut-corner; when she was standing again her ears and tail came up and for a moment.Lissar thought she would go bounding through the snow like a puppy. But then the tail and the head dropped again, and she sighed, and almost crept back inside the little house. Only then did Lissar notice how dull and flat her once-shining coat looked in the sunlight.
A memory came to her, of chasing her beautiful dog around a walled garden; she was herself running freely, neither hip hurt, her eyes focussed easily, adaptably, without thought, and she stretched out both whole, strong arms to make a snatch at Ash as she spun around a corner and leaped entirely over her person. Lissar let the memory fade. She did not wish to remember more; the guardian panic hovered, watchful, in one corner of her mind; she did not want it disturbed.
She went back indoors. Ash was sitting, unhappy head hanging, by the dying fire.
She opened and closed her mouth, almost thoughtfully, as if trying to remember something-or trying to rid herself of a memory of something. She looked at Lissar beseechingly.
Lissar looked around the tiny room. A table stood against one wall with a tiny shuttered window over it; a bed was shoved against the wall the wood-pile stood on the other side of. The door and the fireplace took the other two walls. Next to the door were cupboards. Under the table stood a bucket. Lissar took it outdoors and began shovelling snow into it. She had to stop often, because her fingers burned and turned red, and her feet went almost instantly burning-cold, without the comfort of numbness.
