Fool's Quest - Page 211/313

I didn’t want to get off her lap. When I moved, it opened her coat and the little warmth my body had stored around itself slipped away into the night. She shifted around, grunting a little as she did, and settled her legs into a different position. “Sit next to me,” she directed. She slipped one arm out of the white fur coat and I crawled inside it. I put my arm down the empty sleeve and she put her arm around me. My bottom did not like the hard, cold earth. I tugged at my coat and found enough slack to fold an edge up around us. We huddled. The night had become colder, darker, and much more quiet. Two owls began a conversation, and I slid into shivering sleep again.

I woke shaking all over. My toes were numb, my bottom ached, and my spine was painful ice in my back. I had buried my face in the fur of the coat, but one of my ears was painfully cold. Morning light was fingering its way through the snow-laden branches that had sheltered us for the night. I listened but heard only the morning challenges of birds.

“Shun. Are you awake?” She did not stir and I felt a bolt of terror that she had frozen to death in the night. “Shun!” I shook her, gently but insistently. She abruptly lifted her head and stared at me without recognition. Then she gave her head a sudden shake and knew me.

“Listen!” she hissed at me.

“I did.” I kept my voice low. “Nothing but birdsong. I think we should get up and try to get as far from here as we can.”

We both began to move stiffly. We could not stand upright under the branches. It was hard for me to untangle myself from her coat, and harder for me to pull my coat from under her and wallow my way into it. It was cold and full of fallen needles. I was suddenly hungry and thirsty.

I led the way out of the tree-well and Shun wallowed up after me. The winter day was bright and clear and for a moment I stood blinking. Then I scooped a handful of snow and put it in my mouth. It melted into a very small amount of water. I stooped for more.

“Don’t take too much at once. You’ll chill yourself even worse.”

Shun’s advice made sense. I could not have explained why it irritated me. I took a smaller scoop and put it in my mouth. She spoke again. “We have to make our way home. We can’t follow the sleigh tracks back. If they’re looking for us, that will be the first thing they’ll expect us to do.”

“If they’re looking for us?”

“The soldiers quarreled with the Servants, I think. The Servants will still want you, if any of them survived. But we can hope the soldiers won’t care about us.”

“Can’t we go to that town and ask for help? Or one of those houses?”

She shook her head slowly. “They were doing bad things in that town. Making people forget they were there. I don’t think we should go there. Because I think that’s what they’ll expect us to do. And the same for knocking on someone’s door and asking for help. I think that today we should walk as far as we can, away from here, but not on a road where we can be seen. They might ask people if they’ve seen us.”

Everything she said made sense but I didn’t want her to be in charge of all our plans. I thought hard, trying to be as clever as she was being. “We should go by ways where it would be hard for a sleigh to follow. Or a horse. Through brushy places. Up and down steep places.”

“Which way is home, do you think?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I looked up at the overcast sky.

She looked around us and then, almost randomly, said, “We’ll go that way.”

“What if it takes us deeper and deeper into the forest and we die of cold and hunger?”

She gave me a look. “I’d prefer that to what will happen if they find us. If you want to retrace our tracks and see if they’ll take you back, go ahead. I’m going this way.”

And she started off. After a moment, I followed her. It was slightly easier to walk in her broken trail than to force my own way through the snow. The path she had chosen led us up one hill and down the next and away from the mercenaries’ camp, and all seemed like good things at the time. As we continued, the hillside grew steeper and the brambles thicker. “There will be a stream at the bottom of this,” I predicted, and “Maybe,” she agreed. “But the sleighs can’t come this way, and I don’t think the horses would do well here, either.”

Before we reached the bottom, the incline was steep enough that we slid several times. I feared sliding all the way and ending up in water, but when we did reach the bottom, we found a narrow stream that was mostly frozen. The thread of moving water we easily jumped. It reminded me of my thirst, but I took another mittenful of snow rather than put my bare hand in the water. My heavy fur coat was like walking in a tent. The bottom hem gathered snow and added to my burden.