RABBITEAR
While I shrug into my coat, Quiller slides through the gap in the parents’ shelter and disappears into the gale. It takes another thirty heartbeats before I’ve pulled on my mittens and I’m ready to follow her into the storm.
Wind Mother rages across the Ice Giants, piling enormous drifts of snow against anything that dares to defy her fury. Boulders, trees, crevasses, all have vanished into a featureless expanse of white. Worse, there’s no light, not even a hint of zyme glow, and the temperature has plunged. As I stagger through the drifts, breaking trail, I can feel the water freezing in my eyes.
“Quiller?” I put a hand up to shout, “Where are you? I can’t see you.”
“Over here! Stretched out on the edge of the cliff.”
When I make out a human-sized mound beneath the snow, I get down on my hands and knees and crawl toward her. Before I can drop to my belly beside her, Wind Mother almost shoves me over the edge. Quiller grabs my sleeve and drags me close. “Did you see something down there?”
She’s shivering, her teeth chattering. “No. I haven’t even g-glimpsed him climbing the trail. Either he fell, or he’s holed up in the second or third children’s c-camp.”
“Then let’s go back to the parents’ shelter! This is killing cold! We’ll not survive out here for more than a hand of time.”
“No. No, I have to find him. He could be—”
“Look at me!” I shout in her face. “If he fell, he’s dead, and there’s no point in rushing down to the shore. If he’s in one of the children’s camps he’s safe, and if he tried to climb the cliff in the storm, there’s no way we can get to him! It’s too dangerous.”
I grip a handful of her sleeve and drag her backward toward the shelter. She fights me for a few moments, then I hear her muffle a sob. Finally, she says, “You’re right.”
We both slide away from the edge on our bellies before we dare to rise to our hands and knees so we can crawl. The trail I broke through the drifts moments ago is almost gone, filled in, but the shelter’s black boulders, warmed by our fire, waver in and out of the ground blizzard. I lead the way back and wiggle through the gap into the firelight.
Quiller shoulders through behind me and crawls to the fire, where she drops like a rock and gives me a heartbreaking look. “When the storm—”
“Yes, we’ll leave immediately.” Frowning at her ice-crusted hair, I say, “Let me get you a hot cup of tea.”
Shivering, she stammers, “Thought I might . . . see him.”
“In this ferocious blizzard? You have to be smarter than this!”
Retrieving a cup from where it rests near the tripod, I dip it into the tea bag, and then lean around the fire to set the cup by Quiller’s hand. “I only filled it half full. Didn’t want you to slosh the tea onto the floor before you got it to your mouth.”
Carefully, she grips the cup in both hands. As she sips, she blinks ice-encrusted eyelashes at me. “Wind Mother is tr-trying to stop us. Why?”
“Probably because Jawbone is wrapped in a warm buffalo hide sitting before a fire, and she’s trying to save our lives.”
Quiller clamps her jaws for a time to force her teeth to stop chattering. “Even if we can’t climb d-down,” she stutters, “we can still hike to the s-shore.”
“Once the storm eases up. Even then, if the wind is still gusting, it’s going to be tough cutting a trail through the drifts. Some of them are taller than I am. And that’s up here on the top, where the wind sweeps the ice constantly. What about at the bottom? The drifts piled against the base of the cliff are going to be one hundred hand-lengths tall and just as wide. Breaking trail will take at least a day, maybe two, and if we lose sight of each other in the ground blizzard, it’s over.”
Quiller shivers hard before she answers, “We’ll rope ourselves t-together.”
“We’re not going to find Jawbone down there anyway. He’s safe and warm and—”
“Then we’ll climb up and s-search the camps.”
I almost ask her what happens if Jawbone isn’t there either, but I stop myself. I’m not sure what that would mean. It might mean Jawbone managed to climb up the trail and was waiting for us in the parents’ shelter. Or it might mean something I don’t want to consider, not yet, for there’s always the chance he got confused in the storm and started inching his way across a ledge far from the quest trail.
Quiller takes a deep breath and her whole body shudders. “He can’t have fallen far from the vertical line of the handholds, RabbitEar. If the snow is deep enough, he may be alive, but we have to hurry or—”
“Stop saying he fell.” I give her a penetrating look. “We don’t know that.”
“You didn’t hear him scream. I did. It was . . . terrible.”
I reach around the fire to smooth a hand over her hair. “You thought you heard him scream, but you were sound asleep. You could have been dreaming, or it could have been the wind or the howling of a lone wolf in the distance.”
Clutching her cup in both hands, she whispers, “Not g-going to argue, but I’ve been over and over it. I know what I heard.”
“Fine, but I’m not ready to accept that yet.”
As she sips her tea, her eyes glaze over, as though she’s already digging through drifts for our son’s dead body.
“Talk to me, Quiller.”
She tries to hide them, but she’s still suffering uncontrollable bouts of shivering. She was out there for less than fifty heartbeats and it completely drained the heat from her flesh. I’m certain she won’t be warm any time soon. Just as certain that in less than one hand of time, my wife will be on her feet and heading out the door into the ground blizzard, off to shovel through drifts at the bottom of the cliff.
“RabbitEar,” she says in a pained voice, “Jawbone shouted ‘Father,’ then he shouted, ‘Mother.’ Twice. But he called out for you first.”
I pause as my heart thunders. “Why did you tell me that?”
“He n-needs you.”
The fire is burning down. The light that plays upon her anguished face has changed from amber to a reddish hue. I need to add more bison dung, but I’m concentrating on her expression. She truly believes she heard our son call out for us.
Quiller says, “While I warm up, c-can you get us packed?”
“Yes.” I answer reluctantly. “But we’re not leaving until the storm breaks. While we’re waiting, we’ll eat and get as warm as we can.”
Quiller’s head jerks in a nod, but I can tell she thinks I’m wasting precious time.