“We’ll get to the first slope,” he says, voice beside my ear. “Then camp.”
He urges Odie on, and we cut over a barren, treeless stretch of low hills toward the cold mountains. There is no place to hide, no shelter from the wind. It lashes at our backs, then changes direction without warning to sting and cut into our faces.
When I squint through the wind, I see only blowing snow and the sheer rock of the mountains growing closer. This is a place for the dead. For the doomed.
Maybe that’s what we are.
Just after nightfall—my hands trembling in my coat pockets, eyes dry from the endless wind—we reach the base of the mountains and Noah finds a low overhang in the rock, a place where we’re able to tuck our bodies in just enough to keep the wind from our faces. But there’s no timber for a fire, no way to keep warm, so he wraps his arms around me and I lie with my face tucked into the hollow of his neck, shivering, while Odie stands with her back to the wind.
We don’t speak. Not enough warmth in our throats for words. Only closed eyelids and shallow breaths now. All that’s left of us.
My eyes open—tiny snowflakes on my lashes, at the ends of my hair. But the sky is still gray, a carpet of low, swirling clouds, as if the sun hasn’t risen at all.
A snowstorm has burrowed itself against the mountains and shows no sign of letting up. “Are you okay?” Noah asks, so close he could lay his lips on my temple, press himself to me, and we could stay this way until the cold pulled the last of the warmth from our bones. But I nod, mouth too numb to speak, and he runs his hands up my arms to warm me. “Odie can’t come with us any farther,” he says. “It’s too steep. She won’t make it.”
I lift my head, a tremble at the back of my teeth. “No.”
“We don’t have a choice.”
He pushes himself up from our little shelter beneath the rock, leaving the blanket around my shoulders, and starts removing the bridle from Odie’s head.
“We can’t leave her on her own,” I snap, my voice brittle and cracked.
He rubs a hand down her forelock to her soft nose. “She’ll be okay,” he assures. “Horses know their way home.”
“But she doesn’t have a home.”
Noah places the bridle on the ground, in the snow—leaving it there. “She’ll probably find your pa, eventually.”
I don’t want to go on without her, not after I’ve found her again. But I also know he’s right, she won’t make it through this snow—it’s too deep, too dangerous for her—so I stand up, keeping the blanket wrapped over my shoulders, and lay my palm against Odie’s neck. I breathe in her damp, woolly scent—knowing I have to let her go. I think of the farmhouse and the apple orchard. Maybe she’ll find her way back there: the memory of those trees, the soft, grassy land, will be enough to draw her there. “Okay.”
I release my hand from her face, and she stands a moment, earspointed forward, confused, but then slowly she starts moving back down the slope toward the trees in the distance.
I fight the rising tears. Not just for Odie, but for everything we’re leaving behind. This feels like the point of no return. A divide inside me—the past laid out behind us, dotted with blood and scars and things I can’t take back, while the future is a storm cloud ahead, a terrifying wall of snow and cold.
Noah wraps his hand through mine, squeezing—not letting go, just like he promised—and we start up the steep, rocky route between two mountain peaks, feet sinking into the fresh layer of snow, lungs heaving in the cold, awful air.
Noah makes a trail through the snow ahead of me, and I think of nothing else except keeping him within view, not losing sight of his silhouette in the gusting wind ripping down the mountainside. Every few yards, he glances back to make sure I’m still there—that I haven’t collapsed or slipped down the steep terrain.
At a low spot, he stops, pulling out his compass to make sure we’re still heading north; then we push on again. The wind is fanged, brutal, freezing the drops of moisture on my eyelashes, turning them to ice. I’ve never tasted air this cold, swallowed and felt it burn. The numbness in my hands and feet starts slowly, a tingling that becomes a stinging pain.
And then no feeling at all.
At last we reach a sheer stone wall, and Noah has to hoist me up over it, making me stand on his shoulders so he can push me up to the top of the ledge, before scrambling up himself.
On the other side, I place my hands over my eyes to block the wind, and look out at a landscape dotted with more mountains, and I think:We’re not going to make it.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I ask, turning my face away from the wind.
He nods and says, “Not much farther.”
But he can’t know for sure. He just doesn’t want me to look back.
Despair is a thing that sneaks up slowly, tendrils threading into your thoughts until you can hear nothing else.We’re going to die out here,my mind begins to repeat, a loop that won’t stop. And too soon, the sky grows dark, the moon hidden behind clouds, making it impossible to tell the hour. We sink down beside a boulder, away from the wind, but we don’t sleep. We sit with knees drawn up, the blanket over our heads, and we shake. We eat the last of the corn cakes and dried fruit that Maybelle gave us. Noah cups my hands in his and blows warm air to keep the numbness at bay. I rest my head against his shoulder, then touch the chain around his neck, pulling the silver ring free from his coat. He watches me silently, lets me hold the ring between my fingers. I can’t see the stars through the storm above us, but tracing the tiny constellation etched into his ring soothes me, makes me feel not so lost in these mountains.
“Do you know what your ring means?” My voice is cracked, teeth chattering.
Noah is quiet, and I wonder if he heard me over the wind, or if the cold has sapped his ability to speak. But then he says softly, “It’s a constellation. Circinus.”
