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So saying, she came back with a proper gobbet of meat and I was going to take my time eating it, I’d make it last a year, but of course I gobbled it straight down and made my eyes as big and loving as I could, waiting for my next piece. But what happened instead was she grabbed my tail, yanked it high, and shoved something up my arse.

“Don’t ye dare take that out ’til you’re back in your cave!” she said, and not even a goodbye, and I woke up sputtering and with a terrible pain in my eye.

“Ow!” I said. “My fucking eye. What happened?”

Galva turned her head to look at me, barely able to hold her eyes open. She wiped at her cheek with the furs about her.

“I. Poked. Your eye.”

“What the fuck for?” I said.

“I do not. Like. To be licked,” she said, wrinkling up her nose in distaste, and then going into a spasm of wheezy-sounding coughs.

Now I became aware of a discomfort and a pressure in my bunger.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to go find some privacy and get the post.”

“What?” she said in a strangled way, annoyed both at her cough and that I was still talking.

“I got a letter or something up my arse.”

She shook her head, and groaned, and before long, she slept.

Sprumlet,

for so the letter started,

I have asked such of my colleagues as have knowledge of the Thralls whether there is any way to cheat through them, and it might be that I have found one such way, but, as you may guess, it will not be without price. Long ago, when the world was warmer than it now is, before anyone had heard of the Kesh, different gods were worshipped than those we now embrace. These earlier gods were many and strange, and none so strange as one who was once honored in those mountains. If indeed it was only one. It was supposedly three as well as one. Nobody knows its name, or names, but it, or they, has and have a shrine not so very far from where you are, in a temple deep within a three-headed mountain that the very clever folk in far Oustrim named Three-Head. Apparently, you can see it from there on clear days, so fucking big it is. Or they are. I’ve included a bit of a map, which shows you the approach. Getting there is hard. But harder, so it seems, is what you’ll be asked to give, or maybe gifted with. But here’s the unsettling bit. I’m not allowed to tell you what it is. If you go to it in knowledge of its requirement, it won’t do a thing for you.

But it’s fuckin’ awful.

Anyway, good luck.

Don’t go ’til Galva gets fully well or dies.

It may take a few weeks. She’s strong, but she’s got it bad. And of course, by then the snows will be fearsome.

I’d write more, but I’ve come to the end of the page, and I know you’ll rather one page than two, as two would need a bigger tube.

The girleen is always looking out for me, you can’t say she isn’t.

The tube, of course, had the letter in it, but also an oil-paper packet with a dozen foul-smelling medicinal pellets, as promised. And so began the part of the story where I foraged, built fires, and feathered a number of winter rodents to supplement the brigands’ preserved stores with fresh meat. Galva coughed all colors of nastiness out of her lungs and went in and out of fever, but by day five, Norrigal’s goaty little pills had worked some good. Galva’s fever lessened, and she could speak without going into a cough, though she still slept three hours for every one she woke.

Now, with Galva not in immediate danger of slipping away, I found there was time enough, and the brigands’ lamps had yak oil enough, that I could set to reading that book proper. Paper and ink I had, as I mentioned, for the making of notes—but reading and translating this tome was no easy matter. The spirit of the book was hostile to me, or so I thought, and would oppose me at every page.

What was in here that they guarded so close?

You’d think writing the whole thing in an alphabet that would kill anyone who hadn’t learned it would be safeguard enough, but no.

One page showed an illustration of a dog or wolf birthing a dam from its mouth, and I suspected I was on to the harboring spell that had let the assassin Sesta hide inside Bully Boy. This would be useful magic for a thief if I could learn to use it, so I set about warily studying the image, a moment or two at a time, as you’d search for something at a river’s bottom, taking care to surface before your luck and air ran thin. But when I looked back at the picture the second or third time, the dam was out of the creature’s mouth, and the wolf had reared its head back in a howl. I swear the wind, rarely gentle here, became ferocious outside the cave and howled proper, sending a chill down my spine and raising henflesh on my neck and arms. It put the fear in me, and now my fingers were trembling.

Galva moaned in her sleep, and I set my writing down to go and see if the book had worked some mischief on her. It had, but none that I could see just then. She was warm again. I wiped her shiny forehead with a cool cloth I had in water, but she shook it off. I let her be and went back to the book. I saw that the picture had changed again. The dam was there, but the wolf was now going into her mouth, its rear legs and bushy tail all that was left of it.

Now Galva cried out, which was no infrequent thing with her dreams of Gallardia, but this was different. It was both louder and lower. She stood now and took up her spadín, its sharp edge glowing in the firelight, that same firelight reflected in her eyes, which looked far away.

“Spanth,” I said, “Are you well?”

“Lobu,” she said, which I know is Ispanthian for wolf, and then she said some more business I heard lobu in the middle of. I didn’t speak much Spanth, but the intent sounded like, “There’s a wolf in here,” and that’s how she acted. Now she was in a fighting crouch, her weight on the balls of her feet.