He tugged at his ropes.
Wren pulled off her right mitten, looked at his bound hands where they lay above his head, and grasped hold of them. They felt swollen and icy cold.
“Rumbler?” Wren said, fear edging her voice. “Your hands. Are they—”
“I can’t f-feel them.”
Wren sat up, and swiftly massaged his stubby fingers. “How about now?”
He shook his head.
Wren held his hand more tightly. She’d seen people with frostbite. The frozen fingers turned black and had to be cut off to save the rest of the hand. Sometimes the Shadow Spirits started feeding on the dead flesh, and the person lost his arm.
“Wren, I need to … to …” He went quiet, as if he couldn’t remember what he’d been about to say. After several instants, he repeated, “Wren, I have to catch a bird. Will you help me catch a bird?”
“Yes, I will, Rumbler,” she choked out.
He smiled. “You are my friend.”
The struggle drained from Rumbler’s eyes, and his head lolled to the side.
“Oh, Rumbler—”
“Look,” he said, barely audible. “Do you see him?”
Wren forced her neck around.
Starlight had turned the snow a pale blue. She searched every drift and cornice, then the dark tree line and sparkling shore. The snow crept and spun. “Who, Rumbler?”
“He’s been coming to me every night. Singing. He—he Sings to me.”
The frozen ground beneath Wren’s feet melted to quicksand. Her knees went wobbly. “Who? Who does?”
Rumbler’s eyelids drooped, then flared, as if he wanted to keep looking at her, but couldn’t. “He wants me to go now, Wren. I have to go … with him.”
Wren frantically looked around again. “Who, Rumbler? Who is he? Is it the—the bloody little boy?”
He closed his eyes and his muscles relaxed.
“Rumbler?” Panic fired her blood. “Rumbler, you’re not dying, are you?”
Wren put her hand on his chest to check his breathing. She couldn’t feel anything! She gripped him by the shirtfront and rolled him to his side. He flopped over like a string doll.
“Rumbler, no!” She tugged hard at his bound hands, then scrambled around to pull on his feet.
… Something broke inside her.
Wren jerked her knife from her belt and sawed through his ropes as fast as she could.
Thirteen
The pops and hisses of the fire woke Blue Raven. His tired body felt like lead. For a time, he granted himself the luxury of watching the firelight flicker across the backs of his eyelids. When he’d been young, and sitting Vigils, he’d tried to find messages in those dancing orange shapes. Tonight the images looked angry. He could make out warriors waging a fierce battle, and giant winged beasts sailing across flaming skies … .
The fire hissed again. Blue Raven opened his eyes to see heavy snow falling. He looked toward the hilltop, then down at the lake, but he could see neither. They had been engulfed by the deluge of flakes. The snow fell straight down, hissing as it died in his fire.
It took him over a hundred heartbeats to find his bow and quiver beneath the snow, then he sat up, and gazed down the hill.
An unbroken blanket of white covered Rumbler. The boy had stopped crying.
“Please, Falling Woman, let this Vigil be over.”
Blue Raven rose to his feet, slung his bow and quiver over his shoulder, and started down the hill. As he trudged through the knee-deep snow, he felt as if he might be the only creature alive in the world.
The scents of winter taunted his nose, frozen mud and fragrant pine needles.
He stopped at the place he remembered staking Rumbler down, but found nothing. Thinking he’d misjudged the distance, he slogged farther down the hill. In the firelight, it was like moving through a glittering ocean of gold dust.
Blue Raven looked around and frowned, searching for any sign of a body buried beneath the snow. He started uphill again.
Halfway to his camp, he cut a strange dip, the barest of undulations in the snow, and knelt to examine it. About four hands wide, the dip ran straight down the hill for as far as he could …
He lurched to his feet, and stumbled down the snowy slope, following the drag marks.
Rumbler must have been too weak to walk, so the kidnapper had wrapped the boy in a hide or blanket and dragged him across the snow. But why hadn’t he simply carried the boy? Rumbler’s little body should have posed no problem for a man or even a woman—
A sharp pain lanced his chest. “Blessed ancestors.”
The pain grew fiery. Blue Raven bent over, gasping for breath. It took thirty heartbeats before the stabs calmed to a dull rhythmic ache. The entire time, he whispered, “Oh, Wren, Wren. Do you know what you’ve done? It’s been nearly forty winters since a girl was Outcast from the clan, but the matrons will have no choice. You’ve left them, and me, no way out.”