“He’s a teacher, Dust, not a savior.”
A cold breeze blew through their shelter, tousling Sparrow’s long white hair and sprinkling his round face with snow. Dust watched glittering flakes alight on his beaked nose.
“If he’s a teacher, why don’t you ask him to teach you something valuable? Like how to fly. Or maybe how to wave your hands and make irksome things, like snowdrifts, disappear.”
Sparrow rolled over. “Do you really think you’d be here, Dust, if I knew how to do that?”
She tied her rolled blankets to her pack, rose to her feet, and kicked him as hard as she could. “I said get up.”
Sparrow winced. “You know, I’ve been a great many places, and known a lot of women. I’ve visited spirit worlds in the sky, worlds beneath the earth, even worlds that ride the backs of Cloud Giants. But all of the women I met in those worlds were kind and compassionate.”
Dust nodded. “That’s because they were dead, and if you don’t rise in the next ten heartbeats, you’ll be seeing a lot more of them.”
She pulled her hood up, and bulled through the drift that blocked the open end of the shelter. Snow lay hip-deep on the ground, and mounded on the brush and deadfall. It frosted the dark limbs of the trees. “Oh, gods, this is worse than I thought.”
Flakes plummeted down around her. Rumbler can’t survive in this. He can’t!
She had held thirteen children in her arms while they died—held them and rocked them, and sung to them with her heart bursting in her chest. Not Rumbler, too. She couldn’t let him die!
She ducked back inside the shelter, and crawled to the fire pit. They’d purposely built up a thick layer of coals last night, then, after supper, they’d rolled the circle of hearthstones into the middle of the pit. The hot stones had heated the shelter through most of the night and, she hoped, they had also insulated the coals beneath.
Dust used a branch to push the stones to the edges of the pit again, re-creating the ring, then she stirred the ashbed. A few hot coals glimmered to life. Dust carefully isolated them in the middle, then started cracking her branch into smaller pieces of wood. As she arranged the twigs over the coals, she blew on them gently. The coals flared. Finally, flames crackled through the tinder. Dust added larger pieces of wood. The teapot, still half full, hung from the tripod to her right. She arranged the legs of the tripod so that the pot hung just at the edge of the flames.
“I’m going to cook mush, Sparrow. It’s fast. The tea should be warm soon.”
Sparrow crawled from beneath his warm hide, and started for the opposite end of the shelter, but Dust’s voice stopped him.
“Wait.”
He turned. “What for?”
She picked up his pack and rummaged around for a pot. Cone-shaped, with a soot-coated bottom, it made a bulge against the leather. She tossed it to him. “Fill that with snow while you’re at it.”
Sparrow left, using the pot to shovel snow out of the way. After a few moments, he returned, panic in his eyes. He knelt beside Dust, scooped two handfuls of snow from the cook pot into the teapot, and said, “This is the worst storm I’ve seen in winters.”
“What else happened in your Dream, Sparrow?” She took the cook pot from his hands, and worked the pot down into the coals. The remaining snow instantly started to melt. “Was Rumbler all right?”
“No. He was barely alive.”
Dust pulled two bags from her own pack. As she rested them on the hearthstones, her arm shook. She said, “I love that little boy, Sparrow. We have to get there.”
“We’re trying, Dust. But, I swear …” He gestured to the snow.
“Yes, I know. It seems as if every Spirit in the forest is working against us, doesn’t it?”
She opened the birchbark bags, dropped several chunks of hardened maple sap into the cook pot, then added a handful of dried blueberries. She used a stick from the woodpile to stir the mixture. When it started to boil, she would add acorn meal.
Sparrow tucked his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Firelight shadowed his wrinkles. “I don’t always understand the ways of Spirits, Dust. But I do know that sometimes events that seem unfortunate are really very good from another person’s point of view. Perhaps this storm benefits Rumbler in some way. I admit I don’t see how, but I haven’t given up hope. You mustn’t, either.”
The tender concern in his voice touched her. She folded her arms beneath her cape and held them like a shield over her heart. “I haven’t given up. I’m braver than that.”
He smiled, and the lines around his eyes crinkled. “Oh, yes. I know. Do you recall the Summer Dances forty-three winters ago? I was ten and as scrawny as a drowned chipmunk. Twitter, the bully, had knocked me down and was sitting on top of me, spitting in my face. You sneaked up behind him, whacked him in the head with a rock, and when he fell sideways, you said, ‘Sparrow’s half your size, Twitter. If you ever hurt him again, I’m going to poison your food.’”