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.Smoke from the burning monastery drifted above them and in the distance, barely competing with the rattle of the fight and flames that now consumed the barn where they had been captive, was the distant sound of the river and breaking ice.“What have we got?” Evan asked when he had caught his breath and wiped his streaming face on his sleeve.He suspected his face was black with soot, and his hands were blistered, but neither of those things mattered because they had got out.“You’ve got the crowbar and I’ve got some rags for our feet.” If she was discouraged, she did not show it.“Anything else?”She bit her lip, and some of her buoyancy deserted her.“That’s it.”He nodded and found solace in her challenging eyes.“Then we’d better find some shelter.” He turned up the slope.“There’s a lot of snow around.”“We’ve been in snow before,” she said easily, knowing that they did indeed need shelter, but not worried or beaten now.A snowbank was preferable to that barn.She remembered the years she had survived alone, with little but her wits to sustain her but her wits and her crossbow.She was not frightened.“Snow’s better than that,” she said, pointing back down the hill toward the ruined monastery.“Yes,” he agreed before turning his back on it.The going was hard, for although the snows were melting the ground was icy wet underfoot and the water quickly soaked through the rags that bound their feet.Just under the surface the earth was still frozen and there was little relief from either the hardness or the cold.Most of the trees had shed their burdens of snow and now swayed, whispering, in the north wind.As they climbed, Thea watched the ground ahead of them and once brought them both to a halt.“What is it?” Evan asked, seeing a soft indentation at the edge of a shaded snowbank.“Bear,” Thea answered, her eyes dark with concern.“They must be coming out of hibernation now.They’re grouchy when they first wake up, and hungry.I hope there are deer around for them.”He understood her implication, and at the moment he bitterly missed their lost crossbows.To have hungry bear about was a serious danger, and to be unable to hunt brought hunger back to him with crushing rapidity.He remembered then that they had had no food that day.The monks had not fed them well after he had smashed Brother Roccus’ head with his chain.No wonder they were both tiring rapidly.“We’d better keep moving,” she said as he paused, deep in thought.“Keep your eye out for dried wood.” He gave her what he hoped was a friendly smile.“We’ll need some protection, and the monks did all right with their walking staves.God, I wish we had matches.”She nodded, but said nothing.She, too, was hungry, and knew far better than he the risk they had taken.But it was better than dying in the monks’ fire, or at the hands of the Pirates.She set her teeth against the pain in her ankles and wrists and kept walking.Nightfall found them above the snow line once more, with Sierraville far behind them, Thea pulled down pine boughs and wrapped them around Evan and herself for the night; the cold and the rustlings of animals in the brush kept them half awake as the long hours ran their course.She found her thoughts straying, not back to the community at Camminsky Creek or her years of wandering, but to her first meeting with Evan, and for the first time she felt an odd, anguished regret that she could not bring herself to accept Evan’s body.The few times he had suggested sharing even so little a thing as a mattress she had recoiled as if she had been branded.Her loathing of Lastly grew, and she began to have contempt for herself.She knew she was maimed, disfigured, and she despised it.Evan slept heavily, seeking the oblivion of dreams that were insubstantial fragments of the world he had lost.They woke shortly after dawn to a distant muffled roar that seemed to come from the very bowels of the mountains, a sound that penetrated to their bones, that shattered the air, that made even the trees bow and tremble, to silence the few pitiful cries of little animals that had echoed forlornly across the morning.“What was that?” Thea asked as she scrambled out of her pine nest
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