At dusk they made camp in a shallow hollow of wind-bent pines just below the timberline.
The cold up here had teeth in it. Ysabet’s two bent fingers on her right hand ached steadily beneath the burn bandage, a deep bone-chill that no amount of yarrow grease could touch. While Ashaun wedged dead pine branches between two boulders to build a low windbreak and Osha wrapped her blistered feet in strips of her spare petticoat, Ysabet set the mouse’s half-covered box down inside the curve of Lilt’s folded right fin, where the sandray’s heavy body blocked the draft.
The mouse came out as far as its wooden ramp-strip, tested the air with its whiskers, and dragged a piece of dry oatcake crust back under the lid, its bad hind leg clicking once against the rim. Lilt turned her flat head an inch to watch the tiny creature vanish, blew a warm, sleepy breath across the top of the box, and settled her chin back on her foreclaws.
Beside the windbreak, Chaska sat cross-legged by a shielded tallow dip to update her route sheets.
She had Suth’s migration map weighted down with pebbles on one knee and her own leather-backed sketchbook open on the other. As she flipped back two pages to check the compass bearing from the shellhorn grazing valley, the candle light fell across her charcoal drawing of the caravan: the tall timber houses strapped above Moss-on-Stone’s broad shoulders, and below them the newborn calf, Crooked Morning, leaning its…
