Frost had stiffened the grease on Deyun’s boot leather before sunrise, and the oak water bucket beside the turf shelter wore a skin of clear ice as thick as a thumbnail.
Ysabet broke the ice with the heel of her left fist, careful not to bump the healing burn across her right palm or catch her two crooked smaller fingers on the iron bucket hoop. The two extra days they had spent hauling Deyun out of the pollen meadow on a lashed pine litter had brought them to his seasonal camp beneath the Stormglass Teeth just as the autumn weather turned sour. High above the timberline, the jagged quartz ridges caught the first gray light like broken bottle glass, their upper gullies already streaked with early snow that the wind had not blown clear.
Inside the low stone-and-turf hut, Deyun shifted on his pine-bough mattress and let out a sharp breath through his teeth as his splinted leg bumped the cedar bed-frame.
“Don’t put weight on it yet,” Ysabet called through the open doorway, setting a dented tin pot on the flat fire stones and ladling cold water in with her left hand. “The swelling around your ankle only went down last night, and the bark splints will chafe if you twist the linen.”
