The royal post road between the Black River Valley and the eastern border was forty leagues of unbending, frozen misery.
A howling north wind, thick with stinging pellets of ice and sleet, swept down from the Jagged Crown Mountains, scouring the rutted dirt highway until it became an impassable sheet of black ice. Along this lonely hall stretched a line of human sorrow that seemed to have no beginning and no end.
Men with sunken, gray cheeks leaned their entire weight against the wooden shafts of overloaded handcarts, their breath wheezing in ragged, shallow gasps. On the carts lay bedridden grandfathers bundled under thin, moth-eaten hemp quilts, their knuckles swollen and blue from the biting freeze. Beside them trudged mothers with hollow eyes. It grabbed swaddled infants beneath layers of tattered coarse wool. It whispered desperate lullabies into the screaming gale.
Every few paces, a dark stain dotted the snow where bare feet had split against frozen gravel.
“Keep walking, A-Bao,” whispered Master Wen, his voice hoarse from swallowing cold air. He gripped his oak cane with both hands, planting it firmly into the slush with every step. “Don’t sit down. If you sit, the frost enters the marrow. Keep your boots moving.”
