The warmth of summer thermals fills her like a fever and at length the man’s trembling stops. She has been with men before, but the memory does not stir her. There are small red spots at the base of every hair on his body. He trembles against her, cold and scentless, skin to skin. Considers whether there is room in her for compassion-and whether what she feels is compassion after all. Stop me if you must, but I will set one fire. I need fire, he says, to melt snow for water, at the very least. The man looks at his trembling hands with a kind of bemusement. She looks at him in silence, wondering if he will take the answer she has already given. She sits in silence, remembering those colleges: stone and cedar dwindling into the snow behind her. But I have read the journals of your colleges.

We place the art of physics above the science, he says. The spring it steals here will become the fire that kills your king. Swallows all heat, in transgression of the Second Law. Your king was right, I think, the girl says. He chews on salted leather, and she sees that his gums have drawn back to bare red bleeding flesh at the roots of his teeth. The girl thinks of men strewn like crows across the ice. But we expected spring, and met disaster. I sailed south with four galleons and two thousand men to kill the wyrm while it still slept. My lord King dreamt a prophecy of ruin and dragon fire. I am court wizard to the High King of the North, he says. I need to set a fire, he says, or we won’t last the night. They sit opposite, in the space between the frozen hide walls. The man pitches a sealskin tent oiled in the fat of midsummer calves. By now she has learned the futility of fire. Her telescope’s brass is cold enough to peel skin and her compass has frozen in its turn, pointing with dead insistence to a north that rings the world.īeneath her crampons the ice complains into the silence.Īfter a long while the aurora pulls the sun out of the sky and opens itself horizon to horizon. She walks north, her eyes rimmed with black grease against the glare. Thank you, she says.īut the souls of the crows are silent now. They make a papery protest as she takes their feathers for a totem. I will end the winter, she tells the crows. It is spring, but the crows know too little of thermodynamics, and she is too tired to explain, even to the clever souls of crows, why the thaw will never come. It should be spring, their dead eyes protest.

The long glazed road goes on towards the mountains through villages of crushed eaves and crumbled roofs. The weight of ice has stripped the boughs from all the trees and now they stand like bones. The valley before her lies dead and glittering with rime. Stops to say a word for their little corvid souls. The girl finds them fallen, ice and feather, on the frozen stone.

Tower of trample crow