Graveyard Children

The Dark Entrance to Dawn (cont.)

Glass.

It was as if the wood was all made of it, shining, smooth, as if on purpose, but by the hands of someone who could never craft something the same way twice. Behind her came the heavy breathing of the bear and the sluff of snow as it fell in sheets off the embankment around him. He moved slowly, weak, she could hear the lethargy in his steps, much the same as she felt in her own, but they were both of them standing. She felt emboldened that they could still stand, even after the world had tried to suck the heat out of them.

The crystalline night had distracted her for an instant, but she remembered where she was now, and how she would have to endure pain and starvation to keep her footsteps moving forward, for that was her only hope of getting down the mountain, and they had to get down. It would take a day, or maybe several days before they were even below the snow-line, but it would get warmer as they moved. The winds of winter could return any moment now, she knew, and if they did, they would not last through a second storm. Perhaps the bear could if they stayed here and slept until spring. He was fatter than she was, and could maybe eat her if she died.

The thought caused her to frown when she'd forgotten what frowning was. She wondered if he would ever eat her, even if she were already dead. She knew he wouldn't, but she couldn't decide why, beyond the repeated thought that bears don't eat other bears. She was no bear. She wore the fur of his dead mother across her shoulders but she was not his mother, nor did he think her his mother. The smell had long gone away from the skin to give him any illusion of that. It only smelled as she did; as a human girl that was only a few more years in the world than he, and she no alpha among people, much less bears. Even so, as she took her first steps across the shining glass of snow, the pads of bear-feet were not far behind her. She liked the sound; it gave her rhythm for walking, and the courage to continue doing it. The starlight snow-meadows around her were so alien and astonishingly beautiful that it distracted her from the cold enough to walk. The cold wasn't even that bad anymore, not compared to before, but she remembered them say you couldn't feel the cold that kills you. No, she decided, it was not that she couldn't feel the cold, she was simply struggling to recall what it was to be warm.

The padding behind her went silent. She stopped, immediately regretted stopping, and then wondered how she might ever start walking again. It was as if something molten cooled around her knees at the moment of stillness. She winced, and then her face hurt to make the expression. It was painful, but everything was painful, and there was nothing to be done for it.

The bear was making noise all of a sudden. It was a cub-noise she knew immediately, though he hadn't made it in years. She had been hardly more than a cub herself at the time, but she remembered that moment and that noise. She heard words in it that her mind had put there when she'd first met him. It was imprinted on her - the memory of that that sound and seeing the little bear exploring for the milk of his dead mother. She knew the words behind the cry because she had made the same sound herself, in her own moment of orphaning. For all the things behind it, the words meant simply 'this is wrong', but even though the words were right, they didn't communicate it in the same way that the sound did.

She turned to search his face for what it was that was wrong but didn't turn all the way. She stopped, seeing what he saw. Again a deer was in her path, though before it had been sudden and in an explosion of snow, this time it was silent, a silhouette against the starlight and snow. A stag instead of a doe, standing despite the cold, and so still she would not have seen him if not for the Bear.

Her knees were bending again before she wondered how, but upon creeping forward, closing the distance between, the male thing, horned and posed, remained where was. She expected him to spring away any moment, but the closer she came the more still he seemed to become.