“Ara?” Smooth Guy prompted.

The shyin held out both hands, feeling the air. “The fog is the mantle of a creature.” He made a graceful curling gesture on either side of his head. “It’s mane.”

This was alarming, but first things first. “Can you go out into it to retrieve the old woman, is it safe?”

“You want her body back?” Arandgwail asked with the inappropriate cheerfulness so typical to him.

The kid sobbed against Havec’s chest, but Smooth Guy was speaking before he could respond. “A creature of what kind?”

Hair-On-End’s head cocked while he considered it. “It reminds me of the lady I sometimes see riding on his shoulder.” He pointed at Farait, but for one merciful moment, no one understood what he meant.

Then the girl whispered, “Are you telling us it’s a god?”

“Am I?” Hair-On-End replied. “It’s nothing like the person in him.”

Havec nodded; that made sense. There were only a handful of Archetypes of War and they were all accounted for. It wasn’t a comforting thought; he had come to think of the Archetypes as benevolent, in their own peculiar way, but this wasn’t. No creature with icy, sulfur-smelling, scream-filled fog for hair existed to bring good into the world.

Without anyone having suggested it, they had ended standing in a defensive circle with their backs to the fire, staring at the white wall around them as they waited for it to reach out again. Over one shoulder, Havec asked, “Mother? You seem to have some idea what’s going on.”

“Your father and I removed you from Moritia for a reason, you should have stayed away,” she told him angrily. It was all she would say.

It came as a shock when, only a few minutes later, the nightmarish fog cleared. Havec had expected it to come for them one by one until no one was left. Probably all of them had. He felt no relief; instead, his fear increased. Nothing that malignant would be satiated by a single death, he felt sure of it. It couldn’t possibly be done causing pain, which meant the worst was yet to come. When he turned to face east, he could see the backward edge of the stormfront retreating down the hill.

Not retreating, he corrected himself: advancing toward something else.

“What is it?” he growled. When no one answered, he closed on his mother, taking her by the shoulders and giving her a shake. “What is it?”

“Do you truly remember so little?” she sneered.

“I know.”

It was Hib who’d spoken, and all of them turned to look at him.

“It’s winter.” His eyes were on Havec’s mother. “You mean to bring winter to the south.”

“You recognized it?” Hot Priest asked.

“We knew this was coming,” the boy said quietly. “I mean, not this, but something. That’s why it took Moida: to punish her for spying.”

“What did she see them doing?” Havec asked, eyes on his mother.

“Feeding it. Stealing from their own people and sacrificing to it. Sheep, cattle, foodstuffs. Lieutenant Pannus thought they were trying to gain the ear of a being that doesn’t usually treat with humans.”

There was a period while they all struggled to come to terms with the revelation that the guides they had mostly ignored might be considerably better-informed than the rest of them. It was Farait who recovered first. “If we knew this was coming…!”

The boy bowed his head, unable to respond.

“You didn’t know?” Smooth Guy demanded, the accusation clear.

“I’m the chaplain,” Hot Priest retorted, “I’m not exactly ‘need to know.’”

“So the uniform’s just a costume to you?”

“Funny you’re so keen to brag about your service, since you quit,” Havec snarled back.

“Gentlemen.” Qanath stepped in and raised her hands. “If we could shelve the bickering and get back to the murderous god that just walked through our camp?”

Anger remained heavy on the air, but that shut them up and they glowered at the fire as they wondered what to do. It was Havec who broke the quiet, glancing at Farait. “You’re our expert. What would a god be doing walking about in our world?”

The priest grimaced. “It’s in their nature to want to become more powerful, to expand their reach or gain new followers. They don’t really have any goal other than to be what they are, except more.”

“Then why aren’t they always at war?”

“Because there is no afterlife for them.”

Another silence descended as they all considered that. It was an unsettling thought, that the supernatural beings woven through the fabric of their world only failed to rend that fabric regularly out of rational self-interest. It left open the possibility that, at any time, one of them might decide to say screw it and go with their gut.

The girl dropped to the earth before the fire as if her knees had given out, and that shook him from his daze. Going to her, he grabbed her by the upper arms and pulled her right back to her feet. “We can’t stay here,” he told her, shooting her an apologetic frown. “We need to get down out of the mountains now. If Winter is walking the heights in Moritia, there’ll be a blizzard on its heels.”

***

They were still walking by the time the sky in the east began to go gray. Havec had said they needed to get down out of the mountains, and it wasn’t so much that Qanath questioned his reasoning: she was beginning to wonder if there was a place in Moritia that qualified. The temperature kept dropping, and they could see the massive banks of clouds piling in. There was going to be a storm, and none of them wanted to be out in it.

The hike was an agony that only grew worse as the hours wore on. The icy wind seemed to slice the exposed skin of her cheeks, piercing straight through her clothes to breathe across the naked flesh beneath. Her breath clawed raggedly in her lungs as they traversed ground that was never flat, but only up or down. Havec made them dismount more than once and walk, to warm them up and give the horses a break. Their mounts walked with their heads bowed, exhausted, and Qanath began to wonder if they would survive; these looked like southern creatures, without a thick coat to protect them from the chill. It hadn’t begun to snow, but the last snow had yet to melt and slowed their feet. When they broke free occasionally from the trees, the wind threw the snow across the sky in shimmering clouds as if it meant to claim the world. It did, Qanath remembered every time she saw this, shivering from more than the chill.

They were doing another spell of walking when dawn arrived. Havec had ordered them down again; while everyone else faltered, he kept on like he had no need for sleep. Qanath walked with her head down, hunched into herself, feet catching on unseen obstructions with every other step. She didn’t want to dwell on it, but it was hard to think of anything but the burning of her breath, the hot ache in her muscles. The numbness fading into pain in her fingers and toes.

By the time she realized she could actually see her own plodding feet, she was quite sure she had never been more tired in her life. She’d stayed up as long in school, cramming for a test, but she had never before had to walk for hours along the way. She hadn’t spent a period in the middle of it watching a duel with evil witches, terrified for her own life and her friends.

“Do you smell that?”

She looked up, too tired to be surprised that Amril was walking at her side. She didn’t need to ask what he meant: one sniff and her nose was filled with the smell of smoke. It was faint but shocking against the austere, wintry odors of pine resin and ice. She stifled a sob, thinking that she’d never been so grateful for anything in her life.

“I almost wonder if something went wrong.”

She glanced at him because she had no idea what he was talking about and was too tired to ask.

“The boy said they’ve been plotting with this god. But when the queen realized the god walked the world, she seemed upset. She blamed it on your friend, but if the plan was that he be a long way away from here when they did what they meant to do, how could any of it be laid at his door? It makes me think…”

“Things aren’t going according to plan,” she supplied. He seemed to have a point, but she was too weary to discern whether it was meaningful, let alone what to do about it. Tucking a bookmark in the thought, she shelved it and went back to watching the lethargic trudging of her feet.

They emerged moments later from amidst the dense press of evergreens into a field. Beneath the trees, the snow lingered, but here most of it had melted off. It was light enough that she could see the grass had already begun to turn green in anticipation of the spring it wasn’t getting.

On the far side of the broad open expanse sloping west to east stood a house. A modest house and a much bigger barn, the latter shuttered tight, the former spilling light and smoke into the last remnants of the night. She heard Havec let loose a quiet laugh, and although the sound was whipped away instantly by the wind, he sounded pleased.

He made right for the house, and none of them hung back. Qanath wasn’t sure whether they were following more because they trusted him or because questioning him would take energy. He tossed himself down and knocked on the door almost eagerly, as if he had no doubt what reception was awaiting them.

The man who came in answer was middle-aged and rotund. He had a knife in hand, a huge, heavy knife with a rectangular blade such as one used to do butchering. That wasn’t why Qanath couldn’t stop staring at him: his hair was the startling orange of flame. Her immediate reaction was to assume it was done with dyes, but his fly-away eyebrows and his lashes were orange too. His beard was a darker color but distinctly ruddy.