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Staying was not a conscious decision; the will to th returned It approached with s awaited, it arrived all at once She constructed a shelter of deadfall and vines, using the tarp as a roof The woods abounded with life: squirrels and rabbits, quail and doves, deer Some were too quick for her but not all She set traps and waited to collect her kill or took them on her cross: one shot, a clean death, then dinner, raw and warht had faded, she bathed in the creek The water was clear and shockingly cold It was on such an excursion that she saw the bears A rustling ten yards upstrea in the brush; then they appeared at the edge of the creek, a mother and a pair of cubs Alicia had never seen such creatures in the flesh, only in books They prowled the shallows together, pushing theloose and half-formed about their anatomy, as if the muscles were not firled coats A cloud of insects sparkled around theht But the bears did not appear to notice her or, if they did, did not think she was ireen leaves, dense with shadow; then the woods exploded with riotous color In the , the floor of the forest crunched with frost Winter’s cold descended with a feeling of purity Snow lay heavy on the land The black lines of the trees, the small footprints of birds, the ashed sky, bleached of all tone: everything had been pared to its essence What month was it? What day? As time wore on, food became a proble her strength; she hadn’t spoken to a living soul in nearly a year Gradually it ca in words, as if she had beco her an to talk to Soldier, as if he were a person Soldier, she would say, what should we have for dinner? Soldier, do you think it’s tiather wood for the fire? Soldier, does the sky look like snow?
One night she awoke in the shelter and realized that for so as blowing in directionless gusts, hurling around in the treetops With a feeling of detachment, Alicia listened to the storhtning forked the sky, freezing the scene in her eyes, followed by an earsplitting clap She let Soldier inside as the heavens opened, ejecting raindrops heavy as bullets The horse was shivering with terror Alicia needed to calm him; just one panicked movement in the tiny space and his ood boy, shehis flank With her free hand she slipped the rope around his neck My good, good boy What do you say? Keep a girl coht? His body was tense with fear, a wall of coiled muscle, and yet when she applied slow force to draw him doard, he allowed it Beyond the walls of the shelter, the lightning flashed, the heavens rolled He dropped to his knees with a h, turned onto his side beside her bedroll, and that was how the two of the winter away
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She abided in that place for two years Leaving was not easy; the woods had become a solace She had taken its rhythan, a new feeling stirred: the time had come to move on To finish what she’d started
She passed the rest of the su This involved the construction of a weapon She left on foot for the river towns and returned three days later, hauling a clanking bag She understood the basics of what she was atte watched the process h trial and error A flat-topped boulder by the creek would serve as her anvil At the water’s edge, she stoked her fire and watched it burn down to coals Maintaining the right teht, she removed the first piece from the sack: a bar of O1 steel, two inches wide, three feet long, three-eighths of an inch thick Fros, and thick leather gloves She placed the end of the steel bar in the fire and watched its color change as the ot to work
It took three more trips downriver for supplies, and the results were crude, but in the end she was satisfied She used coarse, stringy vines to wrap the handle, giving her fist a solid purchase on the otherwise srip The polished tip shone in the sun But the first cut would be the true test On her final trip downriver, she had wandered upon a field of rew in a dense patch, tangled with vines of grasping, hand-shaped leaves She’d selected one and carried it ho, took aiht the sword down in a vertical arc The severed halves rocked lazily away froround