Kushiel's Justice - Jacqueline Carey [266]
I looked.
It was hard. Snow covered everything. But here and there, I found it. From what I could determine, Berlik had been travelling in a straight line. I followed in the direction I'd marked, looking for broken branches. Looking for tufts of hair poking through their coating of snow.
Whenever I found one, I made a fresh mark. When I didn't, I backtracked along my own trail to the last mark, adjusted my angle, and tried anew.
I didn't find him on the sixth day. I did find a fox, which I tried to kill by throwing my dagger at it. It dodged effortlessly the moment my arm came forward. By the time I retrieved my dagger, it was gone. My empty stomach growled. When I saw one of the other animals digging beneath a tree, one of the ones I couldn't put a name to, I dropped my mittens and nocked an arrow. The creature scurried, a dark, anxious blur moving over the snow. I swung the bow wildly in an effort to track it, shot, and missed.
I lost that arrow, too.
It wasn't that I was careless or unobservant. There was just so much forest, so much snow. It could swallow up a castle without noticing. A man was nothing; an arrow, less. I tramped around searching for the better part of an hour before giving up. The quest I had abandoned compelled me.
On the evening of the sixth day, I made camp and melted snow for my dinner. I drank as much as I could hold, and more. Water was good, water was life. I'd learned that in the desert when I travelled to Meroë with Phèdre and Joscelin.
I could live for days on water.
I could die on it, too.
It was snowing when I awoke on the seventh day. Not hard; almost idly, as though the snow were an afterthought. I felt a little weak, but clearheaded. I drank deep of snowmelt, then broke camp and struck out once more. It was another day like the others, filled with searching and backtracking.
Except that I found him.
If Miroslas had seemed like a mirage, I have no words to describe my reaction upon finding Berlik's cabin. It was small, very small. It stood in a tiny glade I could easily have missed. When I found it, I stood for a time and simply stared, my mouth agape. There were gaps between the rough-hewn logs of which it was composed. He must have built it himself.
I set down my pack and took up the hunting bow. Elua, it seemed like a long time since I'd borrowed it from the Shahrizai lodge. I nocked my last arrow and trudged across the glade. Around the cabin, the snow was packed hard, gouged by bear-claws and boot-heels alike.
I kicked the door open.
It wasn't much of a door, not really. It hung on leather hinges, sagging a little. Inside, the cabin was empty. No Berlik. Only strips of salted meat, hanging from the rafter poles to cure. There was a crude stone hearth in the center of the room, but the hearth was cold. A pallet of pine-boughs in the corner, covered in blankets and furs. On one wall, there was a cross; a pair of branches tied together with dried sinew. I surveyed it all, breathing hard.
Empty.
My heart ached. I was so tired.
There had been a tree outside. An oak tree, a barren tree. Dry branches reaching toward a stark, snowy sky. It nudged at my memory. There had been a tree in Dorelei's vision. I went outside. Trudged toward the tree, arrow nocked.
I would have seen him before if I'd looked more closely, but I'd been fixed on the cabin. He was sitting beneath the tree, still and motionless, watching me. A man, not a bear. There was an axe not far away from him, embedded in a stump, but his hands were empty, resting quietly atop his knees. As I approached, he stirred.
I aimed at his heart. "Don't move.”
He did, though, rising to his feet. "I will not harm you.”
My fingers trembled on the bowstring. "I've heard that before.”
"This time it is true," he said in his deep voice. "I ask only that you kill me like a man, not a beast. Put down the bow.”
"Damn you!" I shouted