The Stray

2-3: Hemolymph is Thicker Than Water, Pt. 1

That winter had earned its name and then some. You're too young to remember, Meri, but the sun disappeared for weeks. The snow never stopped falling. The cold was intense enough to freeze a sneeze in your nose. Heck, if you stood still too long you'd freeze over!

("Really?" Meri asked.)

Oh, yes, really. And that's not even considerin' the wind— it coulda blown a durawn over and rolled it away, it was that strong. More'n a few trees with weak roots blew over and froze to the ground. And that was the year I was unlucky enough to be on the run. ("Damn...")

You know how that happened, so I ain't gonna repeat myself. The great storm'd come on me just out the Forest of Pain. ...Yes, that one. What's that look for?

("Why didn't you take the Punnel?")

The Punnel... wait, you don't mean the Painless Path tunnel, do you? They actually finished it?

("Yeah, a few years back. But nobody calls it that! It's the Punnel.")

Huh... Well, it wasn't finished yet. At the time, we kinda thought it never would be, what with the Awn clans fighting over it and all. Someone lost their head, I bet... Hope it was Root Katha. Anyway! No shortcut for me.

I was a tiny little thing, then.

("Tinier than now?" V grimaced.)

Oh, yes. Short, skinny, hadn't even grown into my ears yet. Not at all ready for a blizzard that strong. Listen, a Vol Streneli is taught the ways of the wild as soon as they can walk. By my age, I was apprenticed to a trapper, y'know? As part of tryin' to make Pathfinder. Between that and my witchcraft, I wasn't 'zactly helpless... but there's a difference between short trips to hunt near the village and a forced march east in the dead of winter. Thinkin' back, the only things that kept me alive were—

("Guts? An ironclad will to live?")

("...The power of love?")

Ha! Oh dear, don't I wish. Nah, the power of enchantment. Like I said, we'd started packing to run before, well. You know. They tore into our bags, but when I ran away I scraped together what I could from'em. That's when I started wearing dresses— Gran kept an old traveling dress of hers glyphed and loaded with spells, including ones to ward off the cold and the wind. Tons of those glyphs blew out when the blizzard hit me... I'm lucky I'm fireproof. Heh.

Mind you, that didn't make it easy to survive, it just made it possible. I musta looked a sight, a kid smaller than Meri wearing, oh, three shirts and a ratty overcoat, tripping over a too-long dress and boots meant for a grown woman. Ugh, and not just tripping over those. The snow piled up real fast. It wasn't long out the forest that I was more climbing than marching. It was bad.

("We still talk about it sometimes, even in town. School was cancelled for like, two weeks." Timothy looked at V askance.)

...How terrible. As for me, I had a choice to make. I pushed on as long as I could, but soon enough, it was between hunkering down somewhere, anywhere, or freezin' to death. And, well... when I could see at all, I could see a forest with a petty thick canopy...

("Wait," V's brow furrowed in confusion. "If you were close enough to hit the Deepshadow, you had to have seen us, right? Why didn't you just come here?")

("...Timothy?")

... It was a whiteout. Anyway. It was the dead of night. The Deepshadow canopy was helping keep the snow and wind back, but it was still a dense forest, and the ground was still thigh deep in snow. So I was stumbling through unfamiliar forest, blind from snow and completely turned around.