A Song of Ash and Snow

Escape

When at last all of the group had gone to sleep, the now nineteen year old Barra, slips quietly to the stash of weapons, withdrawing the two long daggers she favours as weapons, plus a larger spear, several smaller knives, and a bow that comes with a quiver of twenty one arrows. She tucks the smaller weapons into various pockets found in her clothing, slings the quiver and the bow over one shoulder, and carefully sheathing one of the large knives and strapping at her waist, she sets out to do what she'd been planning for twelve years now.

The other knife, which she'd kept in her hand, cuts quickly across the throats of the thirteen men and five women, her tormentors and kidnappers. Then, grabbing the sled that contained all their provisions, she sets out into the snow, looking back only once in satisfaction at the people lying in the snow, in pools of their own blood, with their throats cut.

Then, she marches North, to the lands of always Winter.

***

It is so bitterly cold here that Barra would have forgotten what heat felt like, if it had not been for the tiny fires she builds each night in her tiny snow caves. They only last for one or two hours though, and the trees are getting scarcer. Half her sled is now filled with wood, and the other with any game she'd managed to shoot down. 

But still, she continues further and further North.

That night, as she constructs her shelter, her hand comes across something hard, colder than the freezing snow that buries it. Curious, she continues digging, until she liberates an egg that almost looks to be made of pure ice. It's about as big as her two cupped hands and it shimmers in flecks of silvers, whorls of light blue, and swirls of a translucent white. It radiates cold the way she imagined an actual dragon egg would radiate heat. 

Barra continues carving out a tiny cave for herself, and now for the mysterious egg she'd found.

When she finishes, she makes herself dinner with one of the rabbits she'd killed a few days earlier. Luckily, it was cold enough that the animals froze when they were dead and so where kept fresh for far longer than if they'd been south of the Wall. The egg sits beside her in a little nest she'd made of snow. Then, as the fire dies and Barra sets up her bedding, she takes the egg and places it next to her.

Despite its coldness, it was comforting to have something potentially alive next to her again.