Chapter 7: The Mothers

Hurn walked to the Quiet Cave at first light with two hunters behind him and a spear in his fist.

Kesh walked at his side with Ilu on her hip.

Nobody spoke.

The snow squeaked under their boots, and the sky over the ridge went from gray to the color of a peach.

At the cave mouth, Hurn stopped and looked into the dark.

"Show me," he said.

Kesh set Ilu down.

Ilu took her mother's hand, and then, after a second, she took Hurn's.

His hand was huge and cold and dry as a bone, and he jerked.

"Why do you touch me?"

"Mar says to hold on," said Ilu, in English.

Then she said it again in his tongue, because he was a person who had to be told things twice.

"Hold on to someone, and we go together."

She did not know why she was sure.

She only knew that when she crawled toward the warm wind, her whole body felt it, and her hands felt like doors.

Hurn stared down at her.

Then he did something she had not expected.

He let go.

"No," he said. "I do not follow a child into a hole."

He crouched at the mouth of the hollow and shoved his arm inside to the shoulder.

He grunted and pushed his head in after it.

For a long moment there was nothing but the scrape of his cloak on the rock.

Then he swore and backed out, and his face was gray.

"It ends," he said. "It's stone. There is nothing there."

Kesh did not look surprised.

Ilu looked at her mother, and the strangest thing happened in her chest.

She saw her mother's face go smooth and careful, the way it did when she was not telling the truth.

"It goes only for her," Kesh said. "That is the law of it."

"Whose law?"

"The cave's."

Hurn laughed, once, a short cold sound.

"Then I will wait here," he said, "and when you come back, you will carry what you find to me."

Kesh took Ilu's hand again.

The two of them knelt together at the hollow.

The last thing Ilu saw before the dark took them was Hurn's face, flat and patient, turned toward her mother.

It was the face of a man memorizing something.

They crawled.

Ilu went first, her mother close behind with a hand on her ankle.

She felt the warm air thicken against her face, and smelled coffee, and then something sweet and buttery that made her mouth water.

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