Chapter 10: The Palisade

I ran.

There was a hunters' path down the east face, steep as a ladder, that my father had shown me when I was ten.

No boar the size of a hut could take it.

I could.

Tobiah went up as a hawk to keep his eyes on Old Frost.

Kell went down after me as a snake, pouring over the rocks, slower every mile as the sun dropped.

I got to the Ridge as the light went.

The torches were lit along the palisade.

And outside the gate, in the trampled snow, waited the Ridge wolves.

Twenty of them, in fur.

Brannon stood at the front, the biggest of them, his ash-gray coat silver in the torchlight.

The lion and the bear stood with them, as men.

Hester stood on the palisade walk above the gate with her father, wrapped in white fur, watching.

I came out of the trees at a dead run, gasping.

"Get the children away from the gate! Old Frost is coming down the pass!"

For a moment nobody moved.

Then someone on the wall laughed.

"Look. The exile wants back in."

"Willa Corrick, hunting boars," another voice called. "Did your snake tell you a story?"

Brannon, still in wolf form, turned his big head and gave me a long amber look.

His tongue lolled. He was laughing too.

"You fool," I said to him. "You can't turn it. Not twenty of you. Not a hundred. It's not a pig, Brannon, it's a mountain."

The chief leaned over the palisade.

"Exile. Leave, or the guards will see you off."

The ground shook.

The laughing stopped.

It shook again, and snow slid off the gate roof in a long white sheet.

Out of the dark at the top of the trail came a sound.

Old Frost walked into the torchlight.

He was bigger than the gate.

His tusks were longer than the wolves.

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