Chapter 12: Left Behind

Kesh was not far.

Ilu found her by smell first, a thread of smoke curling out of a gap in the rocks a short walk down the slope.

She ran with her purple coat swishing and her arms out, and Lois ran behind her, wheezing.

They came around a shoulder of stone into a little hollow out of the wind.

A small fire burned there.

The old man lay beside it on his furs, with the lame boy curled against his side.

Kesh sat across from them with her knees drawn up and her cloak pulled over her head.

She looked up.

Her face did something Ilu had never seen it do.

It broke wide open.

"Ilu," she said, and was across the snow before she finished the word.

She dropped to her knees and caught Ilu against her chest so hard it hurt.

"I thought the cave had closed. I thought it had shut, and you were on the other side, and I would never..."

She stopped.

She pressed her face into Ilu's neck and made a sound like a hurt animal.

Lois stood at the edge of the firelight, holding the empty thermos, and looked at the sky.

The sun was a hand's width over the ridge.

"Two hours," she said, to nobody. "Maybe three. Then I have to go back or I don't go back at all."

She sat down on a rock to give them room.

Kesh held on for a long time.

When she finally let go, her cheeks were wet and her hands were still tight on Ilu's arms.

"Where is everyone?" Ilu asked in their own tongue. "Where's the camp?"

"Gone south."

"Why?"

"Hurn ordered the move at midnight. He took the sacks, all the food from the other side."

"He told them the cave was a thief, that it fed the weak and took the strong."

"He said Oro was too old to see it."

Kesh wiped her face on her wrist.

"Oro went with them. He is not strong enough to say no to thirty people with empty bellies."

"But you didn't go."

"I stayed."

"Why?"

Kesh's eyes dropped.

For a long moment she looked at the fire, and her mouth worked.

"There is something I have to tell you," she said. "And I am more afraid of it than of Hurn."

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