Chapter 12: The Man on the Ice

I was standing in the pines at the foot of the bluff before the sun came up.

Lars stood a step behind me with his hand on my back, and Petra waited at the top of the path with a thermos and her mouth in a hard line.

"You don't have to do this," Lars said again.

"I know."

"We could wait. Let Petra bring him up to the cabin and talk to him."

"If I wait for him to be ready," I said, "he'll be ready right when I'm not. I'm doing it now."

He didn't argue.

He only squeezed my back once, and stepped aside.

The sky over the lake turned from black to gray.

Far out on the ice, a single yellow lantern was moving toward us.

It was a small, steady light, and it took a very long time.

He was walking the whole lake on foot, from the south shore to the north.

I watched it come, listening to my own breathing, and I told myself it was nothing.

It was my mate.

It had been my mate.

The lantern reached the shallows at last, and I saw the man carrying it.

He had no hat.

His black coat hung open, and his hair was iced white at the edges from the wind.

He walked up out of the lake into the snow of the north shore, and set the lantern down, and stood there looking at the trees.

Then his knees folded under him.

He knelt on the frozen sand with his hands on his thighs and his head bowed.

"Marit," Garrick said.

He said it to the ground.

His voice was thin and hoarse, and I could hear every day without sleep in it.

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