MOUNT AEMIR GLOWERED over the nameless valley, a ruthless god cloaked in shadows. The high peak yet guttered with the fading flames of day, but all the world around it was dark now. True night had come, and with it, a bone-cutting wind swept down off the high rocky shoulders.

Ulrem could not feel it. He could feel little as he staggered past the graves of heaped snow and into the squat village. Cold beyond any sensation, as numb as the dead themselves, he shoved one foot through the snow after another, his hands clamped up under his arms, forcing himself to breathe past the point that any man ought to have drawn breath. Iron will drove him, a proud refusal to give himself up to the hells.

“Hesitation is death,” he told himself, muttering Akale’s words like a priest’s mantra, feeling the truth of it scrawled across his aching flesh. The huts engulfed him like beasts closing ranks. His feet knew the path. As he slid between the stooped houses, Ulrem glanced around him and wondered what sort of life the people who once dwelt on the frigid shore might have lived. He could see the strange shapes of sledded craft for pushing across the ice or dragging across the snow. He knew, with the hard instinct of a man who had walked the wilds of the world, that they must have been a hardy breed. This sort of place, steeped in the shadow and endless cold, could only have bred hard men.

Yet, they were gone now, given up to the high house of the sun.

Staring out over the frozen lake, Ulrem started. He stood transfixed, for far out among the ices his eye caught the vague forms of men. They stood still, watching, and though he scried for any detail, it evaded him. He was still staring when a blast of wind kicked up the snow that lay on the lake and drew a white veil between them. When it faded, the shades were gone, if ever they had been there at all.

Unsettled, cold to his soul, Ulrem ducked his head under the low door of the woman’s hut and dropped unsteadily down the stairs. He nearly lost his footing, and the stone wall he caught himself upon was so cold it burned.

His heart fell when he saw it was empty. He had hoped to find the woman here, to tell her of what he had done. Though she may not understand, she deserved to hear it from him. Yet, the hut was not empty, was it?

The only light came from the door behind him, fixed now against the cold, and the chimney hole in the tall ceiling. By that grim light, he saw a form stretched across the bed of skins. Ulrem had first mistaken it for blankets thrown carelessly down, but stooping beside them, what he saw made him bite off a black curse.

The woman lay swaddled in blankets. Her thin face, with jutting cheekbones and lips drawn back to bare stained teeth, was no fresh death. The long winter had frozen her flesh hard as stone, and her black hair was like coarse wire, and brittle. She had been long dead, a rational part of his mind judged. The rest of him was screaming, wordless horror boiling out in a revolted snarl.

Struggling to his feet, Ulrem mastered himself with steady breaths. His hand rested on the hilt of his sword, which he had retrieved from the tower, along with the tattered blanket now wrapped around his shoulders. The ring glowered on his finger, a steady warmth, sated now by the violence on the slopes, but its strength was useless here.

Exhaustion hung about Ulrem’s shoulders like massive chains. Still, he wondered what force had allowed her soul to linger long after she had faded. Could one know the true desires of a ghost? And yet—he knew with a darkening scowl—he knew what grave force had bound the silent woman to the icy skin of the world long enough to see vengeance done.

Ulrem stepped quietly over to the small cradle. There, he saw what had been hidden from his eyes before: a small thing, swaddled in skins. As dead and silent as its mother. He let out an animal sort of groan, a mingled grief and rage that steamed in the air before his face. Gingerly, he reached down and retrieved the little one.

He placed it beside its mother. Ulrem’s people, exiled to their distant mountains, kept no gods or prayers. Ulrem had no comfort to give the dead.

He put a hand on her gaunt shoulder, and closed his eyes.

Then he began to break down the cradle, though every spar and plank felt as if it were a bone breaking in his own body. He set about making a fire.

In the morning, he would have two more graves to dig.