Nor did she particularly want to spend the winter cooped up anywhere, alone with Peter. Once I used to daydream about something that would isolate us, so we had time only to be alone together. … Even now, it might be … pleasurable…. Exasperated, Magda told herself to snap out of it. She wondered, half annoyed, if Bethany had been right all along; was she still half in love with Peter? 7 should have taken another lover right away, after we separated. God knows I had enough chances. I wonder why I didn’t.
She checked the notice board, and discovered that there was another shelter just about half a day’s ride distant. As she turned her back on the shelter she felt again the curious, almost physical prickling of the “hunch,” but told herself fiercely not to be superstitious. I’m afraid to go on, so I find reasons, and call it ESP!
The trail steepened and grew rough underfoot; by midafternoon the thickening clouds lay so deep on the mountain that Magda was riding through a thick white blanket of fog. The dim gray world was full of echoes; she could hear her horse’s hooves sounding dimly, behind and before her, like invisible, ghostly companions. The valley was gone, and the lower slopes; she rode high and alone, on a narrow trail above the known world. She had never been afraid of heights, but now she began to be afraid of the narrowness of the dim trail, of the white nothingness that hemmed her in on every side and might hide anything-or worse, nothing. Her mind kept returning to the cliffs and crags below, where an animal, putting a foot down wrong, might step off the trail, go plunging down the mountainside to be dashed to death on the invisible rocks far below. …
As the darkness deepened, the fog dissolved into fine rain and then into a thick, fast-falling snow, wiping out trail and landmarks. The snow froze as it fell, and the slush underfoot crunched and crackled under her horse’s hooves; then the wind began to howl through the trees and, where they thinned, to roar across the trail, driving icy needles of sleet into her face and eyes. She pulled up her cloak’s collar and wrapped a fold of her scarf over her nose and chin, but the cold made her nose run, and the water froze on her nose and mouth and turned the scarf to a block of ice. Snow clung to her eyelashes and froze there, making it impossible to see. Her horse began to slip on the icy trail, and Magda dismounted to lead it and the faltering pack animal, glad of the knee-high boots she was wearing; a woman’s soft low sandals or ankle-high, tied moccasins would have been soaked in a moment.
I should have stayed in that last shelter. That was what that hunch was all about. Confound it, I ought to listen to myself!
Her feet were freezing, and she was seriously beginning to wonder if her cheeks and nose were frostbitten. Normally cold did not bother her, but she was chilled now to the bone; her thick fur-lined tunic and cloak might have been dancing silks.
She sternly told herself not to be frightened. The woman who had trained her in Intelligence work had told her that human stock was the hardiest known in the Empire. Man’s home planet, Terra, had contained extremes of temperature, and, before civilization, ethnic types had developed who could, and did, live in unheated houses made of ice blocks, or on burning deserts sufficient to blister the skin. She could survive outdoors, even in this storm.
But frostbite could delay me, beyond the midwinter deadline.
The light of her saddle-lantern glinted on one of the small arrow-shaped signs of a travel-shelter. Her antlered pack beast threw back its head and whickered. Magda turned off the trail and trudged down the narrow path, leading toward the dark building she could just see. The road crunched with rutted and frozen sleet, much trampled. As she came through the trees, she saw the loom of two buildings; it was one of the large shelters, with a separate building for animals. Then she swore softly to herself: Through the crack of the door a faint light was visible: the shelter was occupied.