Springwar Read Online Free PDF Page B

tugged hishood closer around his face and reached back to snare their skis. He yanked at the door, but it was stuck.
    Masking a surge of impatience, Eddyn jerked it closed. Eronese conditioning, if not Eronese Law, said that one should always leave a shelter as one found it. Someone else might need this place.
Some fool
.
    “I could’ve managed,” Rrath muttered.
    Eddyn nearly hit him. Forced confinement with someone he had little cause to like had worn his always-volatile temper dangerously thin. “I’m sure you could,” he growled as he stomped into the waist-high snow drifted around the porch. A pair of strides put him into knee-deep powder atop a hard-packed base. The river glittered a dozen spans beyond, totally iced over save for one narrow channel, courtesy of the steam venting upstream. Pines lined the gorge to every side: dark against the white.
    “I was afraid you were going to—”
    “I nearly did,” Eddyn snapped. “Don’t make me regret it.”
    Rrath glared at him, but his guileless features and youth made him easy to dismiss. “I think we’re even,” he dared at last.
    Eddyn grunted. “Until we reach Tir-Eron.”
    “Assuming we do.”
    Eddyn dipped his head to the right, where an impressive escarpment glowered, easily six spans high. Snow softened scorched walls at its summit: the ruins of Woodstock Station, now abandoned. “Might as well get to it.”
    “But the birkits—”
    “Even birkits go to ground in blizzards,” Eddyn retorted. “The fact remains: Either the gem is up there, or it’s in the Ri-Eron. And while I doubt that Rann or that woman who was with them had the thing, we’d be crazy not to check.”
    Rrath’s eyes flashed challenge for one wild reckless moment, before their fire faded. “Apparently,” he spat, “my choice is whether I’m killed by birkits, you, or my own clan.”
    Eddyn’s face was like frozen stone. “That’s a fair assessment.” And with that, he started up the timbered slope.

    Eddyn knew what they would find long before they peered over what had been the way station’s outer palisade, but he motioned Rrath to caution anyway.
    The tracks told it all: two fresh sets of ski trails from the station to the riverside, ending just out of sight of the boathouse, then footprints going back up, but angling away from the station. Birkit spoor in indeterminate number accompanied both sets, all several hands old.
    So Rann and the woman had survived. They’d evidently risen early, skied down to the river to search for Avall’s body, and, not finding it, had struck out overland, back into the Wild and heading west. Which made sense, given that both were wounded, and the woman would surely have a permanent shelter fairly close by. More to the point, they
hadn’t
pressed on to Tir-Eron. By the look of the sky, he and Rrath shouldn’t, either.
    “Best I can tell,” Rrath murmured, “Rann and the woman left at first light.”
    Eddyn peered over the blackened wood of the outer palisade. A courtyard lay beyond, clogged with drifted snow from which more blackened timbers rose—the remains of the station proper. And a wellhead. A messy maze of prints, human and birkit, already melting in the fickle morning light. The air was sharp and crisp, but without the deadly bite of the last few days. Eddyn didn’t trust it.
    Scowling, he began to skirt the wall, targeting what had once been a gate a dozen strides to the right. “We could follow,” he observed, “but we’ve already argued that to death.”
    “Indeed,” Rrath dared. “Of course, two days ago I could’ve told which way the gem had gone.”
    Eddyn didn’t hear him, having slipped through the gate and entered the compound proper.
    Eddyn flung a snow-caked white cloak over the frozen body he’d found sprawled atop a millstone, revealing a tan-green tangle of entrails where its abdomen had been. Fightingback an urge to vomit, he stalked off to the shelter of an arched alcove, facing into the sun. It