Leaving the Warmest Prey

Rime crusts the volcanic flue, sharp enough to cut leather. When I reach for my chest, the massive weight pinning me to the basalt is gone. Cold air rushes into the hollow where an eight-foot predator lay breathing against my neck. I need to know if my spark survived his leaving.

My fingers work the wooden plug on the bison horn.

I pull it free.

A thin thread of sweet gray smoke curls into the frost. Inside the horn's charred lining, the birch punk glows red as a fresh puncture. The heat bites the meat of my thumb, fierce and alive.

The clan still has fire.

I shove the plug back into the horn, twisting until the seal bites. My ribs ache where his arm held me flat against the stone. My wool tunic smells like scorched grease, wet bear fur, and old blood. His blood. Or whatever beast he tore apart before dropping through the ceiling to keep me from freezing.

I look down at the soot beside my knee. Bram's bare flint spearhead lies where it clattered across the pumice during the night. I pick up the stone and slide it deep into my tunic lining. Dirk still thinks the young hunter got lost in the scree. If Dirk finds this flint on me, he will not ask questions before using his own spear.

I crawl out of the soot alcove.

The basalt ledge is three paces wide. Below, the floor of the chimney flue drops into shadow, where twenty-eight shivering refugees huddle together around cold ashes.

Then my boot hits something wet.

Not ice.

I look down.

A mound of raw red flesh lies sprawled across the frozen gravel, steaming faintly in the sub-zero draft.

It is an entire hindquarter of a steppe elk. The meat is marbled with yellow tallow, dark and glistening. The femur is snapped clean across the joint, the thick bone splintered by pressure rather than chipped by stone tools. No flint scrapers touched this carcass. The hide was ripped back by thick fingers, peeled like birch bark from a birch pole.

The blood has frozen into garnet beads along the pumice.

Thirty pounds of fresh, calorie-dense muscle.

Piled right outside my sleeping crack.

Most women in the low valleys receive polished river pebbles or bundles of dried mint when a suitor wants their bed. I get thirty pounds of ungulate haunch butchered by a monster with his bare hands.

My stomach cramps so hard my teeth click.

Three days of boiled lichen and pine pitch have turned my guts to water. The raw iron reek makes my mouth fill with saliva.

I drop to my knees, draw my small skinning knife, and slice a strip of red meat from the inner muscle. The fat is cold and sweet on my tongue. I chew fast, swallowing before my throat can protest. The warmth hits my belly like swallows of melted grease.

He left it for me.

Not for the clan. Not for the sleds.

Just me.

Heavy scrapes mark the chimney wall above the ledge. Gouges in the black volcanic basalt show where his boots caught the rock as he hauled himself back into the storm. No human climbs a sheer basalt chimney without ropes. Wouter Heenk did it in the dark, carrying half an elk on his back, just to drop it at my feet before dawn.

\"Grietje.\"

The voice echoes up from the flue floor, rough with cold and gravel.

I stiffen.

Dirk van Houten stands at the foot of the ledge. His gray beard is frozen into clumps around his mouth. Behind him, Roelof and two other hunters cluster in the gloom, their ash spears lowered, their faces gaunt as skulls.

They do not look at my face.

Their eyes lock on the steaming red mound between my knees.

\"Where did you get that?\" Dirk asks.

He takes two steps up the narrow rock ramp leading to my perch.

\"Found it,\" I say.

\"You found thirty pounds of bull elk on a soot ledge?\" Dirk stops three paces below me, his knuckles white around the ash shaft. \"The sleds carry nothing but scrap leather. The children cried all night from hunger.\"

\"Then go hunt an elk,\" I say, wiping blood from my lip with the back of my hand.

Roelof steps up beside Dirk. His eyes dart from the meat to the chimney ceiling. He points a cracked finger at the snapped bone.

\"No flint knapped that joint,\" Roelof whispers. His voice trembles. \"Look at the splintering. That bone was crushed. Only a beast breaks marrow like that.\"

\"A beast did not bring it here,\" Dirk says. He stares into my eyes, cold hatred replacing his hunger. \"The meat is not cached. It is placed. Neat as a bride's dowry.\"

\"Take it or leave it, Dirk,\" I say. \"Stand there flapping your gums, and the tallow freezes hard as rock.\"

Dirk does not reach for the meat. He raises the point of his spear until the flint aligns with my throat.

\"Bram vanished in the scree two nights ago,\" Dirk says. \"Now this fresh meat appears on your ledge. A beast from the Star-Wound stalks the migration.\"

The four hunters fan out along the ledge ramp.

My fingers slide down my hip to the leather strap of the bison horn.

\"Dirk,\" I say, keeping my tone level. \"Lower the spear.\"

\"You lured it,\" Dirk spits. A fleck of frozen foam clings to his lip. \"You knew what took Bram. You made a pact with the thing in the mist. It feeds you while the rest of the tribe starves.\"

\"I am the fire-keeper,\" I say.

\"A witch,\" Roelof mutters, his hand trembling on his spear grip. \"She beds with the skull-walker. That is how she kept warm while our pelts froze through.\"

A bitter laugh escapes my chest. If they knew how close Wouter lay against me, they would have thrown themselves into the ash pits hours ago.

\"Listen to me, Dirk,\" I say. I pull the bison horn forward, resting my thumb over the vent hole. \"You want this meat? Take it. Feed the sled-pullers. Feed the children. But if any man steps past this line with a flint point raised at me, I pop the plug and dump the living ember into the drainage mud.\"

The hunters freeze.

Dirk's chest heaves. The tip of his spear dips an inch, then steadies.

\"You would kill thirty people,\" Dirk says.

\"Twenty-nine,\" I correct him. \"Bram is already dead, remember? And without my horn, you will not survive the second ridge. The frost will turn your blood to glass before midnight.\"

Silence fills the volcanic flue, thick and heavy as soot.

None of them move. Their frozen silence tells me they know I will do it. A girl who has carried thirty miles of burning coals through sleet does not bluff about fire.

Dirk looks down at the blood pooling around my boots, then up at my eyes. His jaw grinds with a sound like crushed gravel.

He drives the butt of his spear into the frozen pumice between us, leaving the weapon quivering in the rock.

\"Cut the haunch into six shares,\" Dirk says, his voice flat with venom. \"Give Roelof the marrow. When we break camp at noon, we bind your hands to the sled. If you speak to whatever walks the fog again, we leave you on the ridge without your horn.\"

He turns on his heel and stalks down the ramp into the dim flue.

Roelof lingers at the edge of the ledge, his hollow eyes flicking between the raw meat and my face.

"You should have let him take the horn, Grietje," Roelof whispers. "The thing in the fog is going to slaughter us all."

I slice a thick ribbon of steaming fat from the bone and let it drop onto the frozen rock between us.

"Tell Dirk to bring his cords at noon," I say. "We will see who bleeds first."