The next morning the sweet nag—the one that pulled the carts filled with pilgrims up the steep hill and down again without complaint, that watched the churn of the courtyard with calm brown eyes, that let bold children tug her tail—was found dead in her stall. It baffled the ostlers, who found nothing strange about her except wisps of frozen blood around her eyes and nostrils, her last breaths as streaks of red in the freshly-fallen snow. It was as if someone had simply wished her dead. Servants trudging to their morning's work bowed their heads and gave quick, breathless prayers to Andraste as they passed.

Bri woke once, in the middle of the night, chilled to the bone, a cold sweat along her skin. But she laid back and remembered Cole's touch in the Chantry, and Fabien's desperate arms around her, and found warmth and rest again. Now she stood shivering in the cold and dark of the early morning and watched by torchlight as the horse's corpse was hauled onto a cart by six men, ropes tied around the mare's ankles and head to drag her up. The mare's long neck lolled over the edge; her head shuddered and jolted with every uneven paving stone on the path back to the valley. Brown eyes, like her own, like Lille's, unblinking in the early morning darkness.

"Quit staring!" The ostler was before her, snapping a length of dirty cloth against his thigh. His eyes, squinting, reddened from more than just the cold, stared her down as he choked out his demand. "On your way!"

She took a breath in a hard gasp; the air stung at her throat. Bri bowed her head and walked the worn steps to the kitchen, shivering.

When she and Fabien had wiped the cold tears from their cheeks and parted for the night, Bri had brought the half-empty bowl of sugar back to the kitchen where she, with a joyous reverence felt only for Lille, placed it back on its shelf. She had even turned it gently, to make it look as though it hadn't been touched at all. But as Bri opened the door, a chill following her and shuddering her skirts, she saw that the sugar bowl was gone. The space on the shelf was empty, a gap in the rows of pots along the stone wall.

She looked away. She felt as if her heart had ceased to beat. Her limbs moved without her direction as she stooped to build the day's ovens, her thoughts blanketed with a thick cover of ash, her throat choked with smoke. Her hands were steady. The fires must be lit; her hands would light them. But she trembled as she handled the tinder. The ember breathing at its core would not alight. Her breath was too shallow to stoke it. When she had finally managed a weak flame, she smothered it by building the wood too thickly atop it. Bri leaned back, ash scabbing her apron at her knees, her hands stiff and aching with heat.

Then she heard a sob—sharp, short, definite—from the hall. Shattering, like the sound of glass breaking against the stones. She hesitated before rising unsteadily and moving quietly to the hall beyond. There was another sob; it came from the pantry. She pried back the heavy door and peered into the darkness, cautious.

There was one solitary candle to light the room, one little flame that trembled when she opened the door. It took effort to find quiet moments in the kitchen; Bri had ruined this one in her cold curiosity.

It was Lowri. Lowri was crying in the pantry. Bri didn't say anything for a moment, voice caught in her throat. Lowri was bent over, hands covering her face, stifling the grief that poured out of her into the limitless dark and silence that was the only thing that could accept it whole.

Bri tried to leave, trying to be quiet, but the door groaned a little as she went to close it, and Lowri's eyes whipped to her at once. They were red lined, swollen, sore.

"I—I—" she began, but Lowri jumped up and struck the door closed so sharply that it hit Bri's nose.

Holding her breath tight in her chest, Bri returned to her work.

When Fabien came in, finally, wordlessly, his clothes were wrinkled and his sharp eyes were sunken and dull. Bri looked up from the mass of dough she was kneading with her elbows, straightening; he did not look at her. He knew about the horse's death—he had to know. And when Fabien glanced at the absence that sat on the shelf, his face went as white as a dead man's.

The horse's last meal of stolen sugar was on their hands. And Bri watched as his hands, hands that could gild Andraste's face with hammered gold across the curve of a cake, trembled as they worked.

Bri kept her eyes on him as he kept glancing up at the space where the sugar bowl once was, as if it had just been a simple mistake which had frightened them both, as if the light had lied to them. Then, sharply, he turned to her. She closed her throat on a gasp.

"What?" he croaked. Then, swallowing thickly, he continued. "Get back to your work."

The kitchen went silent. His voice had cut through a lull in the drum of knives and whispered conversation. She saw him curl his hands in his apron, cleaning his knife with such white-knuckled intensity that she thought he might slice open his own palm.

"The Divine's entourage is coming," he said in a held breath, his eyes darting between the staring kitchen hands. Silence and sweetness hiding secrets. Bri could see his shoulders shaking as he said it, pulled tight with the effort of keeping his voice even. No one spoke.

"I understand," Bri replied, her own voice creaking as she answered him. She felt the kitchen's eyes fall on her, now; she bent her head and dropped her gaze.

"In one week," Fabien said. "One week. We can't be idle."

Bri nodded, so short and so stiffly it made her neck ache.

"One week," he muttered again, just a whisper to himself in a short breath, as he turned back to his work.

Bri could do nothing else. He would forget all his seething sadness. He would simply forget, carve it out of his memory with his kitchen knife and let it blister and burn in the fire, let it boil up in the pot, let it rot in the straw. He would forget how Lille had lifted their hands to the horse's mouth to poison the poor beast. He would forget how Bri had held him as he wept.

If any of the other kitchen hands had turned to look at her, they would have seen her tremble; they would have seen her fingers, stiff and shaking, sink into the bread dough, to hide them, to still them. They would have turned and seen her shiver, and assumed it was the cold. They could have looked—but none did.

When Bri had wiped her hands on her apron for the last time and folded her knife into its front, she stood in the empty kitchen and watched the wisps of ash that whispered from the dying fires. Just above, the servants assembled for their evening meal. Her stomach had twisted too tightly to sit, head bowed, with the others; they would see her, and discern her guilt somehow, she knew it. She could not do what Fabien did. Her thoughts were too thick, too impenetrable. Her memory too heavy. She had survived the day relying only on her strength of habit and the deep memory of each task ingrained in her body, so that she could close her eyes to the sight of the space on the shelf. That she could close her eyes to the ache of fear that climbed up her spine.

She would go to him. He had helped her, last time. She wrapped herself up in her threadbare cloak and went where she had found Cole, weeks ago, cherries in hand; to where she remembered the press of his hands and heart when she had wept in his arms. The wind bit at her face and neck, tearing at her hair, stinging her eyes as she shuffled across the icy stones to the attic corner where she knew he crouched with his collection of small, stolen things. But when she reached the landing and shook the cold from her shoulders, she found that he was not there. Still, she approached cautiously, as if he might emerge from the shadows like he had seemed to so many times.

But there was nothing beyond the tangle of his collection. Its entire arrangement had changed since she last saw it. No more daggers stuck into the wood flooring, no more flash of tarnished jewellery. Instead, a blunted kitchen knife. A torn apron. A crust of bread. A broken chantry candle. He had told her before that they were only borrowed things, things kept until they lost their sharpness. But these were things no one would want—or, at least, she could not imagine they would be wanted. But then as she approached, as her eyes adjusted to the low light, she saw that there were chalk marks across the wall—hundreds of them, little white scratches across the stones, uneven, broken, edging into the mortar. They made letters, at least some she could recognise, and then half-written words, sometimes whole continuous lines of them. They said nothing to her; they were uneven white marks and little else. But then Bri spied the first letter of her name, written across a protrusion of stone. She crouched beside it, staring for a moment before bringing up her hand to trace a fingertip in the powdery mark. It streaked beneath her touch. Beside it was the second letter, then the third. She looked at the wall again; he had written her name dozens of times, nestled between the words she could not read and would never understand.

She could not stop the blush that crept up her throat and cheeks at this discovery. Bri was nearly relieved that he was not there to see it, though he seemed to see everything. She smeared the chalk between her fingers. He wasn't here—she did not know where else to look for him. She sat in the attic corner and breathed her shallow, quick breaths.

"Cole," she whispered, as if she could summon him, as if her speaking was more powerful than his writing on the wall. He did not appear. She retreated a little further into the shadows. She could hear the distant scrape and chatter of the people on the floor below. The creak of floorboards and footsteps, of music, of joy. She could not see or touch it. No one could see her here. She sighed—half at all the taut muscles of her body unwinding, half the small kindness of not being seen.

Beside her, she glanced over a pot of something dark and shimmering in the distant firelight. It was filled with rotted fruit—cherries, she realised, when she looked more closely. They were all withered now, an acidic odour wafting from them. She touched the little bowl of fruit reverently, apologetically, with her fingertips. She had promised to bring them to him, but she never had. Had he stolen the cherries—had he tried to draw her back to him, by fulfilling half the promise she had made to him?

She reached for one instinctively, held it up in confusion, not sure what she herself would do. It stained her fingers with a dark and viscous red. But it was real—if she cut it open it would still trickle some meagre flavor. She took her knife from her apron and sliced at it, taking out the pit from its sloughing meat with a delicate press of her fingertips, with hands too used to holding rotten things.

She pressed it to her lips, felt the sour smear against her tongue, felt the sharp sweetness, the cloying scent, as she let it linger. With it, she stitched together the memory of Lille pressing fruit to her lips and asking her to taste. She thought of all the brilliant colors of Lille's mouth; the pink of her bare lips, the red stains of cherries, of strawberries, of currants, and even the deep purple when she kissed bruised blackberries during autumn and pressed their juices with her tongue. Bri held the cherry in her mouth, then swallowed it and closed her eyes.

When she opened them again she quickly blinked away the blur of tears and found herself among nothing but the cold and a collection of useless things. She rose, leaving the bowl of rotted fruit, leaving the memory of sharp sweetness behind.

Bri should have returned to the kitchen. The evening meal would be finished by now, or close to. There were still preparations that would keep them in the kitchen into the night. But the memory of Fabien's stricken face stopped her. He would be there—he would be in the kitchen, would grind himself down to nothing but a pair of hands so that he could forget what they had done. And his grief, he could grind that up, too, scrub out the stain of her in all her indelible entirety. Or he could try. He would try. It was just a bowl of sugar. It had just been a bowl of sugar. Bri could not look at the absence any longer.

The dormitory was empty. She had never seen it so. Bri was amongst the last to come and the first to wake for the day. But now, she moved towards her cot with its tightly-tucked quilt—and then looked to Lille's, a few places down, shoved against the wall, whose tousled quilt and dented pillow had been untouched since the last time she had slept in it. This, the last of her, since she had nothing of her own to leave behind.

The quilt was cold. The straw-filled mattress scraped its stalks as she sat. She was quiet, still, for a long moment, her hands grasping the edge of the bed, ready to leap from it should someone come in and find Bri desecrating her last impression. But no one came. Bri shifted the quilt aside. She stretched out on the cot, her head pressed into the pillow, looking up at the dark ceiling where the moonlight made soft shadows against the stones. For a moment she thought to pull the quilt over her body but she knew, watching, that Lille had, every night without fail, kicked it away in the night until she woke from the cold and dragged it over her again.

Bri smiled to herself, and turned onto her belly. She caught vanilla in the pillow, left by Lille, scent stolen from the pantry. Bri breathed, sharp, catching the breath in her chest and clutching at the pillow that held such a memory of her. Bri slid her hands beneath it, holding it to her. Then she idly ran her fingertips down the wall alongside the cot, letting them trail down, past the frame, to the floor, where the jostle and chip of mortar made one of the stones shudder at her touch. It clattered so softly that Bri had to touch it again to know that it was there—a loose piece in the stonework, just beneath Lille's cot.

Bri brought her hand back, then clutched the frame and pulled herself to the wall so that she could peer down into the darkness beneath. She could not see—only the faint outline of a few pieces of chipped mortar. Quickly, she rose from the bed, falling to her knees and sliding under the cot. She stretched out her arms, flattening herself against the cold flooring, reaching again for the stone.

Lille would have put something behind it. Bri felt—she felt her heart flutter at finding another secret that Lille had kept. She hoped—she wished it would be as gentle and as delicate as the drift of vanilla from the pillow where she laid her head. She knew it would not be so.

Bri pried at the stone. She wiggled it, wincing as more mortar chipped and fell to the floor. But slowly, slowly, it came free from the wall.

Careful, fearful, she reached inside. Her hand brushed against what felt like a folded piece of cloth, and then a single, rolled piece of paper. Bri could not stop the trembling in her fingers when she pulled these things from their hiding place.

Drawing back, sitting beside the bed, Bri laid out what she had found on the floor. She wiped dust from the mortar on her apron. There was the folded piece of cloth, thin, stained— she opened the cloth to the moonlight.

Drawn in thin charcoal that would smear to nothing if she touched it, the cloth was marked with a skull, denuded of flesh, its jaw missing and its eyes simple hollows of dark dust.

Bri folded it again, shaking her head, creasing the fabric tightly as if this would hide the mark more firmly from her eyes. She could not guess what it meant. She did not want to guess. But it seared her thoughts without regard to what she wanted.

The rolled paper was next—she scratched at the cord that tied it with dirty, flour-stained fingernails, and unfurled the paper to her eyes.

Bri could not read it. She didn't know what she had expected. But there were lines laid out, one after the other, like a written recipe—like the ones the commis read out when they were to prepare some delicacy ordered by some Marcher noble yearning for his homeland. Like the lines Fabien would write.

Lille couldn't read—she couldn't read. Neither of them could. She had always told Bri so. She had always asked Fabien if there was something that needed to be said aloud, and happily he would always do it, smug, smiling. Lille hated him for it, for that look he would give her, as if she were meant to be impressed. But if she could—Bri rolled the paper up again, a frenzied rustle, binding it up again as best she could as she willed her hands to stop their trembling. With a held breath, she pushed it and the cloth back into their little, childish vault, and sealed it up again. Lille was just beyond her reach—Bri went back to her narrow bed and, futile, failing, turned away from the wall which held a dead girl's secrets.

The next morning, when the sugar was laid out again, freshly ground and ready for its purpose, Bri had taken a fingerful with a steady hand, and licked it. The sweetness had burned on her tongue, her teeth, down her wan and wavering throat. Fabien had stared when she did it. Stared and nearly let the chocolate burn again. He watched her all day as they had gone back to the ceaseless enormity of their work.

When she finally lay down to sleep in the shifting, murmuring dormitory, she drew her coverlet aside to feel the cold comfort of the night. And she found, the next morning, that she woke.

The castle forgot about the old horse, perhaps less swiftly than it forgot about the kitchen girl who—rumor told—had drunkenly wandered out to the iced-over river, slipped, and cracked open her empty skull. Still, it took effort; makeshift stalls made of hay, freshly painted wooden statues, even bunting strung up between the low buildings. Skyhold would find its joy again, piece by piece; as anything, it had to build it up from scratch.

For seven days the kitchen smelled like hothouse flowers, thick roses shipped from Orlais whose decadent, obscene whorls made the younger kitchenhands blush. Still, they plucked the petals, then boiled buckets of the things in sugar water until they distilled the scent into a rich flavour that sang of summertime. It was overpowering—it was cloying, even, clinging to their clothes even when they stepped outside for air. But the kitchenhands played games, does-he-won't-he, as they pulled each petal from their wilting calyx.

But the violets proved difficult. Fabien had plucked each flower from the ice-box in which they had arrived, dried them, then brushed their delicate, sloping petals with a mixture of egg and sugar so that they glinted, dewy, in their living death. They'd been grown under glass and knew nothing of the cold.

In this delicate work, Fabien forgot, as surely as Bri knew that he would.

It was all for a traditional Orlesian wedding-cake, layered over with these sugar-crusted violets, each shining ball of rolled and boiled pastry filled with the rose-flavored syrup that they'd had on good authority the Divine enjoyed, despite all appearances. It was mountainous, wealth and power laid in sweet fondant, held together with long strings of sugar, and it towered over the kitchen's residents for days as it was painstakingly decorated. Some servants curled their upper lip in snide laughter when they'd heard of it. The woman who sat with a furrowed brow, who raised Andraste's sword with a practiced hand—that woman loved sweetness?

"She's a romantic, I heard," one of the maids said. "The Divine. She likes the sweet. Wants something that's like being kissed. Something that's like being f—"

"Quiet!"

The servants trilled their laughter. The Divine was married to the Chantry, now. This was the only sweetness Most Holy would ever get. But she could indulge in the rest, at least; there would be feasts every night for the duration of her stay. Animals had been slaughtered in the valley every day for the last week, cured and prepared for the great hall's tables. It was an expensive affair, hosting the Divine and the whole of her gilded entourage.

And despite all their work, all their breathless days, all their nights toiling until the ovens' flames went out, they were still not prepared for the enormity of her arrival.

The Inquisition's servants stood assembled in the courtyard. They watched the procession with a dutifully held breath and a straight spine held firm by the chill winds which swept over Skyhold's walls. Bri was among them, standing huddled with several others from the kitchen as they tried to keep warm despite the cold.

Fabien stood beside Master Donatien; he was standing so decidedly upright that Bri couldn't tell if he was breathing. The Divine's visit demanded his best and cleanest clothes; he had scraps of faded embroidery at his collar, and he'd polished the buttons of his threadbare coat so that they glinted even in the meager winter light. He'd even brushed down his yellow, duck-fluff hair, though it stuck to the crown of his head so flatly it looked as if it had frozen into place by the cold. His hands were clasped behind his back as he tried to hide, she knew, his knife-nicked, cinder-stained fingers from the eyes of the court.

The banners, first—dozens of them, held aloft by marching Templars. And the Divine herself astride a white charger, lead by a young Sister. Two others flanked her, carrying high the banner of the Chantry with its sunburst in gold thread woven into deep, red velvet.

But the Divine herself sat in her ornamented saddle with a set jaw and a stiff back, grimacing as though uncomfortable in her gilded seat. Her head was heavy with the rounded, gold helmet that haloed her square face, and she held the crossbar of her sword close to her chest, the point tilted back and the flat of the blade resting against her golden shoulder to show the friendship she had—would always have—for the Inquisition and its Herald. She would not cross the portcullis with a raised sword; she would not walk through its gate point-first. But neither would she sheathe it; Andraste lived by her blade, after all.

"She's brought two chefs," the commis chef whispered. He was right; trailing after the Divine's cortège of noble clerics were the assemblage of clerks, maids, aides, and two chefs who would occupy and outfit the suite of rooms allocated to the Divine.

"Most Holy likes all kinds of flowers," Linna said. She'd brought the host of roses to the kitchen door. They'd shoveled them into the pots, gently, so they would not bruise and lose all their oils. The commis had rolled his eyes.

"Flowers even in the middle of winter! I guess that's what you can get when you're Divine."

Linna's fingers were thorn-pricked, and she pulled at a hangnail that bled. But she paid it no mind as she spoke. "She likes roses most of all. Or—poetry. We've got to make it poetic. She wants to feel like someone loves her."

"Thedas loves her."

"Not the way she wants ."

"I said quiet! "

The Divine rode up the short path, then dismounted with the help of two Chantry sisters to greet the Inquisitor herself at the stairs that lead to the Great Hall. As the last of her entourage came through the portcullis, the crowd shifted to look up to where the Divine stood beside her closest friend. The Divine would address them; she would address the servants of Skyhold as if they did not know her already, as if they hadn't watched her pummel a straw-filled dummy with a wooden sword every day for months.

Bri watched the woman's face, this woman thrust into a position so public and so demanding that it had aged her, drawn down her mouth, bent her back, yet lit such a fire in her eyes that Bri shied from it, pressing back into the crowd that watched with rapt attention.

Without thinking, to no one, Bri absently said, "The Divine likes blueberry Navariennes ."

It was something, something that could draw together into one the two women that stood in her mind. When she looked up, three kitchenhands were staring at her.

"How do you know that ?" One asked—Bri blushed.

"Someone told me that—I can't remember." Bri answered shakily, her eyes shifting again to the icy mud at her feet.

When she felt that they had turned their attention, she looked up again, her eyes wandering the crowd that had gathered just behind the servants, just behind the open portcullis so that the people who dwelled in Skyhold's shadow could witness the Divine. One face stood out to her; she stared for a moment before she realised who the man was; he was the pilgrim who had taken Fabien's note, and had taken Bri's money as recompense. Most pilgrims stayed for a few days before travelling along to another shrine, but he remained—though the Divine's presence meant that more and more pilgrims had accumulated in the valley, almost overcrowding it. The Divine would be distributing alms in a few days' time as Wintersend approached, and people had flocked to Skyhold for her coin as much as her presence. He had not, it seemed, taken enough coin.

The castle's servants tittered as the Divine's speech trailed above them. Bri halfheartedly listened to both, the words swirling together. But there were things she could not hear. There were things she would never see. Not without looking, or listening. The loose stone beneath Lille's cot. Poison in the sugar. They would find her, if she did not find them herself.

Bri stepped back into the press of people until it thinned, until only the bite of cold air surrounded her, until only the echo of the Divine's words could be heard. She was the only one who had. Gripped with a sudden panic, she looked up to the battlements, where the soldiers paced, where they would see her breaking from the audience and push her back to join it. But they, too, stood attentive to the Divine, and so did the boy who sat on the edge of the high wall to watch.

He wasn't looking at her, head bowed, kicking at the stone wall with the heel of his shoe as he rocked himself where he sat. Bri turned so quickly to the steps up to the battlements that she nearly slipped on the patches of ice in the courtyard's packed mud; when he was briefly out of her sight she thought that he would be gone again. But he was there, still, when she finally found him.

"I looked for you," Bri said, too forcefully, too sharp. Unthinking, she put her hand over his, where it clutched the edge of the battlements, cold against the stone. She did not flinch.

"Yes," Cole said, and turned to look at her. The word was warm, breathless. "You did."

Bri took a sharp breath, from the cold that gusted the battlements, from the pale ice of his eyes. There were so few who could see her. Under her touch, his hand moved, raised, grasped her own. Again, one would warm the other to life.

"I wanted to find you," she said, her voice bruised. His lips twitched with his breath. Bri wilted. She looked away, sighing at her selfishness. But then he ran the pad of his thumb over her knuckles again, and all her need from that night came back to her.

"You were gone when I woke up," she said, just as softly. "That night in the chantry… I was worried. I'm—I—I wish you wouldn't do that. That you wouldn't leave me like that."

Bri pressed her lips tightly shut, to stop herself from saying any more. Her eyes came back to him.

"You put the cherry to your mouth. Tried to taste me in the tart. I'm sorry," he said. "I did that, too. But it didn't work."

The wind swept over them both. Their hands pressed together more tightly, needful of each other, frightened. She felt her lips trembling.

"I needed—" she began, but words failed her thoughts, and she looked down at the remains of the procession. The crowd had broken up, but patches of people remained, idling before they were pressed back into their work.

"The Divine is here," she said, forcing herself to speak. He knew that—he knew so much that no one else knew—but this, he had watched just like the rest of them.

"She is," Cole said, warmly. "She's my friend. I wish she hadn't left, but other people need help and she's the only one who can help them. She didn't want to leave, either. It's good to see her again—but she's very busy. Like you."

She nodded, gently, though she could not imagine the shape of their friendship.

"Not like me," she said. "I—I remember her, before she was Divine. She was always hitting that dummy with her practice sword. Most of the servants were afraid of her. She always looked like she was—well, about to turn and hit you if you said the wrong thing. She doesn't look like that anymore."

"She still thinks like that," Cole said. "Even if she can't do it anymore. She has two names now, and she feels like two people. It makes her sad. Most people only talk to one of them."

He looked up at the clouded sky, and for a moment his body raised, his back straightening, the wind drawing him up and brushing the strands of his hair. But then he bent over again, his brow furrowing.

"There was two of me, once. But you see the one I am. I like it when you look at me," he said, his voice a whisper. He was looking distantly across the courtyard, now. "It makes me feel realer. It makes me feel here. Like when you kept me with a kiss."

"But you didn't stay," she said quickly, before the wind could steal the words away. He had felt her kiss in the night. She thought he was asleep—she thought he had fallen asleep. Bri felt blood rush to her face.

"Silver in the light. Scent of sweet sweat as you slipped back to sleep. I helped," he answered. His voice rushed. "You didn't need me anymore."

"I—I," she started, but to fill the feeling with words was too much. The broken chantry candle—the silence of his absence. "I need your help."

"You want to see where she died."

"Yes," she gasped, and the word shivered with sadness.

"You don't want to be alone."

Quiet, Bri nodded, the movement so soft and so slight that she did not know if he had seen it. But the breathless sigh that followed told her that he had.

"You want to follow her as far as you can," he said. "And you want me to hold your hand so no fear can find you."

"I—" she began, but the words slipped away from her. She did not know how to speak them.

"You never had to ask," he said.

But even then, he smiled, and she knew she did not have to speak at all. Skyhold's gates were open, and they passed through them together.

While the keep's kitchens had an abundance of salt and sugar, fruit, flour and fresh meat—the valley had tried, in these difficult years, to become self-sufficient. They cleared rocks from the hillsides to grow fodder for livestock—rye, barley, thin shoots of heather—and grazed small, hardy goats who wandered into the mountains and had to be lured back again and again. The refugees who had remained since the war's end had set up homes, stores—even a mill they had all come together to construct, from lumber imported from the countries that bordered the Frostbacks. It worked to turn the goats to skins, and the grass to hay, and the wheat to a coarse flour to feed those who served the Inquisition at its base.

Now as Skyhold celebrated the Divine's visit with banquets the valley made its own fun; big vats of boiling oil cooked ropes of sweet dough, little breaded balls filled with pork and runny eggs, cut up pieces of potato, bits of battered fish too small to serve as a full meal. They made bunting from tattered burlap, lit bonfires, and the soldiers' makeshift orchestras played drums and flutes at a faster pace than the marching songs they'd always played.

The river, its slow churn choked with thick clots of ice for most of the year, had frozen over completely over the last month. Ferries lay useless, half-frozen in the ice by the river's banks. The ferrymen, spurned by the river that gave them their work, turned to different types of grifting. Torches burned on stakes driven into the ice, casting bright circles of light and color. They had cleared snow from a section of it and a tent leant out roughshod skates made of bone to the bold.

There were tents along the bank—the usual ones, where the soldiers slept, but also brighter, taller ones erected for the festival, streaming with multicoloured banners, where food was spinning and spitting on spits over fire-pits, where kegs cracked open and the soldiers, used to hardtack and cheaply-mixed whiskey, indulged. The play-actors who had trailed the Divine's cortege had begun to raise their brightly-colored tents and hitch their painted horses on the valley's common green before the Divine had even addressed the people in the castle courtyard.

The Divine had brought all these with her; they had followed in her golden wake and hoped to pick up some of the coin that could spill from her entourage.

The trailing path down to the valley was followed in silence, hands held, steps quick and careful. Horses and carts jostled past and they kept to the side of the path, where the snow cracked against the packed earth. Now they walked along the makeshift arcade which coiled beside the riverbank—all repurposed timber or haybale stacks, with more canvas covering the muddy walkway. There was a merchant selling live fish, little sparks of silver in a wooden tub, which were teased apart and flash-fried whole. Another stall sold nuts roasted in honey, cracked and steaming. Another had a block of clear ice, with a woman shaving bright, glimmering pieces from it to cover over with simple syrup. And yet another had a crate of a few precious, shrivelled pomegranates stored in sawdust; the vendor cracked one open and, settled in its white pulp, there was a wet nest of garnets fresh as a summer's day, to pick at with fingers until they were stained red. Bri did not like the sight.

But beside that, a crate of apples, brought for the Divine's stores that had been carried through the winding passes to Skyhold, lay open and glistening in the chill air. Bri could see colours just beyond the packed straw. Just as the crates that had come to them in the months before, just as the bright baubles of fruit they had skinned together. The apples shone yellow, red, and a green the color spring leaves. They were being sold; though she had skinned countless apples in the kitchens, still they were more than she could afford.

"We're not allowed to have things like that," Bri said sadly as they passed.

They made their way to a sloping part of the bank, towards the frozen river. Lille had walked out onto it, that night, in nothing but the silver dress. That is what she had heard in the servants' talk. There were people all around them now, worse than the kitchens in their busiest hour. But then Cole stopped sharply, and Bri was caught in the tangle of their clasped hands and so she stopped, too, and looked up at him.

"Lye-cracked hands hurting, blood in the water—washing wounds away."

Cole's voice drifted, as did his eyes. Bri followed his gaze, to where the launderer's billowed beside the river, steaming up with boiling water. When the Inquisition had settled in Skyhold, the valley's residents had erected huge posts and strung up oilcloth so that they would have a place to wash the soldiers' linens. Now they washed everything, the laundry as busy as the kitchens above. They had broken large circles in the thick blanket of ice so they could draw water and dip cloth to rinse the scrubbed soap from it. Inside, they boiled washing in wide vats, and old women, blinded by the fumes, stirred the water up with poles while the foul-smelling steam drifted up, unending.

Bri and Lowri had sent a note down to Norah, one of the few servants who could read and write. About Lille, before they had known. Lowri told her to find Cerys. Bri could not be certain the note had ever reached them. That didn't matter anymore. None of it mattered, nothing of what they did before they brought Lille's body up in the cart.

"She knows it's not her fault. There aren't any stains she can't scrub away. The blood always floats up in the water. The cloth always comes clean. But Lille—"

Bri looked to Cole—he was gone again, leaving her standing alone as people passed, uncaring, unheeding, even as Bri looked for him with sharp, stiff turns. She wound her hands in her shawl, pulling it hard around her body.

Beyond the laundry's long bolts of hanging cloth, which waved icily in the wind as they dripped half-frozen water, Bri could see her. Cerys. She was with Lille that night—now the elf squatted beside a washtub, skirt tucked up to her bare knees, her toes red and raw with cold, stuck in the mud, splashed with heat as she dove her hands lost in a pail of steaming, clouded water as she scrubbed at a stretch of stained cloth with a stone.

Shivering, Bri pushed past the sheets of cloth and approached her.

"Cerys," Bri said. The elf looked up, then seemed to stare past her for a moment.

"Oh, yeah?" Cerys asked, and squinted hard at her. "Who're you?"

"Bri—Briony," she answered haltingly. Cerys sucked at the inside of one cheek.

"Briony? From the kitchen?"

Bri nodded. They had seen each other once, months before. Faces blurred together easily.

"What do you want?" she asked. Bri looked around for a brief moment.

"I want to—I—I want to ask about Lille," she said. Cerys pursed her lips.

"Right," Cerys said. "Yeah. Like everyone else. Well."

Bri winced as she hid her red, cracked hands—burned by lye and boiling water and all the things that scoured the soldiers' linens—in her skirts. Bri quickly looked away.

"Are you—enjoying the Divine's visit?" Bri asked haltingly.

Cerys stared at her blankly, then laughed. She spread her cracked hands wide.

"That about Lille?" She jerked her head back to where the other women were scrubbing, boiling, beating. "You know we don't get to enjoy things."

Cerys's hands instinctively went back to the water, to the stone, clutching at the fabric. But then, she stopped, her hands hovering over her work.

"She always wanted you to come out with us, you know," Cerys said. She sighed. "She talked about you a lot."

"I—I—" Bri stuttered, then clenched her teeth. She shook her head. "I wish I had—that night."

"Why? I did, and that didn't help her."

She scraped once, twice, at the fabric in the wash. It was marked with some deep yellow stain. It came up in the water, cloudy and brown. It would take time to remove it.

"I want to know what happened," Bri said. Cerys rolled her eyes, and scrubbed.

"What, gossip? You hadn't heard already?"

"Just—I need to hear it from you," she said, her voice firming. "Please."

Cerys straightened her back and dropped the cloth and the stone so heavily in the water that it splashed and soaked one of Bri's shoes. Cerys looked up at her, heels dug into the mud, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Look, It's easy to look back and think you can see what was going to happen. But Lille was Lille, you know? She was always frantic, doing things she shouldn't. This could have happened weeks ago, months ago, over anything she did. It just happened now. That's all."

She waited for a moment, as if expecting Bri to simply thank her and leave. She remained. Cerys sighed, and continued.

"We were in the tent. They'd set up a big tent—it kept the cold out, mostly. They'll set up another one tonight I expect. But I don't know how she wasn't freezing in that slip of a dress, but that was Lille, wasn't it? She was dancing. With everyone. Avoiding Abelard, too, I knew that much. But she didn't really mind him. He's harmless. Creepy, but harmless. I'd be desperate too if I milked goats all day but couldn't touch a tit to save my life. And he didn't follow her—we made sure of that, at the very least, even if we didn't have the rest of our wits about us."

"But where did she go? Why would she—"

"We don't know! Why would we know any of that?" Cerys voice raised enough that there was a brief lull in the work behind them, sharp ears and prying eyes. Slowly, the hiss and slap of the laundry resumed. Cerys sniffed, coughed, and spat into the mud.

"They found her out by the ice, a ways off from the mill. Straight out onto the ice. There wasn't anyone out there, not that we knew about. I don't think she was meeting someone. Who'd want to fuck out there? And she'd have said if she was grappling with someone. She loved to kiss and tell."

"I know," Bri said, with a bare brush of a smile crossing her lips. Cerys frowned.

"So it's odd. You know it's odd. But… There wasn't anything. There's no reason to think she didn't just fall. She wasn't even wearing a cloak or the right shoes. Or any shoes, I think, she took them off to dance. Stupid… Just that dress. It's like she went—" Cerys stopped herself.

"Like she went out there to die," Bri whispered. Cerys's shoulders fell, and she bent over the tub, shaking her head.

"It was snowing. The ice is so slick without those spikes on your boots. I don't know. There wasn't even any light out there."

But then she straightened, cleared her throat, shrugged.

"Lille was Lille," she said. "You never could guess what she was going to do. I guess that's how she died, too, huh?"

Bri went silent. Cerys stared at her for a moment, before turning back to her work.

"Did you know she had a brother? She—She never talked about him."

The question was sudden, unthinking; Cerys looked up at her, her hands back in the washtub.

"She did," Cerys said, scraping at the linen again, a twist in her smile when she said it. "Maybe not to you ."

Bri kept hold of her heartbeat when she said it. Cerys's words were sharp, slapping each one down in front of her.

"Londrian. Mage. He set fire to their farm when he was a kid, something like that, burned their parents up. Templars took him away. She stayed. Begged, I think. He came back to her when the Circles fell apart, I think. Tranquil."

Cerys said it as smoothly as she was with the stain in the cloth, scraping down, eyes idle. Bri watched the water churn as she did it.

"Where—What happened to him?"

She shook her head, her mouth twisted down at one corner.

"I think he died. I don't know. She didn't tell me, but she stopped asking Norah to read her his letters. We put two and two together. I think she wanted to forget him."

"Why?"

Now Cerys looked at her, as if confused by the question. Then she shrugged, ignoring it, letting it pass.

"She looked beautiful. On the pyre. By the way. You weren't there, if I remember." She gave a curt smile. "Either way, I think she's with the Maker now, telling Him a joke. Maybe making a pass at Him, who knows."

"Do you think the Maker listens?" Bri asked with sudden intensity. Cerys laughed at that, a short bark that was lost amongst the hiss of the steam curling up from the covered vats.

"Sure. Why not."

Bri sighed, stood in the trodden mud, staring at the slush, at the rucked up hem of Cerys's skirt on her thighs, at the creases and cracks in her hands.

"I have to get back to work," Cerys said sharply. Bri started.

"I'm sorry," she said. Cerys shrugged, not looking up. The moment had finished. Haltingly, Bri turned to leave the hard heat of the laundry.

"There was one thing," Cerys called. Bri turned to her; she had shifted back to squat on the balls of her feet.

"Last month. She wanted lye. I thought that was strange—don't you have lye up in the castle kitchens? Aren't you fancy like that? Why would you need laundry lye?"

"We have it sometimes," Bri answered. "For curing."

"Yeah, I thought so. She said you'd run out, and you were making lye bread. So she asked for some—only a little, though. Didn't seem like enough, to me."

Bri was silent. Lye was used for curing and cooking all sorts. But nothing they had made recently. Cerys bent her head and shoulders again and was raising the stone.

"Did you give it to her?" Bri finally asked. Cerys shrugged, and nodded.

"Well, yeah. I didn't think anything of it. Just that it was strange. But I stopped asking her what she was up to a while ago. None of my fucking business, that's for sure."

She hit the stone hard on the cloth, splashing up the water. Cerys let it drop into the tub, where it hit the bottom with a hard thud. Still, she did not look up at Bri, and quietly, she slipped between the long, cracking sheets of wet cloth and back to the stalls beyond.

The cold, bright churn of the valley, the festival, the noise. Cole was not there. She did not know where he had gone. Bri followed the path beside the river, looking out along its blank expanse. The mill was nearby. Perhaps he was waiting for her there—Lille had gone out from the mill. The sun was low, bright, casting long shadows and hard streaks of light. The night would fall and the first of their celebrations would begin. She could not walk out on the ice in the dark. She could not walk out alone.

Then she heard a scream, high, searing. The slaughterhouse, she was just beside the slaughterhouse—like the laundry, made up of posts driven into the ground and strung up with oilcloth. But its trail of leaking, clotted blood slithered down to the riverside, mixing with the mud, cutting across the path. With a yelp, she jumped away from it. But there was blood on the hem of her skirts already. The scream came again, louder, writhing.

A pig was suspended by one trotter from a beam across the top, squealing and writhing in vain and helpless hope even as the butchers advanced upon the animal. Their cheeks were reddened more by drink than by cold. The spits and their fires beneath crackled with hunger, jolting at each drip of fat that fell into their burning mouths. Their aprons were stained with bright red streaks that glimmered in the sunlight.

As the knife slid into the pig's neck, Bri gave an involuntary jump, even as she watched the blood run down its mouth and snout. The pig squealed out in sacred terror as the knife finished its path across its fat throat. Its blood steamed in the air as it spilled into the waiting trough—for puddings and sausages, or to thicken soups—and the snow beneath was stained a brilliant red as the squirming, dying animal shuddered its last breaths. She did not look away. The knife slid too easily across the flesh, sawing over its pink protuberance. The butcher's hand was clean but his apron was speckled already.

The children swarming around the butcher's feet made quick work of the blood; they caught it in wooden buckets and swirled it with their little hands, mixing in salt to keep it from forming their thick, inedible clumps.

How many pigs had she seen slaughtered? Throats cut, flayed alive, skin scalded with boiling water. Children playing with chicks that were to be fed to dogs or smashing snails against rocks. The animal's guts spilled to the floor as the butcher slit open its protruding belly—purple and red intestines, bright blue organs, all streaked with yellow fat. The children made short work of that too, dividing, collecting. All of it would find its way up to the kitchens. This should not startle her. It never had.

But now she stood and stared. The butcher looked at her, the same glance he had given to the pig before he had killed it. Bri held her breath.

"He knows where the knife needs to be," whispered Cole. He spoke in her ear and it nearly made her jump; she had not heard or seen him approach her. Cole stepped back.

"Sometimes he sticks the pigs when they're still alive. He wants to see how far the fat goes. He laughs when he does it." She turned to look at him, incredulous, his impassive face, his distant eyes. "Sometimes he thinks about the children when he does it—he'll raise his knife and shout at them sometimes. But he won't do it. If he did it, I would know."

Then Cole looked down at her, and concern spread across his features.

"No—No. You don't have to think of her that way. It wasn't like that ." His voice had taken on a higher pitch and for a moment she thought he was mocking her—his wide-eyed and fearful stare, his lopsided shoulders, the way he was wringing his hands together the way she always did with her apron.

"What are you saying?" she said, and found that she was whispering so low that he couldn't hear her. But still, he shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said. He tried to touch her shoulder and she flinched. He withdrew his hand, and dropped his eyes.

"You'll just make yourself sad if you think of Lille that way. She wasn't a pig."

"I'm—I'm not—" she said, and sighed as if to expel the thought entirely.

"Let's go," she said. "We still—we still have to find her."

He nodded, and took her hand again.

"This way," he said, and she followed.

Bri remembered when the mill was raised. It had marked the valley as a village rather than a campsite for the Inquisition. It was the largest building in the valley. It was built from stone brought from Orlais and timber from Ferelden. Raised on cones of grey stone at its foundation to protect it from rats and damp, those pilgrims who had once made the trek to the Temple of Sacred Ashes always said it reminded them of a Chantry. Those who had never been—the majority of the laborers, refugees, and soldiers who made their home here—admired it still. Sunlight shifted through the roof, dark corners smelling of grain, a thin dusting of new flour on everything. Carts came to it in the autumn shagged with new hay, and others with grain that would be spread to dry before milling.

Inside the close darkness of its lowest level, the one that dipped over the side of the riverbank to let its lazy current turn the wheel, the chains and pulleys and wooden gears locked together in their natural turns as the iron spindle revolved, dragging the heavy grinding stones across one another. Grain was poured from the upper level down to spread across the undulating surface of the stone, to create the valley's sustenance

The grinding grain gave off a familiar scent as they passed. Cole brought her to the walkway that extended out over the river and encircled the mill's banded iron wheel. It dipped into a long cut in the ice-choked river and raised itself again and again, endlessly. The ice could not form around the wheel; it would keep turning, even when the rest of the river froze over.

Here, Cole sat, his back to the stone. Bri joined him, blushing and confused. She needed to go out—out to the river, as Lille had. But when she looked out across the white expanse, she looked away, ashamed of herself for her own hesitation. Cole had known, somehow, as he always did.

They could see down where the riverbank bent, back to the arcade and the bright colours, back to the heat and flash of their mounting revelries. The air was thick with tensing celebration. The first night, then the next, and the next, and all through the weeks the Divine was present. Actors and tumblers and jugglers doing tricks and teasing children while their co-conspirators slipped through the rapt crowd to snip purse-strings and pick pockets. Puppeteers making lewd jokes with caricatures of the Inquisitor herself, and all her generals. Music, always music, pleading for coin. Bright fruit from all corners of Thedas, brought to this icy mountainside where they could have never grown.

Bri's eyes were brought back to Cole as he produced an apple from the folds of his coat. She looked at it for a moment, mystified, but then saw the split seam of skin along it as he turned it in his hand, a matted bruise across its flesh.

"He was going to throw it away," Cole said. He passed it to her cupped palms. It was cold; of course it was cold. At this, a small laugh.

"You went to get this for me," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I didn't leave you. You thought I had. I'm sorry."

Bri smiled, briefly, a flicker across her face. Then it was gone.

"Lille was always taking things," she said. "Not just cherries. Sugar, apples, strawberries, cream. She wanted to taste it all. She even ate a fistful of marzipan once while Fabien wasn't looking—she got slapped for that. She said it was worth it."

Bri turned the apple in her hands, holding it up by the tips of her fingers as if it was a precious thing. She paused at the unblemished side, then brought it to her mouth. She glanced up at him as she bit. He was looking at her, his lips trembling, his cheeks flushed. It made her pull away from the apple in a sudden shyness as chill as the air between them.

The mark shone white against its skin as she passed it to him.

"Here," she said, too tersely, her chest tight. He took the fruit and examined it for a moment, his eyes glancing rapidly over its skin, its stem, its bruising. He slid his fingertip over the serrated edge of the bite-mark, glistening with the moistness of her mouth. Then he lifted it to his lips and bit down in the same place.

She blushed, and looked away. He had not taken his eyes of her as he did it. That same curious stare that unsettled her in a way she could not understand.

"I like it down here," he said with sudden earnestness. "They lie less. In the castle it's false names, false titles, false faces—but here they don't do that. They don't feel like they have to."

He held the bitten apple to his chest.

"Look," Cole said, and raised his other hand. He pointed brazenly; she pressed his hand down before anyone saw, then looked back to where he had gestured. A man, old, bent-backed, was using a long stick to punch down the thin ice at the riverbank.

"That night, he kissed his oldest friend. Found feelings, frightening, fateful in the dark. He's loved him for so long. He doesn't know he loves him back."

He was just a man breaking up the ice. Bri turned to Cole.

"Really?"

Cole nodded; she smiled, looking again at the man's long face, creased and heavy.

"Will he be happy?"

"Yes," he answered, and met her smile.

"I told you—I told you that Lille shared things like that with me. Whenever she heard them. Secrets, I think. Gossip. No one else did. I—" her voice drifted away for a moment. The man at the riverside had left, lost in the crowd. She watched the shift and churn of the people as she spoke.

"It made me feel like I was part of it all, if I knew things like that. Things I shouldn't know." Now she smiled again, smaller, sly. "She let me have that."

"Look," Cole said again. A child all bundled up in a cloak too big for it was pulling at their mother's skirt. She carried a pail of milk; Bri was worried she was about to spill it until the woman brought it down, opened it, then dipped a wooden ladle down into its depths. Fresh and steaming, she tipped the fresh milk into the child's waiting mouth.

"Her sister's child," Cole said. "She'll tell him when he's older, lost her in the birth, breathing, bleeding, brought the baby back to life. The last piece of her she has. He's happy. She lets him be happy. He knows she loves him."

Bri watched as the woman lifted up the child to hold him at her hip and kiss his red, snot-smeared face.

"I—I hope he understands." Bri said, and her eyes trailed the woman as she walked away, milk pail in one arm and child in the other, bearing both burdens with a smile.

"And look." This time he pointed to two children at the bank of the river, among the dead grasses that splayed up, tall.

"And what are they doing?" Bri asked, watching as they kicked a wooden ball back and forth between them. Were they brothers—did one steal something from the other, or did one keep a secret, or did they love the same girl?

"They're playing," he answered. He said no more. Bri turned to him, frowning, then laughed.

"Lille," she began, but only faltered for a moment. "Lille once told me how the carpenter's apprentice tried to woo a girl by carving her name into a piece of wood but he spelled it all wrong—he wasn't any good at that—but she felt so bad for him she took it anyway."

Cole was smiling, nodding. His voice was filled with a tremulous joy.

"Yes. He kissed her on the bridge. She didn't regret her choice to keep him."

Bri watched the wheel turn, drawing up drops of water behind it. The ceaseless flow of the river would bear it up and draw it down for as long as the mill remained standing. And beyond that, the ice, which would melt when the spring came and brought all the flowers with it. Lille would never see another springtime.

"You want to go there now," he said. "You're ready."

She did not look at him. Only nodded, and rose at the grasp of his hand.

They left the mill and skidded down the steep riverbank to the ice below. Cautiously, they picked over its pockmarked edge and walked out over the river. But there were patches of ice as thin as eggshell; she showed him how to navigate the fickle river's freezes by watching how the cracks spread out beneath their feet.

He followed along the same path she made across the ice, disturbing the layer of snow, falling into her footsteps, linked only by the desperate hold of their hands. When she turned to glance at him his eyes were already on her with an unfathomable expression; every time, she blushed, and looked away.

Lille had wanted lye—for what? She couldn't imagine it was to clean the stone floors without even being asked. And the bones—the bones behind the wall, and death in the sugar bowl, stolen in the night.

The cold swept away all feeling from her skin again, but for where Cole held her by the hand. She glanced up at him and saw his eyes lit with the winter sun.

They walked in their accustomed quiet, picking their way across the thick river ice. Then he stopped so suddenly that she would have slipped, had she not untwined her fingers from his.

"It was here," Cole said. Bri looked back to him, where he stood, staring intently at the unblemished snow.

"How do you know?" She asked. He looked back at her. The sight of him stilled her so completely that she felt that her heart had stopped, too.

"It's where the pain is strongest."

She did not understand. But then Bri raised her eyes, cast her gaze around the expanse of white, clear snow. There was nothing to be found. Nothing but the memory of her corpse, which was not here—it was in the courtyard, her bare, bloodless elbow bouncing on the cart, fallen out from beneath the cloth that covered her. Now, only unbroken snow.

She had died here. But it could have been in any place at all, and Bri would never know it. That they stood here now meant as much as anything.

"You said I saw her like frosting," she began, her voice muted in the open air. "Like cream on a cake. Pretty. Empty ."

She thought she would feel something—some choke in her throat, ice in her chest, some slipping away of her breath as she spoke—but she did not. There was nothing. The sounds escaped her and formed into words on their own, and she felt nothing but her breath as it passed her lips.

"No," he said, with sudden alarm. She looked up at him, confused. "Like the pictures of Andraste that everyone was too afraid to touch. The ones on the cakes on the same night. That's how you thought of her. Too lovely to eat—but you knew not eating was worse."

The cold stung her lips, dry, cracked. She remembered the pastries they had shared together in the close kitchen, the night Lille had died. The way she had looked at her and sighed. And Bri had left herself behind, left Lille to walk away. Then Cole had come to her, and brought Bri back.

"You thought that she was perfect and you would spoil her. I understand. I didn't want to touch, either. I was frightened. You were frightened, too. But you wished you had touched."

"I wanted—" she said stiffly, then sighed. "I don't know what I wanted."

At this he looked at his hands, splayed open with his calloused palms bright in the winter sunlight. There were still scratches and his nailbeds were a faded purple from cold. It was if he were trying to find a path to a place he had never been and could not recognise. Then he reached out, and touched the back of her hand.

"I understand, now." He shook his head, his eyes closed, his brow furrowed. "It was always more than that. You wanted to be her and she wanted to be you. I thought only demons wanted that ."

"I wanted—" she began, then shut her mouth, swallowed the words, swallowed back what she could not allow herself to want; she wiped at her eyes, where light gusts of snow stained her cheeks.

"She lived each day as if it were her last." His words pierced deep into her thoughts. "Put lemon in mine, have a cherry, they won't see, steal the scent of vanilla. But some day the switch will fall and everything will be lost, just like when the forests burned. Just like when the wheat—turned—to ash. When Londrian was lost."

She looked up at him. Lille's brother. Had Lille smiled and laughed and went through the day as if her brother hadn't died? Bri could not have known. She could never have known. Perhaps Lille did forget, as Cerys said. Perhaps they would forget, too, as the ice had. The wind swept over them, stirring the snow, covering up the path that had led them.

"You don't want to go back yet," he said. You want to be alone."

Bri nodded, a stutter in the cold. The press of people at the riverbank, the pigs' squeals, the hot hiss of oil and chatter.

"Yes," she said. "But—"

"You don't mean alone. You mean—with me."

She looked up at him. She searched his eyes—and he did the same with hers.

"Yes."

He smiled, and she mirrored him for a brief moment before she looked back to the shore. Bri took his hand again. Venturing further out onto the ice was dangerous; they would walk, instead, along the bank. The pair made their way back to the mill, whose ceaseless wheel could be seen from anywhere along the river. But as they approached, Bri stopped short and gasped.

"Oh!"

She clapped a hand over her mouth as she stumbled back and nearly fell against Cole, who stood in the snow unblinkingly. Precisely where they had sat together, in the shadow of the mill's heavy wheel, two figures pressed themselves against the wall, clothes disheveled, cheeks flushed and bodies aligned. Bri did not know who they were—featureless, genderless, half-hidden—grasping together for what warmth they could eke out of this cold and lonely spot.

"We should leave them—leave them alone," Bri whispered haltingly, and touched Cole's shoulder. But did not let her fingertips linger. Cole took a step towards the indistinct pair; he kept his gaze on them as they writhed in the shadow of the mill.

"Cole, they could see us!" Whispered again, harshly, careful of the sound of her footfalls as she padded away in the snow. There was a hard moment, her breath steaming the air, where he still did not turn away; finally he looked to her with wide, curious eyes.

"They're very far away," he said in a breathless sigh, open-mouthed, disbelief colouring his features. "They're in a place where there's nobody else who matters. They're in a place where there's nobody else but them."

He glanced at the pair of them again before turning and taking those same silent steps back to her side. Bri, blushing madly, took his hand and led him down the river.

The sun had begun to set; the mountains glinted gold. The ice shone a deep, broken blue, as deep as the sky. She felt so light, standing beside him. Even linked by the hand she felt like she could float away with him into the wide expanse of the sky. She could barely hear his footsteps beside her and when she looked nervously to him, as if expecting his fingers to slip away from hers at any moment, he was there. He would smile when she did it. She would blush and look away.

She wondered what he had been like. She wondered what he had been. Before—whatever had made him hide himself so. Whatever had turned him, as she had been. She didn't want to pry. He never pried. Yet, somehow, he peered. She wanted to know him—she didn't know how.

She plodded deep holes in the snow and he followed; it had not been swept away for skating as it had closer to the mill. They walked along the river to where the bridge from the barbican to Skyhold's doors cast its long shadow on the ice. High above them, faintly, there echoed the clipping hooves of horses as they trundled wagons from the courtyard to the winding path the pair of them had trod down to the valley. The sound circled down to them like leaves falling from a tree, sharp, skittering against the stones. Cole looked up, as if he could see the echo with his eyes.

"The mountains sing it back," he said, and the frail tremble of his voice shivered in the air for a moment. It made him laugh—his laugh came back thinner each time.

"Briony."

He said her name; she looked to him as the sound ghosted across the flat planes of ice that stretched out before them. He was smiling.

"Briony!"

Louder this time; she blushed. Half-heard, half-felt; her eyes slid away from him, as though shy of the sound of her name on his lips.

"Someone might hear!" she whispered, her lips raw, her hand raised to her flushed throat as if her voice, too, might betray her in this moment. She looked at him; he was smiling that wide, toothy smile that softened all the points of his face.

"Yes!" Cole said, and laughed. He held her by her shoulders. "Isn't it wonderful?"

She smiled, then, though she dropped her eyes and wrung her hands in her skirts. He brought his fingertips to her chin and lifted her gaze in the same way she had the night they danced, before everything came unstitched.

"Briony," he said. She met his eyes.

"Cole."

It was barely above a whisper; his nose and cheeks flushed from the cold, he smiled with such genuine delight that she could not help but mirror him.

"Cole!" she said it louder, then placed a hand to her mouth and laughed as the air trembled with its echo.

"Briony!"

"Cole!"

"Briony!"

Their shouts mingled over the mountaintops, echoing together, merging; it was threaded with their laughter. But she felt her name closer, thrumming just beneath his skin. His hands came up to cradle her face; his palm was cold against her burning cheek. His eyes were as bright as the sky.

"There's just the two of us here," he said, breathless and smiling. "There's nothing else in the world now. Isn't it—Isn't it wonderful?"

She closed her eyes and laid her head against his chest; she felt his breath stir the light hairs across her brow.

"You don't have to go back," he said. It was a statement, not a plea; his voice was so low that she could only hear it though the weak vibrations of his chest. She felt his palms against her skin, the pad of his thumb running light across a cheekbone as though he could not be sure, in this moment, that they were flesh and blood—knowing also that this moment, too soon a memory, would leave them both.

"I—I—" She stuttered out that last syllable, her voice so low she could barely feel it against her tongue.

"Briony," he whispered, for the last time.

She felt his palm against her cheek. She felt—she could not know. There was nothing but the two of them in this place. Nothing but the places where they touched, and the slow churn of their hearts beneath their breasts. Quietly she looked away, just as the last, bright syllable of her name died in the cold air, bursting against the mountaintops where Lille's ashes would lie forever.

She looked up to him again.

It wasn't like the first time. That time was filled with rotting fruit—the apples that had been left after the harvest, lying with their skins split open and their flesh turning in the daylight. Misshapen, too small, too bitter, they littered the orchard beneath the turning trees. It was an autumn day, too warm and bright in the clear sky. Too open. There were beads of sweat on her neck, just beneath the stiff collar of her dress. The apron's knot pressed hard into her back as she leaned, half fearful, against the trunk of one of the trees. The wasps, succumbed to the heat and the sugared intoxication of the rotting fruit, buzzed low and lazily and crawled along the yellow leaves.

He was tall, much taller than she, and his throat bobbed with every syllable he spoke. The miller's apprentice. He hauled sacks of flour and dropped them at her feet every day with a smirk; they made her jump, each time. His hands were rough, like hers. When he said her name the 'r' rumbled harshly across his tongue. He'd held her neck and jaw between his calloused hands, as if she were going to dart away, as if he were going to miss her mouth.

All that tangled fear, all that trembling in her limbs as he approached, and now all she could recall of that moment was how sunburnt his neck was, how badly his breath stank. How his lips were dry and sharp and pricked her mouth when he pushed them against her own; how she couldn't speak or breathe for that terrifying moment when his tongue twisted up and scraped against hers. A wasp crawled along her cheek and flew away. His teeth against her lip. His nose pressed hard against hers, hips hard against hers. When he had finished he only shifted away, still holding her against the tree.

"Did you like it?" he had asked, and she had smiled, and struggled, and lied.

That was long ago. That was in the Dales, before the soldiers took the Dales away. But how frightened she was even now. Her heart racing as they stood on the patchy ice where they'd walked together with such careful steps; how frightened, here, with this boy who touched her so gently and with such patience. The shimmer of their voices finally disappeared against the mountainsides. Only they two stood there, the rush of her heart in her ears as she looked to him. The sun cast long shadows across the still and shining surface of the river.

Leaning up, tilting her head back, straining to reach, she pressed her lips to his; they were cold. His heart seemed to go completely still beneath her palms. His mouth was dry and cracked, like flakes of ice, sharp; she could not feel any warmth from him at all. Before she realized what she was doing, she ran the tip of her tongue along his lips, to wet them, to warm them. To bring him to life. She blushed madly as she came back to herself, drawing back, her breath and voice stuck in her chest once again.

But then he stirred, shuddered, seemed to echo into motion, like the sounds of their voices on the mountainside. He touched her gently, carefully, as if afraid he would touch her wrong. Turning, eyes cast down, pushing tears from her cheek with his palm, he pressed his mouth to hers again. Awkward, aching, then soft, warm—and when she pressed herself to him, their kiss melted into water, deep and slow.

Then he ineptly poked his nose against her cheek and his chilly fingers edged up her neck as he tried to cradle her head in his hands. She gasped at the feeling, drew back, lingered. Now his lips were tearslicked, bright, bitten. Their eyes met.

She could never know what he was thinking. She could never see past the mirrors of his eyes. Cole turned away, leaving her touch, leaving her side, to trudge across the frozen snow to the riverbank. The sound of horses' hooves on the bridge above shattered the silence. The moment had swept away as suddenly as it had come; she followed, shaking, scared.

"What—What's wrong?"

Her question repeated itself in the air.

"Cole?" Now when she said his name it was with that trembling uncertainty once again. The night had come at last. She followed so that she would not lose him again.

It was half an apple, poking up from the ice; Cole, shaky and unused to lacking grace, slid over it and tripped. He fell heavily on his shoulder but climbed up to his hands and knees in the same instant, turning to what had upended him. He passed his hand over the snow, scraping it again, leaving a streak of blood.

She stared at him; he did not seem to notice that he had hurt himself.

"You're bleeding," she said, taking a few trembling steps towards him.

"Yes," he replied mechanically. And as he said it, a thin streak of red slid down his temple, too. He didn't even move to touch it, as though the wound came so naturally to him he did not need to look.

She pulled a corner of her shawl up and wiped the blood away from his face; it smeared against his pale skin as he winced at the touch. A long streak, thin and spreading, stained her clothes and slid into the thick grain of the fabric. He was looking away from her, still at the place where he had slipped.

"There was nothing but the last, cold breath," he said. "The last breath that she would ever take. And then she breathed in the cold, and it held her so gently she knew that dying would be the only kindness she would ever know."

"What do you mean?" Bri said, and brought her hand to her chest. He looked to her, then his eyes flickered away again in that quiet way where she knew he had gone somewhere else. "The girl who begged for everything but her life."

He pointed to the patch of ice.

Quietly, her breath hanging in the air, she took short, careful steps to where he had fallen.

Blood on the frost—Cole's, she thought, but then saw hers, the woman beneath blooming in a cloud of red with apples floating up from her basket, frozen, delicately encased in ice as though she slept under glass, but for the gash along her belly and the bruises that mottled her from chin to throat and below, out of sight beneath her sackcloth dress.

"Oh!" she yelped, and jumped. Cole was at her side, and caught her as she slid back. Bri's breath was hard and short—her mind raced for words.

"She must have fallen. Yes. She must have fallen last month, before the river froze." The gash in the woman's belly spoke to Bri's lie. She turned away from the sight. "We need to go back to the camp and let them know."

"She didn't fall," he said, moving to look despite her urging. Bri watched as he took a few wobbled steps towards where the girl lay beneath the ice.

"How do you know?" Her voice was very small.

"It's in the ice. It stays forever." He knelt, and ran his fingertips over the sharp snow. "Fingers at the throat, Maker, I'm dying, a stab in the stomach, hot on my hands, eyes dark, bright water black with blood."

The girl's last moments rose up in her mind. She pushed them down, even as the watery blood swirled in her mind.

"How do you know?" she asked again, more softly, as if the unanswered question echoed in her own throat. She clutched at her own belly, as if the knife had been placed there; she only felt the thin outline of the kitchen blade she kept in the folds of her apron. He was silent. Shakily, Bri moved to kneel beside the frozen girl, and wiped at the snow with the corner of her shawl to better see her. The water was cloudy with blood and frost and she could not recognise her.

"We need to go back," she said again.

"Yes," he said, "They will want to know."

When Bri rose, she did not extend her hand to him again. She looked up to Skyhold; it didn't blend into the white clouds, or raise itself like a natural thing among the mountains beside it—it jarred her, and she looked away as she picked her way carefully over the treacherous ice.

"Someone has to cut her out," Bri said, more to herself than to him. But when she turned to him, he was gone; gone, like he had the night he had watched her weep, like the morning she had pried him from the deathly snow. The darkness spread about her so thickly she could only see as far as it would allow.

"Cole!"

She yelled his name into the night and was answered with the rolling sound of her own voice as it swept further and further from her throat. There was no answer of her own name, this time. Bri drew sharp breaths into her body as she swung around, panicked, trying to find the impressions in the snow where their footfalls had made as she and Cole, not moments before in the fading light, had found their names among the mountains. Now there was nothing but the harsh crunch of thick unbroken snow, the hazardous groan of the ice beneath her, and her own heartbeat ringing harshly in her ears.

The shore and all its firelight could guide her.

Soon Bri was climbing up the riverbank, catching her shawl on a dead tree branch and tearing it, cutting her palms on the sharp ice at the river's edge, finding the muddy path and its dirtied snow that would take her to the tent where the celebrations had already begun. Shaking, dragging her tattered shawl around herself as tightly as she could, Bri circled the warmth and light of the tent, searching the heaving crowd as they smiled, laughed, ignoring the girl who watched them. Then Bri saw her, stuck in a knot of other girls—she jumped and hissed with Bri touched her with her death-cold fingers.

"Cerys," she said, and grabbed at the elf's wrist, pulling her towards her. "I need your help. Please."

"Briony?" Her voice was twisted up, as if she had tried to remember Bri's name—that their conversation had been scrubbed out of her mind as surely as she had scrubbed out the stain. Speechless, breathless, Bri dragged her away from her circle of friends, from the firelight, from the warmth. Cerys yelped, suddenly dragged into the cold and dark.

"What the fuck are you doing? Where are you taking me?" Cerys snapped, and pushed Bri's hand away. Turning, Bri looked at her, and the fear in her face made Cerys go still.

"I found a girl. She's in the ice—dead."

"What! Are you—you're serious, by the Maker." She turned, looking back at the tent. "We need to go back, we can get the soldiers out here, we can—"

"No!" Bri yelped.

Cerys stared at her, struck dumb. Before her mouth could form a question, Bri continued, sharp, quick.

"I can't stay here. I can't—please, just tell them you found her. I'll show you where she is and then you can go tell the watch and I can go back to the castle. Please, Cerys. Please."

She sighed, hard, teeth gritted, jaw set.

"Just—show me," she said, her voice flat and harsh. Bri winced. Cerys took a lantern off one of the posts, wrapping the iron handle in her apron before hoisting it before them. Together, they found the trail of Bri's footprints and picked back the path back to the girl.

"Here," she said, gripping Cerys by the wrist again, jerking the lantern, casting light across the disturbance of snow across the ice. "It was here, I'm sure of it."

Cerys wrested her arm away. The profusion of footprints had softened by the new snow. She knelt where Bri pointed, and soon the half-frozen apple caught the elf's eye.

"Maker's bones," Cerys whispered, drawing back the freshly fallen flakes of ice with all the tenderness as if she were peeling back a coverlet on a sleeping child.

"This is how we found her," Bri said, and Cerys turned to look at her with a curious eye.

"Who were you with?"

"No one," she said, haltingly, wrapping her bare hands in her skirts again. "I meant—sorry." She shook her head, her teeth clattering together as she spoke. Her fingers were numb from clutching the lantern's handle. Cerys's look lingered, but then she turned back to look at the dead girl's face again. If she had noticed the footprints in the snow that had lead them there, she did not say a word.

"I think I know her—the beggar girl. The one who came with the pilgrims from the Dales a few months back. She got on the wrong side of a lot of people. But I didn't think—Maker's breath." She ran her fingertips over the ice, looking down at the dead girl's clouded face. It shone, bright and hazy, in the glare of the lantern light.

"She didn't fall," Bri said. Turning, she saw Cerys's eyes on her, curious, wide.

"How do you know that?"

"I—" Bri began, then shook her head, pointing with a shivering finger down at the ice. "Look, there's blood."

Cerys turned her eyes from her and Bri let out a held breath. The ice glanced the light back from the lamp but unmistakably beneath its hard shine was all the blood that had flowed out before the river froze. Slowly, the elf nodded.

"She could have just hit her head," Cerys said quietly. "She could have just slipped and hit her head."

"Like Lille?"

It was a question filled with sharpness. Bri was surprised it came from her own mouth. Cerys stood, raising the lantern to look her full in the face.

"Go back to the castle," she said shortly. "That's what you want to do, isn't it? Go."

Bri was frozen in place. Cerys shook the lantern in her face.

"Go!" Cerys's voice echoed across the night air. "Go and hide. You didn't come down for Lille's pyre, so what's another dead girl to you, eh?"

Bri stepped back, her throat tight, her arms wrapped around her belly. Pushed back by the light of the lamp, Bri did as she was told.

The kitchen was not empty. She knew it wouldn't be, though she could not have known. He was there, crouching amongst the sacks of flour just as he had been the first time they had spoken. Cole's eyes were cast down, and he did not turn to look at her when she entered, or when she pushed the door shut with a hard crack.

"I don't like it when you leave me," she said rashly, harshly, then bit her teeth down on the words that crowded her throat. Her lips still trembled with the lingering cold. She could barely see him in the darkness.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I—I—"

"You left me on the ice. I had to walk back alone, I could have—I needed—Why? Why do you do it?" Her voice now echoed flatly across the close coarseness of the kitchen stones. Cole stood, still and silent, before her. His hands were lank at his sides.

"Because I am afraid," he said, at last. "There are parts of me you wouldn't want to see."

She shook her head, she breathed a half-formed word. But then he raised his eyes and looked to her and spoke.

"Why do you do it? Slip inside, away from sight, snow fading hearts and hands. Why do you leave me?"

She looked away, ignoring him. Her breath clouded in front of her face, even here.

"I told Cerys about the girl we found. They'll cut her out and—and bring her body to the Chantry."

"Yes."

Bri watched as his eyes raised from the floor, to her, to the empty spot on the shelf where Lille's lethal sugar had rested. Too much—too much.

"It wasn't your fault," he offered. She looked at him, and the chill that had gripped her whole body now squeezed at her lungs.

"What wasn't?" Her voice was nearly lost.

"The horse."

She felt all the blood leave her face. He reached for her hands in a gesture of gentleness but she stepped back, just out of reach.

"She liked the sugar," he insisted. His voice was raw, pleading. "She didn't mind that it was bitter. She didn't know. The sugar softened into sweetness in her mouth. When she died, she thought that she would rest. And she did. She was happy for it."

Bri breathed—it was all she could do for a long moment, her nails pressing so hard into her palms that she felt the cut from the ice open anew, draw blood down her pale skin.

"Cole," she asked, caution edging her wavering voice. "How do you know that, about the horse? Did someone tell you? Did you see us?"

"I heard it," he said.

"How?" She fought to keep herself from trembling so violently that she could not speak at all. "From who? Who told you?"

"You did," he said, as though she had asked a question simply to see if he had known the answer. He had known—He had known, and anyone could see it on her face and know. She took one sharp, halting breath, but then he shook his head, eyes wide, raising his hands as if to calm an animal.

"No one knows. You don't have to worry. She's in a place where there's no more pain, no more children to tug her tail. It was just like falling asleep. Spilled the salt and stole the sugar. Sweetness masking secrets. 'She didn't even grind it right!' But it isn't fair , it wasn't your fault . It wasn't yours to know."

She looked up to the empty place on the shelf, but turned back to him, fearful, watching the twitch and shudder of his shoulders.

"You're frightened," he said. "Like on the river. And—Not on the river. Something new."

"I don't—" she began, and stopped, staring. "I don't understand how you know these things. I don't—"

"Please don't be frightened," he said, fear strangling his voice. "Please."

She could not stop. Her muscles ached as she tried to stop herself from shivering, as she wound herself up in her torn shawl. Bri did not let her eyes leave him.

"You say you—you listen. I don't—"

"I don't listen the way you do."

Bri heaved a breath, shaking her head.

"I don't understand."

"I—I—I—" That same familiar stutter. He swallowed thickly. "I need to tell you about the real Cole."

"Cole, I—The real?"

"No," he said, loud enough that she jumped at the sound. He looked at her, pained. He repeated the word, more softly, but when he took a step towards her she took a step back.

"He—I—he died in the dark. Belly full of knives and nothing. Heels of his hands bruised from beating on the walls. It hurts to remember. But I must. It holds me here, like you hold me here. I can never let myself forget.

"He was locked in a dungeon and died. I got—heavy when I thought of him. It pushed me down. It held me here. I carry the real Cole with me—everywhere. I wanted to kill him. But I didn't."

Each word slipped over her like river water, dragging her down, sealing her up in the ice. Bri did not know what to do. She did not know how to breathe without swallowing his words.

"I wanted to kill the man who murdered me."

Bri stepped back, shaking her head. But she had seen his daggers. Cole brought his hands up, to stop her, to still her, and she flinched. He stepped away again, back into the dark.

"What are you?" she asked. He was quiet, as if he did not know how to answer. As if he did not know the answer.

"I—am Cole, and," he stopped himself, and breathed, long and full if he had never breathed before. "I am the spirit who held his hand."

The silence settled so heavily between them that for a long moment, she could not speak. But then, at last.

"A demon?"

The word pressed hard, a caught breath, her voice a horrified whisper. She asked with one hand wound tightly in her apron, a knife between the twisted folds of fabric, the other hand at her chest as though she willed her heart to stop its painful hammering. No one could see him but her. No one could hear him, all his strange utterings, all his knowings, but her.

"No!" Cole said, his back bending as he leaned forward, his head bowed, hiding his eyes. "I'm here. Whole. Human. Or, I'm trying to be—I'm trying to grow. It hurts but—you help."

"Then what? You say you're not a demon. Then what ?"

"They called me a spirit, but I showed them I could be more than that. But I'm still—it's still a part of me."

"A demon. You're a—"

She could not say the word again, not without her voice breaking. This was her answer. He swayed where he stood, rolling on the balls of his feet.

"No—" he said quickly, stutteringly. "I don't—I can't. I made everyone forget and I was alone. Friendless, failing, faded. Only a body, a dagger for the danger."

Now he shivered. He shivered violently. He spoke so quickly the words flowed together, reduced to simple sounds.

"I was afraid again, self stuck, pain pinning me. I needed to be more. I won't forget. I can't not know again." He looked at her, and his eyes were so pitiful that she felt her heart reaching for him—she stopped herself. At this, he gave a soft sob. Then he spoke again, halting, weak.

"You showed me how 'me' only means what others make it. You make me meaningful. You make me more. Like—flour, water, yeast, salt. Needs kneading—in your knife-nicked hands."

She was silent now—her mouth a thin, flat line.

"I—I," he stuttered again. "I need you. You're the only one who isn't afraid. You're the only one who hasn't left."

She shook her head. She shook it sharply, trembling, stepping back. The memory of his touch had turned to cinders, stinging her skin, leaving nothing but dark ash.

"You—You're lying to me. You were lying to me. All of it. To possess me. You—I let you—"

Now he mimicked her, shaking his head just as intently. But her tears were stuck behind her eyes. Her hands raised to her mouth, drawing her elbows to her chest. Her words breathed through her fingers.

"What are you going to take from me?"

"Nothing," he said, high and keening. "I don't—I don't want to take anything from you."

But he was hungry—so hungry. She had seen it.

With that same ungainly grace he closed the space between them in a step and pressed his mouth against her own. His hands closed on her shoulders, her arms pinned between them, and he held up her shaking body to tilt her face to his. Cole's lips, chill and trembling, closed around her mouth. His teeth clicked against hers. His eyes were wide and open and stared into hers. He pressed her back against the wall and she felt her spine shift and stick to the uneven stones. When he jerked his head back, he left a smear of spittle across her cheek. Bri's throat closed over her words as she sucked air into her body. His scent of blood and dead ash came back to her. The coldness of his body, taking all her warmth. She stared at his luminous eyes and she knew she had nearly fallen into them and been lost.

He let her go, shaking his head. She clutched at the collar of her dress, breathing hard. Their eyes locked in the half-light. He looked at her as if, all of those nights ago, the split cherries he had put to her lips had been pieces of his own heart. Hungrily, she had swallowed them, and in return she had pierced her own breast so he might be fed of her, too. Starved, he could consume her. Fearful, she would strip him to the bone. Even now they carried these pieces of each other inside them. His slick lips trembled in the dark, his eyes wide and wet. And then he slid back into the darkness and left her sight—left her alone in the dark kitchen where she belonged.

Bri gripped the wall behind her, her body rigid, her skin cold.

Every village had their own way to dispel their demons. A burning pile of sage, a sprig of garlic around the neck, a ring of salt that none could pass. Some even painted their lintels with blood on certain nights, to be sure that spirits would turn away.

How had she brought one to her door? How had she let him in? How—How had she bared so much to him, when no one else had cared to try? She would have invited him inside her, if he had asked. If he had pressed any want against her body, she would have met it. She had made him from her own desire, she thought—she had created this strange boy from herself, drawn him here, clung to him in her loneliness. And he would have possessed her and taken all she was and become some creature who knew nothing but horror.

Would she scatter the salt across the stones, so neither flesh nor spirit could ever touch her?

She had nothing but sugar.

Bri turned and vomited into the bucket filled with kitchen scraps. Her tongue burned, her throat raw and aching as she doubled over, gripping the wall with one hand as her knees trembled with the weight of her own body. She breathed until the bitter bile in her throat was swallowed back again. Then, she snatched up the bucket, emptied it out into the snow beyond the door, scrubbed it with lye until her hands went red, and fled the dark and empty kitchen.

The somnolent rustle of bedclothes. The susurrus of breath. When Bri slipped back into the dormitory, it was lightless, the moon hidden in shadow. And as she entered, she saw Lowri crouched beneath Lille's cot, scratching at the loosened stone.