Kendlin the Cold

Kendlin woke up with a good, deep ache in his muscles. He was pleased. The air was cold, and where his breath steamed out of the hole he'd made in the haystack it had frosted the hay all around with shiny specks. He didn't want to move just yet. He wasn't entirely warm, but warm enough. It was deep winter. He could see some of the field around him, the grass heavy with frost. No snow had fallen during the night. The sky above the trees was a blinding white.

He toyed with the idea of spending the whole day inside the pile of hay. What does it look like, where I crushed the grass in the dark last night? Are there tracks? Is it obvious? Where did they make camp? Is the weather holding them down? Did they get drunk in an inn last night?

He squirmed around in his wool blankets in the hay, letting the errant straws tease fresh skin. His thighs were the sorest, the muscles hot and heavy. He squinted out at the sky. What if it snows today?

It was the 246th day. He had not spoken with anyone in at least a fortnight, not since the man lying in the road, but he saw the blood outside the farmhouse from a recent slaughter. It was feast-time, he knew. His own stomach was starting to wake up. He fished around in his bag for the dried beef he'd filched a few miles back. It was eaten before he remembered to taste it. His mind was elsewhere.

Where would they be? Making themselves at home in the farmhouse? Malech has a way with people. They could be eating feast-time mutton right now. What is it now? Three hours past dawn? Look at the sky.

He settled further into the tumbled pile of hay, only half warm and half comfortable. Still half hungry. He determined to wait out the day here. His breath slinked out into the cold. He felt around for another strip of meat and shoved it in his mouth.

Ten minutes later he was on his feet, shaking straw out of his hair and resettling the hay pile. His pack was on his back in a moment and he was off across the field, trying to get the blood pumping into his cold-shocked limbs. He kept on walking for three hours before he stopped by a mostly frozen stream to have a drink and another bite. The woods were completely silent and there was no sign of any animal, not even a bird. The only motion was the water beneath the ice and Kendlin's hand moving from his bag to his mouth.

The sun seemed already to be on its way to setting by the time he was done. He pulled his pack back on and hopped the stream, pushing his way through the brush up the slope opposite. The light disappeared steadily as he walked. It was the deep grey twilight of a thickly clouded afternoon that released the first snowflakes, spinning into the trees and settling, at first to melt, on the sodden leaf litter around him.

The wind picked up as evening came on. Now he was walking up and up, now he was pushing across a ridge, maple and oak rubbing their branches in the air above his head. The snowflakes were fat and slothful. Kendlin got to a cleared place on the ridgeline as night came on, and looked out over the valley to see no sign of life but a few drifts of chimney smoke that barely stood out against the dim horizon. Frozen lakes glowed blankly pale as if lit from below. One spindly thread of road bisected the scene.

His feet were numb and the fronts of his thighs stung with the wind. The snow was beginning to stick, and now every step he took left sign enough for a good huntsman to follow. Soon he'd be leaving tracks plain to anyone. He'd already forgotten the haystack and the morning. All that remained of the day was to move fast and let the white balm cover over and smooth what it would. He set himself a faster rhythym and kept his cold legs pumping. It was dinnertime and dark. Let them try to catch him now.