She awoke, feeling stiff, as though the cold had made the awkward position she had slept in even more uncomfortable. She yawned and stretched and made herself a breakfast of bread again. Her bottle was getting close to being empty. She figured she’d wait another day before braving a fire to melt snow. In the meantime if she drank the rest of her water, she would try to break the ice in the river.

As it was, in most places it was fairly solid. Especially, Laurel found, in the narrower parts of the river, she felt quite comfortable walking on the ice, and did, sure to stay close to the shore. She thought it would be a good way to ensure that she wasn’t leaving any footprints behind. Though she was quite certain that most of the footprints she had left near Nidaver would now be covered by the steadily falling snow, she knew that every advantage she could gain would help. Though the dwarves lived underground, she knew that they weren’t novice hunters. Most of them preferred to trap and grow their food, but some were still very skilled hunters. Those who took more turns than most scaring away humans from the Mines Forest would know the forest very well. Laurel couldn’t help but glance nervously over her shoulder. She knew she would hear them coming if they were following her. Being set on scaring humans away from their forest so long, most of the dwarves who she knew would be enlisted to follow her probably wouldn’t be adept in roaming the forest particularly silently.

Laurel tried to think of what she should do if she heard someone coming. She tried to remember a few of the hiding tricks Jocelyn had taught her and thought to thank her the next time she saw her friend.

If I ever see her again, she thought to herself. The possibility seemed even more remote now than ever. She fingered the brooch her friend had given her at their last meeting. How was it supposed to help her? Could it help her now? How could it? Jocelyn had said that it would know if she was nearby, how could Jocelyn be nearby now?

“Stop being an idiot,” she told herself. “You’re a good three weeks from Enkenon by foot.”

That night when she stopped to rest in a thick clump of brambles she pulled out the map Luke had stuffed into her pack. She had cleared the Mines Forest completely that afternoon and after crossing a rocky stretch of bare, short and squat hills had entered a denser, darker wood she had never seen before.

“Where am I?” she asked as though the map would answer her. Above the Mines Forest an unlabeled forest dotted the top of the paper. Nothing above the forest she presumed she was in. The world couldn’t simply end where the map stopped. The dwarves just must have not particularly care much about what lay north. She racked her memories, desperate to procure one of maps she had seen in the library in Dileab. She knew they depicted more than what was on the map here. She just couldn’t remember what that had been.

She wondered what might lie ahead. Only a fool would go north, Luke had said. I’m already a fool, she thought to herself. Going north can’t be any worse than what might have happened to me in Nidaver. It can’t be any worse than being a slave in the south.

But four more days later, Laurel wasn’t so sure. The dark and dense wood that followed the river was dotted with more of the short, squat, rocky stretches of hills. Some of the bare stretches were longer than others, once, without any more forest in sight, Laurel had decided to simply spend the night in that cruel stretch of land. In the densest clump of rocks she could find she had thought that perhaps she could be warm enough. But unlike clumps of trees, the stones offered no additional warmth. If anything, curled up between a rock and Cantessa, Laurel almost felt colder than ever, with the wind whistling cruelly overhead. She had barely slept at all that night and when she had awoken the next morning her back felt as hard and crunchy as the landscape around her looked. She resolved that day, when she finally came to another dense and foreboding forest, that she would never stop to rest for the night in another stretch of land without trees again.

She was lucky that she wouldn’t have to. The stretches of what Laurel mentally called “crunchy looking land” became fewer and farther between. The forest grew darker and denser, and Laurel began to wonder if perhaps the dwarves might have been better off scaring off people from the forest she was in now rather than in the Mines Forest. Where she had always found the Mines Forest a mostly warm and friendly place, this new, dark, dense forest scared her. It felt closer than the forest of the wood nymphs. Closer than the forest she had met Arston and his men in. It felt older somehow too. Untouched. Almost more pure in its density.

Despite the alarming closeness of the trees, Laurel was grateful for the warmth they provided. They broke the wind more efficiently than the trees in the Mines Forest had. Denser vegetation also meant more places for Laurel to sleep. It was easier to find a protected spot in a place so heavily wooded.

Of course, Laurel was never what she would exactly call warm. After she had been traveling for almost two weeks without having seen a soul she deemed it safe enough to start a fire every evening with her sparking stones. With a fire nearby, and in such close vegetation Laurel was warmer than she had been, but she still felt as though she hadn’t been properly warm since she’d last been in the room she’d stayed in during her time in Nidaver. She wondered if she would ever be properly warm again. She wished she hadn’t. The thought made her think of the word proper and that made her think of Luke.

Thinking of Luke made a heaviness pull at Laurel. It was a heaviness, she knew had nothing to do with the heaviness of her pack. Her pack was getting less and less heavy every day. This made her nervous, her food supply was running low. She hadn’t seen many animals out braving the cold. She wished she could hibernate like she knew some of them did. She wished she could find a nice cozy place to sleep until spring.

Finally, four weeks away from Nidaver, Laurel ran out of the last of the bread and dried meat Luke had given her. There was no end to winter in sight. And she hadn’t come across any towns. She hadn’t seen a soul since Nidaver.

Three days after she had run out of the last of her food supply Laurel got lucky. Laurel awoke in the early morning to find Cantessa hungrily tearing into the body of a squirrel she had caught, and guarding the dead body of another with one of her meaty paws.

Too hungry to care that she often found squirrels a difficult animal to skin and an even more difficult meat to stomach, she cautiously sought to remove the squirrel from underneath the dog’s paw. Cantessa growled threateningly and snapped at Laurel’s fingers.

“Hey!” Laurel snatched her hand away. “What’s gotten into you?” Cantessa licked her black dog lips and glared at Laurel. She knew what had gotten into her. It was the same thing that had gotten into her. Raw hunger.

Cautiously, she again tried to sneak the yet-to-be-eaten animal from the dog. Again Cantessa growled but didn’t snap. Getting an idea, she picked up the nearest heavy fallen tree branch and flung it into the nearby brush with as much force as she could muster. Cantessa looked up, ears perked, tail raised and eyes focused on the exact spot where the branch had fallen. Quickly, Laurel seized upon the dog’s moment of inattentiveness and snatched the animal away by the tail.

Cantessa growled and snapped again, but did not chase after the food.

She glared at Laurel as she skinned, cooked and ate the animal.

Two days later Laurel saw tracks that resembled the deer tracks she had seen in the Mines Forest but they looked bigger. As though these deer had bigger hooves. Or were just bigger in general. She wasn’t sure which. Another day passed and she came across tracks that resembled the rabbits she had seen. Only these too, were larger in size. She considered her options and decided to set a trap near where the tracks had connected to the river. She decided she could afford to lose a day to wait around to see if something got caught in it. Fortunately something did get caught in it. It was a large rabbit with mottled, snowy fur. She skinned the animal and was ready to cut a portion for Cantessa when the dog returned with a bloody muzzle. She figured the dog must have caught something and eaten it away from her camp to make sure Laurel wouldn’t steal it from her.

She cut a small strip of the meat and tossed it to Cantessa. “At least I can share,” she told the dog. Cantessa gave a grunt as she scarffed down the meat. Though every few days Laurel was able to trap an animal and there seemed to be an abundance of large, whitish-grey rabbits, she was still hungry, and could feel herself growing weaker. She was now a six week walk away from Nidaver and it had taken her roughly seven and a half weeks. By her estimations, it should have been late January or early February, but still it seemed as though spring could never come soon enough.

The river began to grow wider. As the landscape grew rockier and hillier the river grew wider and wider. She stopped walking on the frozen ice for fear that the river would be too large to be completely frozen. Not many days after she stopped walking directly on the river, she found the only way she could continue walking was to part ways with it for at least a little while. She had come to a part of the river where the rock jutted up so high and so aggressively out onto the river that she saw no other way than to walk along the more wooded area to the side of the harsh, cliffy, rock. Laurel was nervous to part ways with the river, she realized she had been walking alongside it so long it almost seemed as though it had joined her as another companion. She felt now as though she were leaving behind another friend. After pounding through the mildly thick sheet of ice with a thick branch and filling her bottle with some river water she skirted up the side of the rock lining the river and watched as it disappeared behind the trees.

Soon the woods became so heavily riddled with thick vegetation that Laurel found it very difficult to see very far ahead of where she was walking. As far as she could tell, though most of her walk took her uphill and she battled slippery, snow covered rocks, it seemed as though she was making her way through some sort of valley. The trees thinned and thickened periodically so she could view the river. Soon she found a path that lead her to be able to stay close to the river again. Not many days after she had refound the river she finally came to its beginning. Two great mountains stood before her, their great heights stretching to the sky with artic grace and pulling a bit of the fleecy white sky down with it. In the spring Laurel knew that the fleece would trickle down to the river.

After making camp that evening after having gotten lucky again with finding something to eat, Laurel wondered how she would continue on. The mountains were beautiful in their majestic strength but how was she to surpass them? Climbing the mountains would surely be the death of me. But can I afford to lose the time in order to try to find a safer passage? She hadn’t seen or heard any sign of anyone following her since her flight from Nidaver but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t being followed. They just might have stayed always only a few days behind her. As she curled up in a huddle of fallen branches she had thrown together into a makeshift shelter she decided that she would simply explore the area for the next two days and continue to camp in the spot she was in. Then at least maybe whatever decision I make, at least I’ll know my decision wasn’t made in complete blindness. She curled into Cantessa’s fur and fell into an exhausted sleep.

The next day she set out to explore the landscape as she had previously decided. Though she had intended to explore the area for two days she found that she didn’t need two days. Through the vegetation which was finally waning she began to see the Northern Sea. Though she knew she had to be close to the sea, since she could see it and the small, mountainous island which looked not far offshore at all, she wasn’t sure exactly how close she was. She wasn’t sure exactly how close she was until she came to it.

The rocky hill she had been climbing ended abruptly in a tangled mass of rocks and fir trees. From her stop on the rock she could see that the rocky island offshore was really quite close. And she was just beginning to wonder if perhaps she could build a small boat seaworthy enough to pass just the small amount of water between her and where she was sure the dwarves would never follow her when she lost her footing and fell the ten or so feet into the waiting water below.

And that was how Laurel of Dileab died. That was what the bards would say, for she was certain there would be no surviving this. Clumsily she fought against the churning liquid ice as it slapped her in the face and over the head again and again with salty freezing fierceness. It occurred to her that no bards would sing of how she died, for none would be able to account for her death. And she was certain that none of the dwarves would lament her disappearance. Her family would, yet in secret, for she was certain they would do as Jocelyn had said and find another girl who looked the part. And someone else will live to choose not to do the deeds that would get me sung about, she thought desperately. She tried to pull herself closer to the shore in order to find a crag she could enter, a rock to pull herself up onto, something to keep from the cold pressing down forcefully on her chest. But the water was pulling her out to sea and the water was pushing into the very fiber of her being. Cantessa was barking madly from her perch above and as the world grew more and more consistently fuzzed she wondered if she saw something large and winged scooping the dog up.

Vaguely she wondered if Cantessa had died as well, and if she and the dog were being transported somewhere to wait while they were judged. But the sea continued to push and pull at her until finally weak with exhaustion, and stiffly near frozen, Laurel found herself unable to fight the currants any longer and the water pulled her down into the dark frigid blue.