Location:The Northern Ranges — the first pass to the Middle Ford
Date/Time:TC1857.11.19 – TC1857.11.24
Iron gets cold enough in the high country that it takes the skin off a bare hand, and Bjorn had forgotten that in his years of southern forges and remembered it on the first morning of the surge when he put his palm flat on the ice-axe head to check the edge.
He left the skin on the steel and did not make a sound about it and wrapped the hand and went on, because forty-one children were watching him, and a man who shouts about his hand in front of children teaches them that hands are a thing to shout about.
The girl at the front of the line looked at the wrapping and then at him. She was about nine, and she had watched the eleven-year-old count the second group through the first pass in the tenth month, and had taken it up the next morning without anybody telling her to, and nobody on the route had stopped her since.
"Iron," she said, in Old Northern.
"Iron."
