The courier stepped into the night and was taken by it. Not swallowed—carried, the way a river takes a leaf. His boots found the first of the crampon bites he'd set on the way up. He moved quickly, pausing only once to tuck a fold of cloak tighter around the child when wind sought a seam. Aeneas made a small, annoyed sound. It might have been a protest. It might have been the first argument he would ever win.
Inside, the man barred the door again. He stood for a moment with his palm on the wood, feeling the cold through it, counting breaths as if each were a coin. The woman had turned her face to the wall and let herself weep once, quietly, the way a mountain lets go a small slide from a cornice so the slope does not fail later. When he went to her, she was already straightening, anger armored over grief.
"We have to move," she said. "They'll search the ravine mouth first, then the terrace paths. If we make the icefall and drop to the lava tubes—"
"We won't make the lava tubes," he said, for he had walked this land long enough to stop lying to himself. "We run, we die badly. We stay, we die quick. Or we buy what time we can."
She met his eyes. She understood. Love had made them fools; love would make them clever for as long as cleverness mattered.
"Then we buy," she said.
They broke the hut down in minutes with the intimacy of people who had lived inside it and therefore knew its bones. The man pulled the rafter-peg that hid the pouch of salt and coin. The woman took the jar from the hearth niche where the last of their old teacher's salve lay spent and smashed it anyway because someone might know the smell. He scattered the coals, kicked the hearthstone free, and let snow claim the ash into anonymity. He took the bone charms from the lintel and snapped them one by one—not for superstition but because a tracker from the houses could read the pattern of knots like a map.
When they left, nothing in the room said who had slept there except the shape absence makes.
Outside, the wind had steadied to a constant push. The sky had gone black where the ring had begun to thin, and a weird twilight held that was neither night nor day—an eclipse's private hour. They took the path leading away from the courier's route without speaking, moving into the lee of a shoulder of rock that held its own weather. The man counted his steps. The woman listened to the mountain the way she had learned to listen to him—catching the small betrayals in sound that meant attention, not yet presence, had turned their direction.
Down-slope, a lantern flared. Another answered it. Farther, a third. The line of light crept like a stitch halfway across the ravine mouth.
"They're dividing," the woman said, voice a thread.
"Of course." He felt, absurdly, the desire to laugh. The houses had always loved order. "They'll check the igneous shelves, then the goat trail, then the old ore shed. If we go up—"
"They'll see us against the sky." She tilted her head, listening. "There."
He heard it then too: a place in the wind where the sound was wrong, not because the gale faltered, but because it was making room. He had learned that trick as a young sword-hand hiding in prayer halls he had no right to enter—silence that wasn't empty; silence that meant something larger was moving through the same space as you and had not decided yet whether you belonged.
"The crevasse," he said.
"The crevasse," she agreed.
They moved as one toward the dark seam in the rock the hut had sheltered. The crevasse was a throat of old ice and older air. People had fallen into it and not returned. People had entered it on purpose and come back with stories they wouldn't tell unless you knew which questions to ask. The man put his hands on the edge and swung down onto the first narrow ledge. His boots skidded a fraction and then held. He reached up. She let him steady her—not because she couldn't do it herself, but because letting him gave them both the illusion of sharing the weight.
Above them, lantern light fanned out at the ravine's mouth. Voices carried—formal, clipped. A name was called like an accusation. They didn't react. The mountain breathed frost at their faces and the ringed sky pressed on the world's crown like a blessing given by someone who did not know how human bodies bend.
They moved lower.
Two ledges down, the crevasse widened into a black pocket. The wind here was a strange, spinning thing. It caught the torn edge of the man's cloak and made it beat like a frustrated bird. He crouched and felt along the wall until his fingers found a seam. He pressed. Old rock obliged. A slice of shadow yielded with the slow reluctance of something that had spent a century learning to be closed.
A tunnel gaped: narrow, wet-breathed, smelling of mineral and a faint spice the woman recognized with a jolt.
"Sel-ash," she whispered. "From the old burns."
He nodded once. "If we make it to the second bend, we can lose them for a while."
"And then?"
"And then we keep buying time," he said, and put his hand on the small of her back to guide her into the dark.
They were two people moving through a throat of stone while the sky performed a miracle no one had asked for, and far below, a man whose name would never appear in any chronicle chose the worse road and the colder one because a promise has a gravity that pulls even when the world would rather you fall.
He moved quickly, boots finding the scrapes he'd left on his way up, head down against sleet that came at an angle suggesting the wind had grown bored with being ordinary and was trying new ideas. He kept one hand on the child under his cloak, feeling the small rise and fall, counting it without deciding to count. When the icefall came into view, he angled left for the Goat Stair—a miserable series of hacked steps not fit for anything with dignity. He took them at a pace that burned his thighs and did not slow until his breath had narrowed to a whistle.
The river mouth lay beyond—white roar under black cliff.
He could make it.
He would make it.
At the last turn, he glanced up once because men who travel alone look up at the sky sometimes just to prove it's still there. The ring was thinning now, blue burning back through red at the edge, or red refusing to leave blue's stone face. He couldn't tell which. He thought, unexpectedly, of the woman's laugh when she had said the child was late and smiled despite himself at the memory's warmth in this cold.
Aeneas made a sound—half sigh, half small interrogative. The courier tightened the cloak around him until both of them were one shape against the dark.
"Almost there," he said to the boy who could not understand. "Almost there."
He did not hear the horn this time. The river took that sound and worried it to pieces. He did not see the pair of figures crest the ridge two switchbacks above and pause to study the old prints in the ice, then the new. He did not feel the mountain's attention turn in a way that was not weather.
He only felt the child's breath and the pull of a promise.
He started down toward the river's edge, where boats could be bought for coin or for rings or for nothing at all if the boatman owed the right shame.
Behind him, high in the Shatterglass, a door closed quietly on a hut that was no one's any longer. In a tunnel two ledges down, two people moved with the surety of those who had accepted the price of being stubborn, and lanterns poured like a necklace of old suns across the ravine where the houses searched with the confidence of those who believed the world would always arrange itself into their patterns.
The moons separated by inches. The ring tore. Night remembered how to be night.
The wind changed.
And far away to the southwest, where the sea kept its own counsels and the islands wore storms like shawls, a place that did not know it was about to matter waited with its tide out.