Had you been more vigilant, they might still be alive. Though the steam made his limbs go lax, he tightened his fists, fighting its effects.

He thought of his two daughters, running through the woods around their house, laughing and shrieking as they played when they were supposed to be about their chores, and he watched, smiling on, indulgent as ever. He imagined his wife, her dimpled smile and lively eyes, her body that had always willed him to heat even during mundane tasks, her mind that had cut through their arguments like a hoe through tilled earth. Sweat poured down his back, chilling even as it beaded down, but he ignored it, breathed in the khnuum steam, and willed the visions to come.īut the things he saw were ordinary dreams, hallucinations unfit for one nearly a priest of Skoll, God of the Hunt. So he stared into the flames, and stared, and when he grew tired of staring, he heated his khnuum stone until it was too hot to touch, then doused both stone and fire and covered the smoke vent to fill the tent thick with steam. He craved not only the pursuit, but their adulation upon his return.īut I can't, he told himself, not forcefully, but with heavy resignation of a decision long ago made. He was a man of the wilderness, born to run through snow and woods, to stalk the greatest stags and wolves and return with his prizes held aloft for all gods and men to admire.

Yonik wanted nothing more than to look away, to rise and leave his shelter and hunt.

His back ached and his legs were cramped from sitting cross-legged on the cold winter ground, only a thin tarp for padding and keeping off the moisture from the melting snow. Smoke, trapped temporarily before meandering out of the vent in the top, burned his eyes and throat. He stared into the flames, swaying, sending shadows dancing along the walls of the small, drafty tent in which he hunched.

AN OMEN IN THE SNOW PREQUEL TO THE RUNEWAR SAGA

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