The siblings were still a bit stand-offish, but by the middle of the next day, Wirrin had all three of them doing stretches with her. On the second night, they ate more than the first, and they didn’t pick the meat out of the fat this time.

It was a week out of Tellan, past a high lookout decorated with shrines to all the different Gods, that they finally stopped spotting the stones by the side of the path. It was only a couple of days later that they stopped seeing the path at all.

At which point, tension started to creep back into the relationship. It was cold, it was intermittently raining and snowing. There was no clear path, and the mountains were dangerous. Wirrin pulled back the pace noticeably.

Alina and her brothers didn’t like how much slower the going was. But if there was anything they could have done about it, they wouldn’t have needed to hire Wirrin in the first place.

The second time Hest nearly fell down a cliff over the course of three days, Wirrin called a stop. ‘Hest,’ she said. ‘When I say to walk only where I walk, do you think I don’t mean it?’

All three of them were panting, Leran’s hand still balled into Hest’s coat.

Hest shook his head.

‘Do you think I’m taking in the sights?’ Wirrin asked, taking a step closer to the three of them. ‘Perhaps my bones are too old for this sort of thing?’

Hest shook his head.

‘Do you want to die in a pile of snow at the bottom of a mountain?’

Hest shook his head.

Only when the siblings followed instructions exactly could Wirrin pick up the pace at all. Only when she was confident Hest, in particular, wouldn’t walk himself off a cliff and die, could she take them the direct, precarious routes west.

Four days later, Wirrin was convinced enough that the siblings would do what she said that she decided to take them across the precipice she called Felgoss. They were far enough from civilisation by now that not all the mountains had names. Wirrin had named this one Felgoss because several ledge crossings made for very direct routes across it. Otherwise it would be at least two days of walking.

As Wirrin led the way up the mountain, she explained why they were taking the route. She explained that if anyone failed to follow her instructions, she would cut them all loose to die in a pile of mangled limbs and slush.

Alina looked at Hest, who looked at the ground.

For the first time since she’d left Tellan, Wirrin actually got out her bow. There were a few problems with crossing Felgoss, but when crossing in autumn or winter, the main problem was snow buildup.

‘You want to see something stupid?’ Wirrin asked. ‘Last chance before we start crossing.’ She was going to do it either way, so she pulled out a roll of cloth from her pack and started wrapping it around an arrow shaft, just below the barbed head.

Hest looked up in time to see Wirrin smear the cloth in tallow.

Alina was frowning.

None of them said anything as Wirrin carefully lit her arrow and let the outside layer of the cloth catch as fully as it was going to. This particular trick was the main reason Wirrin carried a fairly long, recurved bow instead of the local style of flat hunting bow.

She drew the arrow, aimed basically toward the biggest buildup of snow on the face of the mountain, and loosed. The arrow swooshed and the bowstring cracked loudly in the relative quiet of the snowy ranges. Some birds took off nearby.

All four of them watched the arrow arch into the cliff face and disappear into the snow. Hest was certainly about to say something along the lines of ‘that was pointless’ where there was a much louder crack, a much louder split, and a loud rumbling.

‘Technically, that may have been unnecessary,’ Wirrin explained as a huge sheet of icy snow trundled its way down the mountain’s face, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces against the many outcroppings, cliffs, and ledges.

‘This time of year, the snow is usually quite hard,’ Wirrin continued, unstringing her bow and wrapping it in its oiled cloth. ‘But I always say it’s better to have fun than to have regrets.’ She strapped her bow back into her pack.

‘What was that?’ Alina asked.

Wirrin took her rope from her pack and handed it Alina. ‘Tie yourselves together, leave enough at the end to tie me on,’ she instructed. ‘It’s called black powder. I assume you’ve heard of it? It’s used mostly for mining.’

Alina nodded. ‘But how did you make it do that?’ She nodded to the mountain as she tied the rope around her waist.

‘I’ll refer you to some good books on mining demolition when we get back to Tellan,’ Wirrin said. ‘For the moment, we can cross.’

Crossing Felgoss with other people attached was a severe annoyance for Wirrin. Doing most things with other people attached was a severe annoyance for Wirrin. It slowed progress immensely. She couldn’t leave any single step to chance or speed, if three more people had to do it after her.

Her whole body was aching when, nearly four hours later, they finally reached the end of the ledge and could finally walk on solid ground. Wirrin called an immediate rest to stretch and warm up.

Though they were less common in autumn and winter, the other thing that Wirrin liked about this crossing was the abundance of mountain sheep and goats. For nearly a half year quite some time ago, she’d made a fair amount of money hunting mountain sheep for their hides.

When she spotted a pair of them, leisurely scaling the near-vertical side of the mountain in just the right sort of place, Wirrin retrieved her bow again. Though there was at least another fortnight of food before she would actually need to start hunting, wouldn’t it be a nice treat to have something fresh after the climb?

The sheep paused at the crack of Wirrin’s bowstring. One started bounding up the rocks as the other slipped and fell from the face of the mountain. It landed heavily in the snow only a few hundred metres from the four of them.

‘This is a good enough place to camp,’ Wirrin said, pulling her boots back on to go and retrieve the sheep.

The siblings were just about competent enough to clear space for a fire by the time she got back. Though they certainly hadn’t gotten the hang of starting a fire out in the snow.

Wirrin was searing some of the mutton on her pan when Leran piped up, quite unexpectedly. Since their first night out in the snow, the four of them had talked very little, aside from what was necessary. The three had gotten more comfortable with Wirrin, but it hadn’t gone further than a drastic reduction in glares.

‘I thought I would get used to it,’ Leran said. ‘It’s all so empty.’

Wirrin didn’t ask why a sheep had made him think of it. She knew the issue of contrasts well enough. ‘I prefer it,’ she said.

‘There’s no one to talk to except the three of you,’ Leran said. ‘There’s nothing to see but more snow, more rocks, more trees. It’s just so empty.’

Wirrin shrugged. ‘The first time I came out here, I was fully intending to never go back.’

‘It would be peaceful,’ Alina said. ‘If the rest of you weren’t here.’

Wirrin smiled her whole-face smile.

Wirrin left the bones for the birds, packed the meat with snow, tied it all in the hide of the sheep, and strapped it to her pack. The route west from Felgoss wasn’t nearly so precipitous as the route there, at least it wouldn’t be for about a week and a half.

It was still early enough in autumn that a lot of the mountain passes would be basically safe enough. It didn’t take much explaining to convince the siblings to be extremely quiet when she told them to.

The four of them had been out of Tellan just shy of four weeks when Wirrin got her first look at the siblings’ map. She’d known they had it. She’d seen them all hunched over their vellum during breaks and when they set camp in the sunlight.

She’d not cared enough to try to steal it and have a look, and after being shown the map, she felt validated in that decision. It was a small map, a double-spread in a bound vellum notebook only just bigger than her two hands, and showed a wide area.

The only thing of much note was that it must have been quite an old map. Very near the edge of it was Tellan, clearly illustrated with only four steps and named Svelen. The notebook was new enough that the map was obviously copied from somewhere. Tellan had had four steps for only about the first eighty years of the Church’s reign. Svelen was the Yovtavan name for Tellan.

Quite over the other side of the map, where mountains were drawn with no regard for their actual locations, was a circle about a quarter the size of the page.

‘What we’re looking for is somewhere in here,’ Alina explained. ‘We have no idea where.’

Wirrin nodded. ‘Mighty specific of you.’

Alina sighed. ‘It’s supposed to be a ruin of some sort,’ she said. ‘From before the Gods’ War. Something they didn’t completely destroy.’

‘It’s supposed to be in a mountain peak,’ Leran added.

That got Wirrin’s interest. She’d explored a few pre-Gods’ War ruins in her time, even discovered two that she knew of. She’d never heard nor seen anything of the sort out in the snow.

She dug her own vellum map from her pack. She’d made the vellum herself in her brief stint of being a mountain sheep hunter. Over the years since then, she’d filled in as much detail as she could.

Unlike the siblings’ map, hers started at the lookout. She had other maps of parts of the mountains nearer to Tellan, most of which she’d sold to people in Tellan.

‘If it’s around here’ – Wirrin circled an area with her finger – ‘then we can rule out more than half of that area,’ she said. ‘I can tell you with complete certainty that it’s not any of these’ – she circled a collection of four mountains – ‘and with good authority that it’s not any of these.’ She indicated a line of eight mountains around the first four. ‘Which likely makes it one of these three.’

‘Not these two?’ Alina pointed to two more peaks west of the three that Wirrin had indicated.

‘Depends how accurate that circle of yours is,’ Wirrin said. ‘They’re not inside it. Even this one’ – she pointed to the easternmost of the mountains Alina had suggested – ‘its peak isn’t in the circle. But I suppose it’s possible.’

Alina nodded. ‘We have no idea how accurate the circle is,’ she said. ‘But we tried to over-estimate.’

Wirrin pointed to another mountain slightly south of the others. ‘Then this might be a possibility. But we’re coming from here’ – she traced their path from Tellan – ‘so we’ll come to these two first.’

Alina nodded some more. Hest was actually smiling.

‘Perfect,’ Alina said. ‘Then let’s go.’

Wirrin looked at the darkening sky. ‘In the morning, perhaps.’

Alina actually looked sheepish. ‘Yes, in the morning.’

They were all very cute, Wirrin decided.