“Right.” Kiem scrambled to his feet and started compressing his sleeping bag. “If the terrain’s not too bad, I think we should get to the rail line today or tomorrow. We could get going and have breakfast later, if you’ve slept enough.”
“I’m not sleeping any more,” Jainan said. He sounded as resigned to it as Kiem had felt at four that morning. “Let’s start out.” He turned away to collapse the tent.
The shadow of the mountain bowl kept the snow around them dark even while the sky above lightened to powdery gray. On the far cliffs, the dawn light glinted on the flybug wreck, small by now in the distance. Kiem looked at it ruefully.
No point crying over spilled milk, and it was too cold to hang around. He and Jainan consulted over the map, which had no idea where they were but handily told them which way was south. They picked the likeliest-looking pass they could see and set out.
They ate breakfast while walking by unspoken agreement. Kiem had been hiking in winter before, but he would be lying if he said he was happy to be stranded out here on an unplanned survival trek, not knowing if someone was after them. They’d been lucky: they were kitted up, and technically the rest of the journey should just be a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, but still, the more distance they could put behind them the better. Jainan seemed to feel the same way.
Once the light broke over the top of the mountains, midway through the morning, they both relaxed a fraction. Kiem was trying not to brood and also trying not to mention anything that would make the stress worse. He and Jainan traded comments and absent half jokes that didn’t really lead on from each other.
By the afternoon Kiem was feeling the walking in the complaints from his thigh muscles, though it was hard to distinguish the aches from the bruises he’d taken in the crash. He came to a halt as they crested another ridge. “Break?”
A weight lifted from his back as Jainan took the backpack. They’d been trading it all day. Kiem slipped out of the straps without argument. “Sorry,” Jainan said. “I should have noticed. What hurts?”
Kiem made a face. “Nothing important,” he said. “Twinge in my hip. It’ll hold.”
“Sit down,” Jainan said abruptly.
Kiem was familiar with Jainan’s way of offering concern by now and was touched, but that seemed like a bad idea. “It’s going to be hard to get up again,” he said. “How about we just stop for a moment? View in a million, right?” He gestured ahead of them, where the ridge they had painstakingly labored up dropped away again into a series of valleys and more snowbound peaks. “I mean, apart from all those other ones like it that we’ve seen.”
“I have filled my quota of beautiful mountain scenes for the year,” Jainan said. “Possibly for the rest of my life.” Nevertheless, he joined Kiem on the promontory, a step back from the edge.
There was a long silence while they both contemplated the view and the relief of not walking, the wind occasionally gusting around them. Kiem rolled his shoulders.
“Kiem,” Jainan said.
“Yeah?”
“I was thinking—if the treaty goes smoothly. If we have twenty years until the next one. I was thinking about monasteries.”
“What about them?” Kiem said, startled by the sudden change in direction. “Is this about the time I got sent on a retreat? I haven’t done anything recently.”
“No!” Jainan said. “No. That’s not—it’s quite normal for people here to go on long meditation retreats and, and contemplation and that sort of thing, isn’t it?”
“Well, it depends on your sect,” Kiem said dubiously. “I mean, the meditation stuff is pretty general, but some sects have strong ideas about gods. Does yours? Uh. Sorry. That was kind of a personal question.”
“No. It’s fine,” Jainan said. “My faith group is quite generalist.” He looked up ahead. The wind gusted again; Kiem had to squint to see Jainan’s face through the sudden water in his eyes. “Once the investigation is over, I could give us both some space by going on a retreat. I could do it regularly. I’d be out of your way.”
It took Kiem a couple of moments to understand what he was saying. “Right,” Kiem managed, not quite knowing how to form a coherent sentence. He should have expected this. Jainan wanted a space where Kiem wasn’t there—that was completely understandable. “Right.”
Jainan was still watching him in that sideways way he had. Kiem raised a hand to his face, not knowing what he was doing, and changed the aimless gesture into trying to rub some warmth back into his cheeks. He was supposed to be good with people, dammit. He shouldn’t be blindsided by things like this.
“It might not work,” Jainan said. “It was—it was just a thought. We can talk about it later.” He looked like he might have said something more, but at that moment, his eyes narrowed. He jerked his head around to look behind them.
Kiem was slower to react, still stuck on the thought of Jainan leaving, but he heard the second sound. It wasn’t coming from the ridge Jainan was looking at but from a row of trees straggling along to the side.
“There,” Jainan said, turning his head again as he triangulated. “What—”
They both saw the black shape detaching itself from the shadow of the trees at the same time. It had its head down in a gesture you never wanted to see in a bear, one that meant it was speeding up to charge. Kiem’s mind seemed to move slowly and his body was sluggish. He heard himself shout “Bear!” then desperately backed into Jainan, grabbed him, and threw them both off the promontory.
They landed a few feet down the slope in a thick layer of snow and rolled. The snow sheared off with them as they tumbled, clutching at each other. Snow. Sky. Snow. Sky. Rock. Kiem heard himself yelling. On one frantic, painful rotation he caught sight of the black shape shooting through the air over them—it had miscalculated the tackle. He tried to yell again, but one of the rocks knocked the breath out of his lungs. On his next glimpse he saw the bear land on the snow and scuttle away into the trees.
Jainan pushed himself up the moment they stopped, a stone’s throw from a stand of trees. “What was that?” he said, fighting for breath. “It moved like a lizard!”
“Bear,” Kiem said, looking around warily for anything that could be used as a weapon. “Let’s back off slowly—it’s got our scent now, it’ll come back.”
“That’s not a bear!”
“Pretty sure it couldn’t be anything else!” Kiem said. “Quick, we need a rock, or a—”
“Here.” Jainan pushed the end of what seemed like an entire fallen tree branch into Kiem’s hand.
“What—right,” Kiem said. He examined the branch, keeping a wary eye on the trees where the bear had disappeared. “I guess we can wave sticks. If we’re threatening enough, it should leave us alone—Jainan?”
“Just over here,” Jainan said, from a few yards away. He had picked up another branch and was methodically stripping it of twigs and leaves.
Kiem spun around at another sound, but it was just snow shifting in the groove gouged by their fall. “Okay, I think we should really get away from the trees.” The back of his head hurt and he’d pulled something in his leg. The bear was presumably skulking somewhere in the copse, but they hadn’t hurt it, so it would still think of them as easy prey. “Into the open. Down here.” He pointed down the slope, where a wide swathe of open space stretched between two straggling edges of a pine wood. There was a frozen river running along one side of it.