“If you couldn’t make snowshoes and walk away,” he explained to Deor, “you were trapped all winter long with the other Uthars.”

“But it can’t snow so very much on the north shore of the Sea of Stones, where Uthartown is,” Deor objected.

“Uthartown is wherever the Uthars are. It must have had fifteen different locations that I can remember.”

“Sixteen since you were born,” Ambrosia interjected.

Deor’s eyes crossed at this and Morlock smiled to himself. Deor understood travel, and tolerated it fairly well, but the idea of a home that was not always in the same place: that was unthinkable to many a dwarf.

Morlock cut cloth from the shell of the Viviana and made it into face masks for each of them.

Ambrosia and Deor took theirs without comment, but Kelat objected. “I don’t like things on my face—I don’t care how cold it gets.”

“Your face cares,” Morlock retorted. “We are nearing the edge of the world, where men may not dwell.”

“Even Deor and I don’t like it much,” Ambrosia said. Kelat laughed, and did not put on his mask. The others did, though.

The track of the sunstream was easy to read on the moonslit face of the snowy plain, and they shuffled across the empty white fields to reach it.

The snow crust there was deeper and more stable. They pitched camp for the night.

“We should have brought firewood from the Viviana,” Kelat said.

“No fires on this trip,” Morlock said.

“What keeps us from freezing at night?”

“You will, Prince Uthar,” Ambrosia said. “You’re a furnace, burning fuel night and day. Did you know it? All we need do is contain the heat that you, and I, and the others here generate as a matter of course. Morlock or I can shepherd that heat, keeping it within a shelter, as we kept it in the balloons of the Viviana.”

Kelat looked relieved at this, but Deor gave a sidelong glance and said, “I don’t like it, harvenen. Long watches in the visionary realm are a burden you have already born to your harm. Kelat and I will go fetch some firewood.”

Ambrosia said flatly, “No. We can’t carry firewood enough to last us to the edge of the world, and we’re unlikely to find any on the road, unless you think you can make a bonfire out of ice-trees. This is the only way, Deortheorn,” she added in a gentler tone.

“There’s another way,” Deor said stubbornly. “Share your burden. Teach us how to do it.”

Morlock met Ambrosia’s eye. She nodded briskly. “The Sight is a treacherous gift for a ruler,” she said. “But harven Deor has a point.”

“I always have a point,” Deor admitted, “though I usually manage to stab myself with it.”

They set up their occlusion and ran a census on their food. It wasn’t much to reach the end of the world with, much less to walk all the way back.

Deor said to Kelat, whose face fell approximately one face-length when he saw how small the rations would be, “Well, look on the bright side. We may not have to walk back.”

“Because we’ll be dead, you mean?” Kelat said calmly. “That might be just as well. Starvation’s an ugly death.”

Morlock was impressed with the youth’s steadiness. He did childish things, like refuse to wear a face mask in the coldest air in the world. But he was not a child.

“If it comes to that,” Morlock said, “there are ways to survive without food.”

Deor stared at him. “Oh?”

“Yes. We might absorb the tal of the local beasts and plants directly. It would keep life in our bodies, anyway.”

“What’s the downside? I can tell by your face there’s a downside.”

“It may change our bodies.”

“Ach. Well, troubles never come singly.”

“And a stitch in time saves nine.”

“A stitch or nine is exactly what you’ll need when I’m done with you, harven,” Deor said mildly.

They each ate something and then Ambrosia and Kelat wrapped themselves in their sleeping cloaks and lay back to back. Deor stayed awake for a while and Morlock took him through the first lessons of the Sight. It did not go as badly as it might have, and Morlock was strangely moved to think that his harven-kin and oldest friend might become a dwarvish seer—a rare thing in the world, if not absolutely unheard of.

Morlock watched intermittently all through the night. The occlusion, in fact, trapped most of their heat, but he set a sentinel mannikin to wake him every few hours to make sure the shelter had not grown too cold.

When day came they struck camp without eating and began the long walk northward on the narrow road paved with ice and the sun’s death. The cleft of the road was always before them; their path ran a little below the level of the snow fields, and there was often drifting snow to contend with. The day was but little warmer than the night; the heat drawn away from the sun seemed mostly to stay aloft. Kelat rarely wore his face mask but Morlock didn’t warn him again; he was not the boy’s mother.

They walked, with a few breaks, until sunset. Then they made camp, ate a little, and Kelat and Ambrosia stayed up while Morlock and Deor turned in.

And that was how it went: day after day in the endless plain of snow and ice. The biggest difference most days was in who would hold the watch at night.

They talked some as they walked. But, in truth, a time came when they had said most of what they had to say to each other, and each walked with his or her own thoughts.

Morlock’s daydreams largely focused on Aloê. Rarely in their marriage had they been apart so long or so far. His longing for her was by now the principal concern of his waking life. It dwarfed hunger, thirst, cold, and fear. The hope of her, the golden warmth of the thought of her, kept him moving. The only way back to her was ahead. His long, regular strides were like the beat of a song, a song that had one word: Aloê . . . Aloê . . . Aloê. . . .

It was not all monotony, though. Occasionally, there were monsters.

One day they found they had passed from the flat, snowy plains to a bumpier region of snow-covered hills. The hills bristled with black-hearted ice trees. The bloodless sun above lit the hills with searing brightness. Morlock drew his mask over his eyes and stared down at the ground. So he wasn’t the first to see it.

“Morlocktheorn,” Deor said at his elbow. “One of those hills is moving.”

Morlock looked up and saw: a hill that stood just to the left of their path lurched up from the ground. They could see sky beneath it through three stumpy legs or roots that still touched the ground.

“Is it a plant?” wondered Deor. “Or . . . ?”

It pulled one of its legs loose from the ground. The leg looked oddly like one of the trees on the beast’s back: crystalline and spiky, veined with darkness.

A second leg came loose, and then the third.

Morlock remembered shapes he had not understood when seen from the air: vast hill-sized shapes moving through the snow. This. These, rather: they should assume that all the hills were the three-legged hulking beasts.

It took a step, and the ground shook. The step was toward them.

“Move,” said Ambrosia, but they were all moving already.

Now more hills were shaking, streams of snow flying off them in the wind like strands of white hair.

“Think they eat things like us?” Deor speculated.

“Does it matter, if they kill us first?” Kelat replied.

“It may to them. Think how disappointed they’ll be! ‘Oh, no! Dwarf-meat again!’”

“That what your mother used to say, you think?”

Deor glanced at Morlock, rolled his eyes, and laughed with (it seemed to Morlock) ostentatious politeness. Morlock decided he should tell Kelat about dwarvish family life so that he could make his banter more on point.

The hillbeast who had first awakened was moving faster now—as fast as they were, shuffling along on their snowshoes. It seemed to be picking up speed as it went, and now there were others bumbling along behind it. The hillbeasts on the eastern side of the road were trundling into motion also.