No, she had done enough dreaming. The only reason she should look at the sky was to determine the weather. She was alone. No one was going to rescue her. Not Sara or Danner, not Lu Wai or Letitia. Not even Aoife. As Cassil had said, she was alone, an orphan under this sky. No one knew her. Here she was Stranger Woman, or the SEC rep. Not Marguerite Angelica Taishan, not Marghe. She wondered if that person existed anymore.

Once she had her mount headed in the right direction, she began trance breathing.

Marghe never really remembered the next few days. She rode in half trance through the white and cold and silence. Sometimes there were brief flurries of snow. Twice each day she would swim up from her trance to swing from the saddle and dig out ice moss for the horse, which was getting too tired to find its own. While the horse ate, she would concentrate on opening and closing veins around her body, sending her blood pounding into hands, feet, and face where patches of skin were white and dead from frostbite. Each time, it became harder to shake off her trance and force her body to move.

When she slid from the saddle on the sixth day, her legs would not hold her. She crumpled onto the snow and had to persuade blood around her body before she could stand and clear snow for the horse. When she tried to remount, she could not. The leg in the stirrup trembled and shook but could not lift her body. Fear, sudden and sharp, flashed under her skin, setting a muscle by her eye twitching. Her breath whistled. She had to get back into that saddle. She leaned her face against the mare’s ice‑shagged withers and rested a moment. She could do it. Blood to her upper arms, to her thighs and calves. Breathe. Gather.

She part jumped, part hauled herself up by the saddle horn until she lay belly‑down across the mare’s back. She dragged her right leg over and was astride and upright. She swayed as the horse started its slow, plodding walk.

It was the wind that woke her, driving hard and cold into her left cheek from the north, from a sky the gray yellow of lentil scum, a sky full of snow.

The horse was stumbling and weaving; Marghe could feel it tremble and sag at each step. The wind died and the first flakes of snow wobbled down like moths. Within minutes the wind was back, driving the flurry into a blizzard of ice blades. She could think of nothing to do but force the horse on. Ice and snow whipped through fur and hair, past eyelashes and under fingernails, to reach places Marghe had thought long numb. The horse staggered, but righted itself.

Marghe tried to guess at how long the storm would last; at least a day, maybe two. She doubted she would survive it. It would take too much effort to stop her mount and climb down, so she simply allowed the horse to wander as best it could. She felt very peaceful.

When the mare fell, she did so without warning, her front legs crumpling like scythed wheat. Marghe fell free and looked at the wreckage, then crawled over to touch the mare’s neck in apology; the horse was alive, but would not be getting up again.

The blizzard hissed around her. Her hands were so numb with cold that she could hardly feel the bone haft when she pulled out her knife; she had to hold her eyes to slits, and the snow gathered on her lashes made it impossible to see if she was grasping it properly. Spicules of ice clung to the mare’s mane; she stroked it, and sang. Singing seemed like a good idea. It was some wavering tune she remembered from her first childhood visit to a temple. She wanted the mare to hear something other than the blizzard before it died.

While she sang, she scraped a mound of snow up against the big vein that snaked along the thin neck. Then she showed the old mare her blade, smiled, and pushed the knife in.

The blood was impossibly red, pumping onto the white snow. The mare sighed and her eyes glazed as the moisture froze. The pumping blood slowed to a trickle. Marghe cursed and scrambled to the saddle to get the empty locha skin. She held it up to the vein, but the container’s mouth was too narrow; the skin stayed flaccid, with only about a cupful of blood inside. Marghe scooped up a mouthful of bloodied snow. She held it on her tongue until it melted and warmed. It was sweet, metallic. She waited a little while before her next mouthful. It stayed down.

There was already a drift of snow gathering by the carcass. Not much time. She picked up the knife again and sawed at the dead mare’s belly. Her hands were clawed with cold and the knife was small. She kept dropping it. Again and again she picked it up and hacked. It was very messy, very tiring. She could hardly see. Now and again she stopped to rest, wipe the ice crystals from her eyes, and swallow another mouthful of bloody snow. By the time she was finished, her furs were slimed from cap to boots, but she had several slices of raw meat lying beside her in the snow. She opened her furs and dropped the red, slithery strips inside against her skin where her body heat would stop the meat from freezing.

The blood had given her a little energy, but there was still hard work to do. She shoveled at the snow, dragging great armfuls alongside and between the forelegs, then the hindlegs, of her dead mount. The saddle had to be cut free; she hauled it to lie halfway between the stiffening, outstretched legs. Then she pushed snow against legs, carcass, and saddle until a waist‑high wall rose around her. Using her knife again, she made a great, three‑sided cut in the mare’s hide. With all the subcutaneous fat gone, it was easy to shear the skin away from the internal membranes in one piece. It was more difficult to drag the flap of skin, about two feet square, over her head and pull its edges down to meet the snow wall.

The result was cramped and stifling, but a shelter of sorts. It was all she could do. She huddled down around her precious cupful of blood and few tatters of meat, all that kept her from death, and breathed deep into her belly. There was nowhere to go from here.

Marghe’s feet were numb now and the blizzard still raged. She chewed on her last strip of meat, knowing that this one, like all the others, would not give her enough energy to keep warm.

The day wore on. With her snow mask pressed tight against nose and mouth, and her face pressed against the fur of her hood, she could hardly breathe. She could not get rid of the persistent image of herself as a blowfly egg, waiting to hatch into a maggot in the rotting flesh of the horse’s carcass.

The numbness in her feet crept to her knees. She was not sure if it was frostbite or a result of her restricted circulation, but moving would mean lifting the skin flap, and the wind would whip away all her hoarded warmth in a heartbeat. She was too weak to survive that. If the blizzard did not stop soon, she would grow weaker and weaker until her heart stopped.

She did not want to die. Even now, half suffocated and starving, with patches of skin dying on her face and hands, she refused to give up. This was not how her life was meant to end, frozen and stinking and alone, forever listed as missing, unless she turned up entombed in an iceberg drifting down the eastern coast between the mainland and the Necklace Islands. She refused to die.

Think.

There was a story her father had told her once, about the organic chemist who had been searching for the solution to the structure of a certain molecule and had fallen asleep and dreamed up the answer: the benzene ring. Her father had used the story to illustrate several of his annoying sayings, like Where there’s a will there’s a way, and Westerners teach their children how not to think, and Relax, let it come in its own time. Right now her hunger and fear were blotting out everything else. She needed a clear mind, a relaxed body; she needed to be still, and let it come. Perhaps there was a solution to all this, a solution as perfect, elegant, and obvious as the benzene ring.