Ten days went by beneath the smaller measure.
The rule she had set held. The reduced share held for both children alike, and the equal care held with it, and Long Ziyun kept her place beside the one reed bedding in the open nesting chamber, the warmstones giving back their stored heat, the water basin holding its stillness, the wind worrying at the mouth and finding no purchase. The days passed the way water passes over stone, and the boy and the snow leopard cub passed with them, side by side, and that was the whole of it.
On the tenth day, the wind changed.
There was nothing to see at first. The seam of sky at the wind mouth kept its thin grey light, and the ledge below it sounded as it always sounded, and the air came in cold and clean off the lake. Then it came in not clean. Under the cold there was something stale, a clinging taint that did not belong to the mountain, and under that the beat of wings, circling out on the wind, patient, unhurried, waiting.
Carrion. A raptor, riding the air beyond the mouth, and it had followed a smell to get there. Long Ziyun knew the smell it had followed. It was the cub's, that small unfamiliar scent that belonged to no beast of these heights, carried out on the wind until the bird had taken it up and come.
She was already moving.
She did not run. She crossed the chamber and gathered the reed bedding up whole, both children on it together, the boy loose-limbed in sleep, the cub curled beside him, and she carried them into the sleeping alcove and laid the bedding down in its dark. The boy sighed and did not wake. The cub's ears turned once and were still.
Then she went back out into the open nesting chamber and set herself between the wind mouth and the alcove, and there she stayed.
The wings went on, closer now, just outside. A shadow swept the grey seam and was gone and swept again. The carrion taint came stronger on the wind and then held, neither nearer nor farther, the bird hanging on the air beyond the mouth, working at a scent it could not run to ground. It did not come in. The mouth stood open as it had always stood, and she did not close it, and nothing on the far side of it crossed the seam.
Long Ziyun stood in her human shape between the wind and the children, her eyes on that thin grey light, and did not move.
The wind breathed through the seam, in and out, and with each breath the stale taint came stronger and then held, and the wings went on circling beyond the mouth.
Long Ziyun did not wait in shadow. She stepped forward into the grey light that fell through the wind mouth onto the chamber floor, and she stood where the bird could not fail to see her when it passed. Her arms hung loose. Her weight was even on both feet. Across the open nesting chamber, past her shoulder, the lake ledge stood wide to the sky, and she was careful to keep it so. She made herself the wall. She left the way out open.
The shadow swept the seam and was gone and swept again. The taint hung, neither nearer nor farther. She stood in the light and let it look at her, and gave it time to choose the sky.
It chose the scent.
The seam went wide and the wings forced through. It came in hard, folding tight to clear the gap, and the herb rack at the mouth broke under the force of its entry, the dried bundles scattering across the stone as far as her feet. Then it was inside, wings half spread, talons gripping the floor of the open nesting chamber, and nothing else in the chamber had fallen but the rack.
Above it the high flight shaft rose dark and open, the chimney of cold air that could have carried it up and out into the sky. It did not rise. It turned its head into the chamber's depth, where the scent threaded under its own taint, and it dropped below the shaft's lip and committed down. From below the shaft there was no climbing back. It had closed its own way.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
She moved then, and not toward the bird. She crossed the shorter line, the interior line, quick and low, and when she stopped she stood between the raptor and the wind mouth with the grey seam's light at her back. The mouth was sealed. Not by stone, not by anything but her body on that ground. And she had not surrendered the alcove. The shorter path to the dark gap remained hers, where the boy slept loose-limbed and warm and the cub curled beside him.
The bird came around. It had the thread of the scent now, close, and it drove. Its wings opened and beat once against the chamber air and it came low across the open nesting chamber toward the sleeping alcove, toward the dark where the children were.
The line she had kept paid for itself. She reached the threshold before the second beat of its wings and set herself in it, feet planted on the seam between the chamber and the children's dark, and when the talons reached through that dark for her, she did not strike back. She turned the attack. Her forearm met the descending force and her whole body turned with it, and the talons closed on empty air past her hip and found nothing of her, and nothing beyond her.
The bird broke away. It swung wide off the failed strike, wings beating the close air, back across the open nesting chamber, and there, still open, still kept open, stood the lake ledge and the clean wind off the water. It took the ledge. It went out into the grey, and the lake wind caught under its wings and bore it away, and the stale taint thinned on the air and went with it.
Long Ziyun did not follow. Not one step past the threshold. She stood in the alcove's mouth while the wingbeats faded out over the lake and the wind through the seam ran clean again, cold and wet and empty of anything but the mountain. Behind her in the dark the boy sighed in his sleep and did not wake, and the cub's ears turned once and were still, the two of them pressed together on the reed bedding, unreached, untouched.
At the wind mouth the broken rack lay strewn across the floor, the dried bundles scattered in the grey light. The one thing lost. She looked at it from the threshold and did not go to it. The raptor had followed the cub's smell, and she had no need to kill it for that. The rack was gone. The children slept. She stayed where she was, between them and everything else, and did not move until the air held nothing but the lake.
The air held nothing but the lake, and still Long Ziyun did not move.
She stood at the sleeping-alcove threshold with her shoulder against the stone and listened to a cavern that had gone back to itself. Water gathered and fell in the spring basin, one drop at a time. Wind came through the seam at the wind mouth the way it always had, cold and wet off the lake, carrying stone and snowmelt and nothing else. The warmstones held their heat along the shelf. Overhead the high flight shaft emptied of the day, and the grey light beyond the wind mouth thinned toward evening.
Behind her, on the reed bedding, the children slept.
The boy lay with one small fist open against the reeds, his breath slow, his face turned toward the cub's warmth. The snow leopard cub had curled tighter against him as the cavern cooled, her small body pressed along the infant's side, tail drawn over him, ears slack. Their breathing came in turns, and then, for long stretches, together. She counted it without meaning to. In and out, and no catch in it, no sound but sleep.
She did not go to the wind mouth. The herb rack lay where it had fallen, frame split, dried bundles strewn and broken open across the floor in the last of the grey light. The one thing the cavern had lost. She looked at it from the threshold and left it there. The children had kept, whole and unmarked, warm on their bedding, and that was the whole of the cost.
The light at the wind mouth faded from grey to the color of deep water. The cub stirred once, pressed its nose into the boy's sleeve, and slept again. The boy's fist closed on the reeds and opened again, and he did not wake. Neither of them woke.
She did not read the quiet as safety. She listened past it, out through the wind mouth, over the lake, into the darkening grey, for anything that was not water and stone and wind. Nothing answered. The mountain held its breath with her. Night came down one shade at a time, and the warmstones held their heat in the dark, and the reed bedding rustled once and was still.
Long Ziyun remained at the threshold, in human shape, between the children and the open seam of the wind. The broken rack lay scattered in the gloom at the wind mouth, in plain sight, untended. She was still standing there when the last light went off the lake.