The Warmth of the Trench

There was a roll of waxed paper tied with sinew and, beneath it, a handful of iron nails filed to points. Nerea untied the sinew with her teeth. It was a drawing, traced in charcoal by a hand she knew better than her own: the cave, the air crack, and from the crack a line that climbed crookedly through the inside of the glacier until it came out on a ledge marked with three lines and a circle. Beside the line, in her mother's cramped writing: Twelve varas. Soft ice to the sixth. Then stone. Drive in and climb.

It wasn't a larder. It was a way out. Her mother had started to open it and never finished.

Nerea ran her finger over the three lines and the circle, the signature her mother put on the panniers so the customs men would know whose salt they weren't going to tax. Her eyes stung, and she couldn't tell whether it was the cold.

Behind her, Lope stirred under the cloak.

"You've steady hands for an outlaw," he said, his voice still clouded with pain.

"And you've a lot of nerve for a deserter." Nerea rolled up the paper and tucked it into her jerkin. She didn't tell him about it. Not yet. "Drink."

She passed him the flask of juniper spirit. They shared a strip of goat jerky in measured bites and the spirit in sips that burned the throat. The hours went by without their being able to count them. The tinder went out and Nerea lit another, shorter piece. The cold began to drop the way water drops in a well, without a sound, and the breath from their mouths fell to the floor as frost before it melted.

When she could no longer feel her fingertips, Nerea knew she had to decide. Lope had already taken off his breastplate and thrown it into the corner, because the frozen steel sucked the heat out of his chest like a leech. Now he was spreading his Segovia broadcloth cloak over the slate.

"Come here," he said. "If we stay two varas apart, by tomorrow we'll be two statues for the shepherds to find in three hundred years."

"If you touch me where you shouldn't, I'll rip out the shoulder I just put back."

"That seems fair."

She sat down beside him, stiff as a post. He wrapped her in the cloak and in his good arm, without squeezing, and for a long while they were two stones together in the snow. Then Lope's warmth—a rough warmth that smelled of campfire smoke and old leather—began to soften the frost on her clothes, and Nerea let her forehead drop into the hollow of his neck because there was nowhere else to put it.

"Why didn't you shoot me on the bridge?" she asked in the dark.

"Because I've spent twenty years shedding blood for kings who can't tell a loaf of bread from an order to cut throats." He took a while to go on. "And because I'm carrying something you should see. It's in the lining of the cloak. Under your hand."

She felt along the lining and found a paper folded in four. She lit the last stub of tinder. It was the order. Sealed in black wax, with Colonel Hinojosa's flourish and the approval of a judge from Burgos. Blow the cornice of the Souls as the caravan crosses. And beneath, a line added in different ink: Let no witness remain of the guide, nor of Captain Aldana, who knows the contents of this order.

Nerea read the line three times.

She thought of the bridge rope cut on the bevel, of the boys pushing the mules toward the ledge, of the dry crack on the crest. It hadn't been an ambush against the clans. It had been a cleansing, with each of their names written in ink.

"They wanted you because you know what it says," she murmured. "And me?"

"You, because you're the only one who knows the route. Kill the guide and the route dies with her." Lope brushed a strand of her braid off her face with clumsy fingers that didn't know how to do such things. "That's why I kept it. If we get out, that order has to reach Oakhaven. The prince. With it in front of him, no judge can say it was the mountain."

"If we get out."

"If we get out."

The tinder went out. Nerea didn't light another. In the complete darkness, with his heart beating against her ear, it seemed easier to say it.

"My mother died in here."

Lope didn't say he was sorry. He said nothing. He ran his hand down her back, slowly, top to bottom, the way you calm a frightened mule, and she laughed with her face buried in his shirt because that was exactly what he was doing. Then she stopped laughing. She lifted her face. She never knew who reached for whom; only that her lips were cracked with cold and his tasted of juniper.

That was when they heard it. Above their heads, through varas of packed snow: a blow. Another. The patient, muffled rhythm of shovels.

Someone was digging toward them.