Chapter 173

Liam

The fire in the shepherd’s hut wouldn’t draw.

I had been at it for twenty minutes. The wood was damp, and the chimney was full of something, old nests or snow, and every time I got a flame going, the smoke rolled back down into the hut and sat under the turf roof in a gray layer at the height of my eyes. I knelt in front of the little hearth and fed it split pine one piece at a time, and blew on it, and swore at it under my breath, and it smoked at me.

“They’re not coming,” Ryan said.

He was standing at the crooked door with his shoulder against the frame, looking out at the snow. He had been standing there since we arrived. The sky over the eastern ridges was going from black to gray. There was nothing on the hillside. No tracks, no movement, nothing on the wind but pine and cold.

“She said first light,” I said.

“It is first light.”

“It’s nearly first light.”

Ryan didn’t answer that. He shifted his weight against the frame