Chapter 197

Abby

The truck stopped for the last time in the middle of the night, and nobody came to take me down.

I sat on the bench in the dark with the sack over my head and waited. The engine ticked as it cooled. Outside, men were moving about, unloading something heavy, and their boots crunched on snow and then rang on rock. Nobody spoke. They never did. In all the days on the road I had heard Cressida’s men say perhaps twenty words, and none of them to me.

The wind was different here. That was the first thing I noticed. It didn’t come and go in gusts the way it had on the hilltops. It came steadily, from one direction, long and low and cold, as if it had a long way to run before it reached me and nothing to stop it on the way.

Then hands on my arms, and I was walked down out of the truck and across the snow. Uphill, a little. Over stones. Through a doorway so low that the man in front of me pushed my head down with his hand, and then out of the wind all at on