I didn’t know if it was true, if it was complete, but I knew enough. I couldn’t save anyone I’d tried to and I shouldn’t have carried that each and every time, for all this time. I was a mess enough alone, and if I was gonna make any difference in this world, I had to save myself first. Calico had always looked at me like she’d understood, and I’d realised it wasn’t her, but nature that understood. Nature accepted things for how they were, and grew however it could. There was a way in this world of peace and contentment and acceptance and it sure didn’t come from the towns and cities.

  …Or maybe she really did understand and I was being rash again, but what was I as a Forester if not a font of rash thoughts and a rigid worldview? A fighter, that’s what I was. Instilled in me from the day I could swing a stick at a fencepost. To fight for what I wanted for myself in this world and fight until I couldn’t anymore. What did I want for myself most right now? Well, it was examination day, wasn’t it? The road from Dreadfall would be impassable for carts till the ice thawed… but it was downhill all the way and scenic as well. Three hundredtimes till midday. Three hundredtimes till they started at the top of the exam entrants list. And the walk from here to Baronbridge would take about that long. I could do that. I could do this.

  I took one sideways glance at the shrug of sticks I used to call a home, spotted movement behind the curtains. Wished them well. We didn’t much get to choose our path in life, but we could pick a few forks here and there, and it paid to know when to walk on, and when to fight like the hells.

  Right now, I was going to walk.

  *

  I kept close to the snow-capped fence as the shimmering road slipped down through the jagged escarpment where the town’s watercourse escaped valley-wards. Dread Stream, and here were the famed Dread Falls: a riotous eruption of water every greengrowth after the pluriscene rains, but with half of it frozen over and the other half a slithering hiss over the stepped cascades? A mere memory of better times. Aren’t we all. The sagging cobble bridge still held across the waterfall’s pool, and beyond that the waters plunged into the Maw. Local legend had it that any weapon or tool tossed into the Maw that eventually managed to reemerge into the calmer waters below, would be rendered indestructible for the rest of its days. I’d heard a few tales of those who’d done it, but then I’d heard tales of people who’d been thrown in there back in the early days after the Clearing. People, on the whole, not much like indestructible.

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  But people could rebuild themselves in a way weapons or tools couldn’t. Repair what they could manage and work around what they couldn’t. And more, if you found the right people, you could offer parts of what was needed to rebuild each other. Build something better together. And when it stopped working so well, learn the lessons, and build again.

  One stone at a time, like he said.

  The twisting, writhing road down through the forest to the valley was littered with a dozen different kinds of walls put in by perhaps a hundred or more hands over however many seasons. Bit by bit, part by part. A precipice guarded here, a boulder bolstered there, a hand-hold or a hitching post or a lay-by cleared for passing space. No one person had done it all nor had one year yielded the sum total. Yet as it all came together, it created something vital.

  Maybe we weren’t the travellers on the path of life, but the path itself. Built steadily, maintained occasionally, repaired as could be afforded. From where we came from to wherever we’re going, under crystalline ice clumps clinging ponderously to the branches of white-dusted evergreens or under the baking verdance rays that would always eventually come to sear through the canopies again, no matter how far away they might seem. I took a moment to breathe by the lichened rock that’d always looked to me like an old woman’s head with scruffy yellowing hair, my breath puffing clouds before my nose, gazing out at the white and green and brown and grey. An odd serenity washed over me, a kind I’d only known in the Glade. No one else had the lack of sense to be out here this deep into the snowy season, and that was okay. All was okay. For now, I was okay. And that was enough.

  Something fluttered overhead. Baronbridge was not far away.