The Bracken Woods [m] ivory ice

he used to love her.

within the forest the caribou waited and cen stalked among them. he could tell from a cursory sniff of dungheap the general age, sex, health, and direction of any herd member. the caribou had belonged to the caribou hunters long before he had been born.

cen was fully in his element. he had tired of bird meat and so abandoned that hunt almost immediately, favoring the paths which led into the darker bracken. here in these woodlands, old caribou came to die, to give themselves to the earth so that new calves might be born beside the sea.

and it was for one of these downed bodies that cen searched, thinking of how he had felt so warm within his heart the first day he had seen red leaf among her sharadoii people, how he had known their tongue as a trader but how he had truly become one of them for a time, calling her beautiful in lanzadoii, allowing the loveliness of her response to him to carry away his grief over gheli's death and then ghaden's own.

but that had been the end of his love. when he found a downed elder, cen dispatched the beast with a guttural thanks to its spirit, then carried as much meat back to the first camp as he could, dumping it in the snow for red leaf to prepare while he went back for more, saying nothing to his wife.