“You’ll have to free the snow from the chimney, first,” Kiers pointed out, removing his hands from her wool-covered shoulder blades. “Unless you want me to just blast heat up the flue and melt it off.”
“Mister Kiers, I am tired, hungry, and on my last dregs of excess energy. My temper is therefore running short. Since you’ve professed repeatedly that you cannot cook anything more complicated than heating a pot of water, I will have to spare my precious reserves of energy to ensure we don’t starve to death,” she retorted stiffly, feeling the cold closing in once more. “You may translate all of that however you like, but the short version is, I don’t care.”
Wisely, he sealed his lips against any possible retort, however tempting it might have been, and moved to open the cabin door. Wisely, she turned her attention toward the sides of the A-frame cabin, where it took her a bit more in the way of careful snow-shifting to determine the roofline sloped all the way to the ground. Once she did have enough of the snow cleared away, she explored as far as she could.
That exploration didn’t go far. Only a bit of light coming in through the gap high up in the porch roofline, but she could just make out the stacked segments of wood filling the outer eaves, with a narrow path up against the cabin walls on either side. The path was strewn with bits of frozen bark and scraps of wood, dirty and mostly weathered but still suitable for kindling if one didn’t have much in the way of Fire-attuned thon.
With the roof extending all the way to the ground on either side, there were no windows cut into the thick timbers forming the side of the cabin. Picking her way back to the porch, Vee wondered how much the ex-prince exploring the interior could see. The sun was still over an hour from setting, but they were surrounded by cloud-covered mountains, and that meant the lighting outside was already growing dim. When the sun did set, it would be as if someone had blown out a lamp, and that meant they needed light now.
Reaching the wooden deck, Vee glanced at the shuttered windows fronting the cabin. A golden glow gleamed faintly through the cracks. Relieved he had found some source of illumination, she opened the door, only to find herself in a dark, modest entry room. It wasn’t big, just enough to have a bench on either side with coat hooks above and room for spare boots, snowshoes, and the like beneath the benches, and a pair of steps up to the inner door.
Even as she looked around, the inner panel opened, letting through a large spill of warm lamplight. Kiers poked his dark head into the boot room, grinning down at her. Some of that light danced and crackled behind him, bringing with it the sounds and the scents of a firmly caught hearth fire. Some of it gleamed through his black locks, cut finger-length short in an effort to change his appearance so that the men chasing them wouldn’t immediately recognize him without the long braid of a member of the Jade Mountain royal family. Vielle thought the shorter strands looked good on him, balancing the square planes of his jaw with their subtle curls.
“Smart fellow, our host,” Kiers praised, dragging her attention back to their surroundings. “It seems he left the house well-prepared for his return. A lamp on the bench down there, and wood already laid in the hearth up here. No alchemical twigs or even a tinderbox in sight, so I suspect our absent host has a fair bit of Fire in him.”
Hopping down the distance of the two steps, he worked on unbuttoning his pale gray woolen coat, his gloves already stripped off. Beneath the coat lay a darker gray waistcoat and matching trousers, with two layers of bleached shirt beneath. Shrugging out of the wool overcoat, he hung it on one of the hooks, added his plebeian-knitted wool cap, then moved to help Vee out of her own outer garments.
She was already struggling with the backpack, holding it in place, moving stiffly from hours of holding her muscles tense, channeling her thon so she could fly. He helped set it on the bench, then unbuckled the leather cap on her head while she worked on the buttons of her leather jacket. Pulling it away exposed the coronet of her braided, ash gold hair. Some of the pins came loose as he did so, forcing him to stoop and catch them before they could vanish between the floorboard cracks. That brought him down by her white, trouser-clad legs, and the scuffed white leather boots she wore.
“He also laid out slippers, so off with your boots, too, Miss Vielle,” the ex-prince told her, feeling like a valet. “Or do you need help with them?”
“No, I can get them, thank you,” Vee replied, pleased that he had offered. Now that she had the chance to rest, her brief bout of temper was fading again. “Sorry for snapping at you. And thank you for helping. And for the slippers.”
The reduction in his circumstances had angered him at first, but now it was merely an annoyance at best. Not to mention Miss Vielle expected him to haul his own weight, even if she literally hauled his whenever they flew. Now that he knew her better, he admired her common sense and practicality. He valued her good opinion of him. Claiming the other bench, he worked on removing his own boots.
“You’re quite welcome. Apparently, Mister Horgen has a thing for keeping his boots downstairs and wearing lambswool-lined slippers inside the cabin proper. He left three or four pairs lined up just past the door. You should be able to shuffle around in the ankle boots, I think. They’ll be a bit big on you, since they looked like they’ll fit me without a problem, but they’ll be toasty-warm and dry, unlike our boots.”
“Then we’ll do our best to comply with his wishes, spoken or not.” Sitting down across from him, Vee tried not to shiver; the upper level might be receiving some of the heat radiating from that fire, but not down here. Unlacing her boots, she left them with her coat, scarf, cap, and gloves on the bench across from his. Before she could pick up her pack, she found it lifted by one of his hands. The other, he offered to her to assist her to her feet.
“For the record, I’ve set a pot of water to boil. Also for the record . . . if you’ll tell me what to do, I’m willing to learn how to cook, Miss Vielle,” Kiers teased her. “Now that we actually have the facilities and the supplies to do so. I took a quick tour while the fire caught; the larder goes back into a cave set in the mountainside. From the looks of it, Mister Horgen has this place very well stocked. Enough for an entire year, I should think. Though I should think it’d only take us a week or two for the men from Jade Mountain to give up on us and move on, thinking that we’ve moved on as well.”
“We’ll have to remember to leave a bit more in payment for our host, then,” she murmured, accepting the hand. Sitting down in the cold entryway had allowed her sore muscles to stiffen. “Plus set fresh wood in the hearth and return the lamp to the entryway bench, and leave the place as good or better than we’ve found it. But as to whether or not they’ll give up . . . we’ll have to fire up the portable aetherometer and try to find the frequency they’re using to communicate again. Assuming we can get a signal through these mountains, of course.”
“Assuming that, yes,” he agreed, leading her into the cabin proper. “They might see that the cabin is occupied, but it’ll look like it’s been occupied since before the avalanche fell. With no visible tracks leading to or from it, that should discourage them from visiting—and if nothing else, we’ll at least know it if they get close. They’ve been sending out their reports at dawn and dusk. You’ll probably want to crank it up soon—do you need a bite of thonite after all that hard work?”
“No, thank you,” Vee dismissed. A part of her was pleased he had asked. She found the ankle boots when he pointed at them, and slipped her stocking-clad feet into them one at a time while he toed his way into a pair of lambswool slippers. “I’m not completely depleted yet, and if we’re going to be resting here for a good week or so, then I’ll have my reserves topped up naturally by the end of it.”