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.And all the time, it was gone.” Only her nervous fingers toyed with her crossbow, as if denying the rest of her body, showing that the calm she displayed was not composure, but stunned incredulity.The wind whipped her hair, blowing some of the feathery dark strands over her face, hiding her eyes.She did not brush the hair back, but took refuge behind it.Abruptly Evan pulled her to her feet.“Come on.”“But why?” She shrank back, seeking the snowdrift again, and its cool, comforting quiet.“Because it’s coming onto night and we have to sleep somewhere.” He jerked savagely at her arm, hoping to see understanding, acceptance, anxiety fear, any emotion at all come into her pale, serene face.“I can’t,” she said, pulling away.“Yes, you can; you’re going to.” The harshness in his voice startled her, and for a moment she saw him as the man who had led the Pirates for those destructive years.His face was set and under the tangle of his beard his jaws were clamped tight.“We are going over there, we are going to find ourselves a place to sleep, and when the morning comes, we’re going to search the place from top to bottom.We’ll take anything we can use.And then we’ll leave.”“Leave?” she asked helplessly.“For where? Where is there to go?”“Somewhere.”“To another place like this?” Something flickered in her eyes.“No, not like this.Someplace we can make our own.” He didn’t believe it, or not all of it, but he wanted to banish her lassitude.“Come on, Thea.We’ve got to look for—”“But how? How, Evan?”“The same way we’ve been doing,” he said, rather more gently.“Day by day, until we find a place.We’ll go south for the time being.To Tahoe, or maybe Yosemite.Or a little valley in the gold country; Angel’s Camp is too big, but maybe Redhawk Pond, or Wilseyville.But we have to get out of here.If the Pirates can find Graeagle, they can find this, and when they do, we’d better not be here.They’ll find Johnsville, too,” he added regretfully.It would have been pleasant to go back to that snug kitchen and large wine cellar, at least for the winter.“Why not stay here for a while?” she said, more animation in her face.“We could make the community happen again.We could set it up again, do some farming, maybe…Or hunting, this high up.We could find others to help us…”“Farming? The two of us? In this?”She started to shake her head, hut he took her by the shoulders, ignoring her protests.“Evan!”“Listen to me, Thea.If we stay here, we’re going to die—maybe from cold, maybe from starvation, maybe the Pirates will kill us.It doesn’t matter how.We’ll be dead.We can’t farm here in the snow.If we had greenhouses, we might stand a chance, but we don’t have the materials to build them, and couldn’t do it until spring even if we did.You know yourself that there’s too little game in the mountains for us to live on for very long.And the Pirates are half a day away after the thaw.I haven’t come over a hundred miles through these mountains for the privilege of dying.You can stay here if you really want to”—his tone told her that he would not leave her behind—”but I’m going on.Anything else is surrender.And I’ve gone through too much to give up now.You’ve never abdicated before, Thea.Don’t do it now.If we die, we let each other down, Thea.”Sighing, she leaned against him, resting her head on the tough, cold-stiffened canvas of his jacket.“It’s just that I wanted it so much,” she said at last, looking across the frozen lake to the wreckage.“I really did believe in it.I thought it would be here.Turning, she studied his face.“You never did, did you, Evan? Not really.”“Let’s say that I hoped,” he answered kindly.“Come on, we’ve got to get around the lake before all the light’s gone.We can find shelter in what’s left of the buildings tonight, anyway.”She nodded and stood up, snow clinging to her clothes.“We’ll need something secure.I saw wolverine tracks earlier today.”“Wolverine? Here?”“The predators are on the move,” she said, and fell into step beside him
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