Chapter 46

Yet all the while, as they fought, they were falling back, step by step, leaving a trail of red across a narrow snow-field and slipping ludicrously as they fidgeted for better footing on small moraines of ice. I could neither join them nor help them. But I thought, for a mad minute or two, that they still had a chance of fighting their way free, that luck would in some way be with them and they would yet live to know quieter hours under quieter skies. But Thera’s clothing, by this time, was partly torn from her bod…