Bastion

doesn’t mean you aren’t still using them.” She made a face. “That’s what happens when you play at being a Healer’s assistant. After a while you stop playing, and you realize you are a Healer’s assistant.”
    “You like it?” he asked.
    “Like isn’t the right word, really,” she said after a long moment of thought. “Some of it is pretty horrid. Wounds and things are nasty. People sicking up in buckets is nasty. But I feel useful. I suppose I would rather be doing something that wasn’t so nasty but I like feeling useful.”
    “You’re braver’n I am,” he said honestly. “I allus hated helping Bear out. It’s strange, but I can kill an animal and butcher it, no problem. I can kill a man if I have to, and it’ll make me sick to do it, but I can do it. But when I gotta change a dressing on a wound, or worse, a burn—” he shuddered. “Just makes me go all collywobbles inside. I think Healers are the bravest people ever.”
    She chuckled. “I don’t think Bear would argue about that. He gets quite cross when some great big man rears back and acts like a coddled highborn confronting a mouse when Bear starts to tell him how he’ll have to take care of his own wound or nurse a sick child. And he laughs when they faint at the sight of their own blood.”
    Mags laughed aloud. “Not to their faces, I hope.”
    “He’s been tempted.” She snuggled into his shoulder and sighed. “It’s nice here. I don’t want to get up. But the longer we stay here, the colder that stone in our bed gets.”
    Our bed. He loved the sound of that. “Well, then,” he said. “Let’s go get it out and take its place.”
    •   •   •
    The blizzard lasted three days, just like the one that had snowed Haven in completely, all those years ago. He wondered how bad it was over at the villages they had left. Had they gotten snowed in this hard? The Guard was going to be mighty busy cleaning roads, that was for certain sure. He hoped that the worst of it was falling here, in The Bastion. He wouldn’t wish this on small villages. He hoped people had managed to get their herds into shelter before it hit, because three days in the snow without food would probably kill most cattle, sheep, and horses. And when the storm was over, it would be hideously hard work to get out to them, even in shelter, and get food to them.
    It snowed them in hard. Because there was very little wind to speak of in the valley, there were no insanely tall drifts, but the snow in the entrance was fully waist deep. There would be no getting out of the cave without a lot of work. Mags had been afraid that Jakyr and Lita would be so restless and irritated by being confined together like this that they would start actual fights by the middle of the first day of the blizzard itself.
    But strangely, they didn’t. They stayed out of each other’s way. Jakyr went into a food frenzy, making trail bread, smoking most of the venison, and making the rest into meat pies that he set near the entrance to freeze. That seemed eminently sensible to Mags; it meant that they’d have pies waiting when they returned from a village, and if they were tired, all they would have to do would be to put one on the top of the stove to thaw and warm. And trail bread kept nearly forever in this weather; it wasn’t his preferred meal—it wasn’t anybody’s preferred meal—but it was a good deal better than making porridge out of the Companions’ oats if they were forced to use another ill-prepared Waystation.
    There was no point in trying to shovel any paths through the stuff or even clear it from the entrance until it finally stopped. It would just pile back up. So mostly, they all rested, and the cave was strangely quiet and peaceful. Oh, he and Bear had a couple of silly snow fights right in the entrance, and coming back into the warmth of the living area was heaven. The steam bath was in near constant use, and Jakyr had even introduced Mags and Bear to a curious custom of using it, then running full-tilt through the cave—in nothing but a breechcloth—to throw oneself into the snow, then running back to it again. He said that people did this up north. Bear was not a fan of the practice at all. Mags found it invigorating, but he wasn’t a fan of running mostly naked through the caves while the ladies laughed at them.
    As for the ladies, Lita was in the throes of composition, and so was Lena. They washed clothing, hanging it from the caravan, which