Bastion

imparted a nice scent to the air. They all read and slept. Or in Mags and Amily’s case—and likely Bear and Lena’s—“slept.”
    And on the fourth day there was sunshine.
    Mags was the first one out, because as usual he woke before anyone else, and went to poke at the mound of snow, expecting to discover that it was heavy and wet. Instead, he came back to where the rest were gathering to get breakfast to report some good news. “Sun’s out, and snow’s deep, but it ain’t too hard to clear away,” he said. “Stuff’s pretty dry and fluffy.” He accepted a plate of hotcakes and bacon and tucked in.
    Lita sucked on her lower lip and took a sip of tea. “Well, there’s the question: Do we want to try to clear a way to the cleft and see how things are beyond it? With that wind, we might end up lucky, with the track drifted to either side but otherwise clear.”
    “I’d still prefer to wait for something of a thaw,” replied Jakyr. “And don’t forget what that weather-witch said. Not just a storm but several storms. Maybe she’ll be right, maybe she won’t.”
    Mags shrugged. “I’m gonna break a path to them two caves, anyway. If we’re stuck here, I wanta see what’s there. While I’m at it, I’m gonna break a path to the cleft when I’m done. Might as well. Less to clear even if it does snow again.”
    Jakyr shrugged. “I’ll help until my old bones won’t let me, once I’m done with feeding you and cleaning up,” he offered. “No guarantee how long that will be. You are right, though, Mags. The more we clear to the cleft now, the less we’ll have to clear if there is a second storm.”
    “I’ll give you a hand,” Lita offered, putting down her gittern and capping her ink. “I was born and raised in the country before I got sent to Bardic. I’m not afraid of a little snow. Not like some people city bred.”
    Ah, there it is, that’s more like I expected. Mags was almost relieved to hear Lita start sniping again. At least now he wasn’t waiting for something to erupt.
    “Suit yourself,” Jakyr retorted. “It’s not as if you were doing anything useful in here. Just making us crazy by plunking the same notes over and over with minor variations.”
    Lita stood up and actually looked as if she might hit him, her eyes flashed with such anger. Mags handed Lita her hooded coat and hurried her out before she could start anything.
    While the storm had been raging, Mags and Bear had looked for anything like a shovel in the stored supplies. At first, they hadn’t found anything of the sort, but after staring at some inexplicable “broom handles” and something that looked like oversized shingles, they had suddenly realized that the two were meant to go together to form flat, broad-bladed wooden shovels. Perfect for shoveling snow. And also a lot easier to store in that form than as a single unit. It turned out that there were even holes bored in the right places, and bolts of the right diameter to hold the things together. If the shingle broke, you just unbolted it and bolted a new one in place. It would be easy to find someone to make you more shingles, too, if you broke all of them.
    He and Bear had put four of the shovels together, figuring that it was unlikely more than four people would want to shovel at any one time.
    Now he hurried Lita up to the entrance and gave her one of the four he and Bear had left there.
    “I think we ought to clear the entire entrance, not just a path,” Lita said, considering the waist-deep snow that confronted them. “If it does start coming down hard again, we don’t want to find ourselves sealed in here.”
    Mags didn’t think that was likely to happen, but he was no expert on snow. So the two of them worked until they were both losing feeling in their feet and getting chilled enough for their teeth to start chattering. By that point they had cleared the entire entrance and a good distance out past it. What was more, they had made bulwarks of the discarded snow to try to hold back drifts from the cleared space.
    It was a perfectly gorgeous winter day, if you liked winter. The air was cold enough to keep the snow from melting and turning hard—but it was rather hard to breathe unless you wrapped your face in a scarf as Bear had done. It cut into the lungs like a knife. The sun would have been blinding, except that for most of the morning it was just behind the hills. But Lita had an answer for that; when it did poke over the hills, she