Bastion

went in and brought out straw summer hats, which they tied on their heads over the hoods to shade their eyes.
    They came back in around luncheon, cloaks snow-caked, and ready to eat just about anything. Bear took their cloaks and went off with them. He came back with all of them beaten clean of the snow, and he spread them over a cushion to warm. “I beat the snow off in the steam bath,” he said with a shrug. “Not like it isn’t already wet in there.”
    Jakyr handed them fresh meat pies and mugs of hot tea and went back to something he was working on without a word. Whatever it was involved harness straps and big, thin squares of wood. Lita didn’t ask him about it, but, then, she looked exhausted. She really had been working terribly hard.
    When Mags was warmed up, he fetched his cloak and his shovel and went right back out again. He meant to cut a path to the nearer of the two caves that interested him—and maybe to the second one, if he could manage it. He reckoned that by sticking close to the cliff wall, he’d deal with slightly shallower snow. Lita was half asleep on the cushion, and he wasn’t about to ask her to come out and help again.
    But Bear followed him, bundled up to the nose. “Reckon I can help a bit,” he said, his voice muffled by the scarf he had wrapped around his face. “I’m pretty fit, I reckon, and I think I got a few more candlemarks in me of work. Besides. If I don’t get some sun, I’m going to start talking to myself anyway.”
    “You already talk to yourself,” Mags teased.
    “There! You see!” Bear retorted. “It’s happening already!” There was a grin in his voice, and it was infectious. Mags felt himself grinning back.
    Since Mags only intended to make a path one shovel wide, the two of them took turns; when one tired, the other took his place.
    “I haven’t asked, how are things going with your herbal kit?” Mags said over his shoulder when it was his turn to shovel.
    “Better than how things have gone with you Heraldic lot,” Bear replied. “Nobody’s met me as if they figured I was that cousin nobody likes. So far, everybody’s been right happy to see me. I got treated real well.” He sighed heavily. “If I’d known people were that desperate for something they could use when there isn’t a Healer around, I’d have done the kit a long time ago.”
    “You’d have had to fight your pa over it, and afore you pretty well proved yourself at the Collegium, I dunno that you’d’a got anywhere,” Mags pointed out. “You had to fight your pa over it, anyway, but at least you had the Collegium backing when you did. Sometimes ye gotta wait for exactly the right time.”
    “Like you and Amily did?” Bear teased.
    Mags flushed bright red, and suddenly his cloak felt far too warm.
    “Hey, I understand,” Bear continued as Mags shoveled faster, trying to work off his embarrassment. “It’s not like you two woulda been able to do anything with everybody and his dog trying to play guardian.”
    “Guardian of virtue, more like,” Mags grumbled. “And every one of ’em self-appointed. I didn’t hear Nikolas sendin’ out a call for people to tell him every little thing me and Amily done, but they sure figgered they needed to. Not just Heralds, either. Everybody on the Hill, it seemed like. I was even startin’ to think the cats and dogs was lookin’ at us funny.”
    Bear patted him clumsily on the shoulder. “’S all right. Me and Lena got lucky. After my father showed up and made a damn fool of himself, especially after the second time, people were practically throwing me and Lena together. Only reason there was a fuss when we up and got married was cause we didn’t tell anybody but you.”
    “Makes me almost wish her pa were someone other than Nikolas.” He sighed. “Nikolas is . . . I wish he was my pa, an’ I’m real happy to have him for—whatchacall?”
    “Father-in-law,” Bear supplied.
    “Aye, that. But I wish he wasn’t King’s Own. It makes things a lot more complicated.” He sighed again. “As if things weren’t complicated enough.”
    And if she wasn’t the daughter of the King’s Own, she wouldn’t have been kidnapped, either, he thought. His stomach still lurched whenever he thought of her, scared and alone, in the hands of those bastards. How in hell could they even dream he’d want to join them when they had done that to her?
    Resolutely he turned his thoughts away from that grim period of time and