The end of the fall had only just come, and already the air could chill one to the bone. Of course,
this far north, one could seldom expect anything else. It was not the cold that bothered her, though.
She'd dealt with that all of her life. Pulling the tattered remnants of her uncle's old cloak closer about
her, she pressed on.
As Myranda strained her eyes against the blistering wind, she saw nothing more than horizon. It
would likely be another full day of walking before she saw anything but the unbroken field ahead of
her. She shook her head, a faint frown cracking her dry lips.
"I should have known," she said aloud to herself. "He seemed a shade too eager to give me
directions."
Myranda had taken to talking to herself to fill the long, lonely, and all too frequent trips like these.
With no companion, the only thing likely to interrupt the ceaseless howl of the wind was the periodic
noisy complaints from her stomach. That much concerned her. She could afford to buy no supplies in
the last town, and no tavern or inn had been willing to serve her thanks to a simple yet disastrous slip of
the tongue. Anyone could have made the same mistake. In another time, it might have gone unnoticed--
or, at least, unchallenged--but in the world of her birth it was inexcusable.
Two older women had been standing in the street, discussing the most recent news of the war.
These days one would be hard-pressed to find a different topic of discussion. In this instance, it seemed
that the Northern Alliance had pushed back a rather sizable advance. After three long, bloody days of
battle, the Alliance troops had managed to take back the very same piece of land that they had started
on. The cost of this maintenance of status quo was the lives of the better half of the troops in the area.
In and of itself, such a tale was anything but notable. Indeed, a day without such a battle was rarer than
a day with one. The difference on this day was that the Tresson army had lost even more.
The two women cackled and bragged over the victory, each telling exaggerated tales of their nearest
war-going relative. "My boy promised to kill three of those swine just for me," one would say. Another
would respond triumphantly that all four of her children had made the same promise. It was during this
exchange that Myranda made her fateful slip.
"All of those lives . . . wasted," she had said with sorrow.
Wasted! Having your child give his or her life for the cause was the greatest honor a mother could
hope for. To speak of such noble efforts as a waste was tantamount to treason. How dare this wandering
woman speak ill of the war! After countless generations, it had ceased to be a simple struggle between
two lands and had become a way of life. Those who opposed this sacred tradition of noble battle were
unwelcome. That one word--wasted--may as well have sealed the poor girl's doom. It had kept her from
filling her pack and from filling her belly. Worse still, it had led a seemingly good man to send her
through this frozen waste, claiming it to be the fastest way to the next town.
She shook her head again. It was one lesson that she could not bring herself to learn. If someone
was going to tell a lie, they would tell it with a smile. Now she found no less than a day of solid travel
between herself and another human being. The cold was tightening its grip on the icy field with each
passing moment. In perhaps an hour, the last glow of the sun would leave the sky, taking with it the
meager warmth it had cast upon the world. The cold of the day was unbearable, but the night was
unlivable. Worse, there was a darkness due to the impenetrable sheet of clouds overhead that warned of
a snowfall in the coming hours. She had yet to find a replacement for her thin summer blanket, and she
could neither afford nor carry a tent. If Myranda was to survive this night, she would need a fire.
Alas, there were but three types of terrain in this land: vast, treeless fields; dense, forbidding
forests; and rocky, impassable mountains. She found herself in the first, an icy, barren stretch of land
with not a plant to burn for warmth save some sparse grass and tough lichens. Neither would be good
for producing anything more than smoke and ash. She scanned the endless horizon for a tree, a bush,
anything that could yield a flame. Finding none, she made ready to bed down where she was and hope
for the best.
Just as she stopped, the last rays of the setting sun peeking through a rare break in the cloud cover
reflected their crimson radiance back from the east. After squinting, rubbing her eyes, and blinking only
to find the fading twinkle still present in the distance, she was convinced that whatever it was, it was
real.
"It was probably nothing," she said. She glanced back in the direction she'd come, then in the
direction she'd been heading. "Which beats every other direction, where there is certainly nothing."
To fill the time as she approached the mystery object, and to take her mind off of the rather dire
position she found herself in, she busied her imagination with thoughts of what it might be.
"Shiny . . . a mirror. Perhaps a caravan of nomads came by and dropped wares. Or perhaps it is a
jewel. A dozen or a hundred jewels. And gold, too. A king's ransom left behind by some daring thief
where no one would ever find it, in no man's land. Ha, that would be my luck. To find a pile of treasure
when all I need is a pile of wood," she said to herself.
The time passed quickly as she dreamed up objects and ways to explain them. She'd not yet reached
the object when the sun's rays failed, leaving her without a reflection to guide her. Her sense of
direction was nearly flawless--a fortunate fact, as it was all she had left to lead her to the mysterious
object. The sunset-painted clouds gave little in the way of light, but night brought utter darkness.
Neither moon nor stars could hope to break through the solid sheet of gray overhead. That was no
different from any other night, though. Even without the stars to follow, one found ways to stay on
course in this land.
In the thick blackness that surrounded her, she literally stumbled over what she was looking for.
There was what seemed to be a large mound of rocks surrounded by a liquid that was sticky, despite the
cold that would have frozen most things. There was also a bundle of irregular metal plates that she
heard clang and crunch as she stepped on them.
"What happened here?" she asked no one in particular as she tripped blindly through the obstacle
course she'd found. Two more steps, though, brought a squeaky crunch that made her heart skip a beat.
It was the sound of icy wood. She must have stumbled into the remains of a camp site, and now stood
ankle-deep in her salvation.
She knelt by the fireplace and began to pull away the icy crust that eventually formed over anything
that remained outside long enough. Soon all that remained was the powdery remains of the fire that had
occupied this place not long before. It was bone dry and better than kindling. A single spark and she
would have a fire in no time. The overjoyed young lady pulled her flint from one of her tattered pockets
and reached blindly for one of the metal plates she'd heard clang free when she'd nearly tripped over it.
She struck the flint to the metal and in moments had a warm bed of embers. A few moments more and
the largest of the charred pieces of wood had caught, casting a delicious warmth and light on her
immediate surroundings.
Now, with light enough to see what she held in her hand, she looked over the piece of metal. It was
oddly shaped and not nearly polished enough to have caused the reflection that had led her here. On the
curved interior of the metal plate, she found a few torn leather straps bolted to it. The outside bore an
embossed symbol that looked to be a crest--one that she did not recognize.
"It must be a piece of armor," she decided, turning it about one last time.
Satisfied that the fire was in no danger of going out, Myranda stood to inspect the strange place
she'd wandered into. She found the bundle she'd stepped on and could now clearly see that it was
indeed a full suit of plate armor. It appeared to be badly damaged and fairly frozen to the ground.
"Why would an empty suit of armor be in the middle of a field?" she wondered aloud. The answer
came quickly and brought a chill to her spine that the iciest of wind never could. It was not empty.
She backed slowly away, dropping the piece she held. Myranda hated death above all else, a fact
that had made her life a good deal more miserable than those of the war-hardened villagers who
shunned her. They saw death not only as a necessary part of life, but a positive one, a source of glory,
respect, and honor. They heaped more praise upon a fallen soldier than the poor man or woman could
ever have hoped for in life, a fact that bothered Myranda all the more.
As she moved away from the body, her eyes darted all over. Something caught her panicked gaze
and froze her in her tracks. Peeking out from beneath the frost-covered shield was a patch of coarse
brown cloth. A pack! One could not live in a time of war and not know what such soldier's packs
contained. Money, water--and, best of all, food. The body could not be more than a few days old. In
this cold, the rations in his pack would still be edible.
Myranda may have hated death, but if being near to a corpse for a few minutes could save her life,
she would not hesitate. She grasped what little of the cloth was visible and pulled with all of her might,
but it was no use. The pack was frozen to the ground and pinned beneath the heavy shield. If she
wanted to free the pack and its precious contents, she would need something to pry the metal sheet off
of it.M yranda's eyes swept across the cluttered campsite. Surely there must be something she could use,
but what? The chest plate from the corpse? It had been partially torn free, but the thought of tearing