The Enemy Is Carrying Our Winter

How it begins

The arrow wound was ordinary. The snow inside it was not.

Sena caught one flake on the back of her glove before it melted. She had not seen snow in eleven years. For a moment the field hospital vanished, and she was a girl again, holding a chipped bowl beneath her mother's roof.

Then the soldier tried to bite her.

“Reasonable,” she told him. “But unhelpful.”

His uniform belonged to the army that had burned the watchtowers. His boots had been repaired with children's blue ribbon. Sena cut the sleeve away and found frost spreading beneath his skin in the delicate shape of a fern.

Outside, someone shouted that the enemy captain had arrived under a white flag.

“Tell him I already have one of his,” she said.

Captain Ivo Dar ducked into the tent carrying a glass box against his chest. Two guards followed at a distance, their hands wrapped in wool. Within the box, a tiny cloud moved above a landscape of white hills.

Sena recognized the hills.

Her father's orchard had stood beneath the third one.

“You stole our winter,” she said.

Ivo looked down at the wounded man. “We were ordered to transport it.”

“To where?”

He did not answer quickly enough.

The soldier's breath emerged white. Around his bed, cups developed rings of ice. Sena put her hand beneath the glass box and felt a cold so profound that her bones seemed to remember it.

Outside the tent, the hospital's last water barrel split with a crack.

Ivo closed his eyes.

“If I give it back all at once,” he said, “everyone on this road will freeze before we reach shelter.”

Sena listened to the patients waking behind their canvas partitions. Beyond them lay fields that had forgotten what rain felt like.

“Then put it down,” she said. “And show me exactly which roads your generals intended to take.”