Free Shadows by E. C. Blake

sound-deadening blanket of white covering the ground, so that they rode in an eerie hush broken only by the jingle of harness and the occasional blowing of the horses.
    The snow seemed to smother conversation as much as any other sound, so they mostly rode without speaking. Mara would have liked to talk to Keltan about what they would do when they got to Tamita, but she didn’t dare while Chell rode alongside them. At some point they’d have to find a chance to talk in private, she thought, but the opportunity didn’t come that day—or night. They camped, made a fire, and huddled around it. Chell’s hood came off, and he blinked around him, face flushed. “Well, that’s better,” he said cheerfully. “Good thing it’s so cold or I might have smothered in there.”
    Mara’s own face felt dry and chapped from a day in the open. “Can I wear it tomorrow?” she asked.
    Chell laughed. “Be my guest.” He glanced at Edrik. “I presume I
will
be free of it tomorrow?”
    Edrik nodded. “I doubt you could find your way back to the Secret City now.”
    â€œI know I couldn’t,” Mara said, and Chell laughed again.
    Keltan, for some reason, glowered.
    The next morning, the eighth of Winterwhite (the date was the first thing Mara thought of every morning now, as the days counted down toward the thirteenth, when she would see her father again) they rode on through a forest that dripped: a melting wind had blown in overnight. When they camped that night, in the lee of a small bluff of weathered gray stone, Edrik made another fire, then announced, “Enjoy the warmth tonight. No more fires. There are few enough people up here, but the lands become more inhabited with every mile we make toward Tamita.”
    Tamita
. Mara felt a kind of shiver at the name. The city she’d grown up in. The city she’d thought she’d never leave. The city where her mother and father still lived.
    The city of the Autarch. And the city in which she was forbidden to show her unMasked face, on pain of death.
    She glanced at Chell, who was talking in a low voice to Edrik. She looked back at Keltan, and jerked her head toward the shadows beyond the circle of firelight. He frowned at her. She jerked her head again, harder, and finally he understood, and followed her into the brush surrounding their camp.
    â€œWhat is it?” he said. “It’s cold out here.”
    â€œI need to know your plan for when we get to Tamita,” she said. “How do we get through the wall?”
    He looked annoyed. “I could have told you that by the fire.”
    â€œNo, you couldn’t,” she said. “Not while Chell is there.”
    â€œI thought you trusted him.”
    â€œI do,” she said. “At least, I guess I do. But Edrik doesn’t. Not completely. I don’t think he’d want us talking about our plans in front of him.”
    Keltan shrugged. “It’s not much of a plan. There is a place where you can get under the wall; you and I crawl through, then go to your old house. We meet your father. We leave again. That’s the plan.”
    â€œWell, Chell doesn’t know it. And now we do.”
    Keltan laughed. “I’m pretty sure he’s guessed we’ve got some way to get through the wall. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
    For a moment Mara considered slugging him. “I just . . . look, we need to decide other things, right? So we get through the wall. Where will we come out, exactly?”
    â€œIn the river,” Keltan said.
    Mara blinked. “What?”
    â€œThat’s how you get under the wall. The river flows through an arched passage, blocked at both ends by metal grates. Someone, at some point, cut holes through those grates, just big enough to slip through, and built a narrow wooden walkway between the grates, above the river. There isn’t room to stand up;