Chapter 12: Winter in the Valley

The first winter in the valley was hard in ways that Sera had expected and in ways she had not. The cold she had expected. Two thousand people adjusting to a new climate, a new landscape, new neighbors who watched them with the wariness of communities that had learned to protect themselves — this she had prepared for. What she had not fully prepared for was grief. The mountain had been destroyed for eight months now, and the relief of survival had been carrying her people through the journey. But arrival, it turned out, was where the grief caught up. Settled into winter quarters, safe and fed and no longer moving, people had time to feel what they had lost. And they had lost everything that was not their lives. Sera held councils that became, in practice, something closer to communal mourning. She walked through the settlement in the evenings and listened. She remembered names, histories, the specific texture of grief that was different for the woman who had lost her workshop than for the man who had lost his father's grave. Drusse watched this. 'You're running yourself into the ground,' she said one evening, finding Sera still writing correspondence at midnight. 'There's a lot to do.' 'Yes. And you'll be able to do none of it if you fall sick.' Drusse sat across from her with the authority of someone who did not observe this distinction between advisory and command. 'What do your people need that you're not asking us for?' Sera looked at her correspondence. 'A place to grieve properly,' she said. 'A ceremony. My people had practices for death and loss — specific ones, tied to the mountain. We've been moving too fast to observe them.' Drusse was quiet for a moment. 'The valley has a tradition,' she said. 'Spring ceremony. For things lost in the winter.' She met Sera's eyes. 'We could expand it this year. Make it for all of us.' Sera looked at her. 'That would mean a great deal to them,' she said. 'Then it's settled.' Drusse stood. 'Now sleep. The fields won't run away.' Sera slept, for the first time in weeks, without waking in the middle of the night.