Five days’ travel to the next homestead, they said. Five days, but ten nights, they joked, for how the few scant hours of daylight flicked past and the dark endured. Phantom rays, ripples of green and violet, poured through the black and pooled in the snowy basin of the valley, but they brought no warmth with them – only a more beautiful death.

Five days, twice as many nights, but the men who joked about those travelled with sure-footed oxen to carry their supplies, with sledges and warm-woven blankets and sturdy boots and everything she wouldn’t have if she tried to make the same journey.

She might find no sympathy at the next homestead, either. No warmth, only whips and shackles until her master sent someone to fetch her. But the longer she looked out at that great mountain-sided bowl of beautifully killing colour, the more certain she was that she would try anyways. If she ended up a frozen statue staring eternally up at them, so be it. Better an upwards-staring statue than a back bent forever under the whip.