"'So comes winter,'" quoted Kaza.

"What?" asked Eseth, who had just gotten up and was groggily stumbling towards the table.

"Oh, just remembering part of a poem I read."

It was two weeks after Eseth had caught the deer, and it had snowed lightly a few times since. There was only an inch or snow still upon the ground, but the tempature had dropped considerably.
Eseth absent-mindedly finger-combed her hair as she stood up and went to make breakfast, groping on a shelf for a jar of pickled onions.

Kaza raised an eyebrow. "What exactly are you making?"

"It's an old family recipe. You can, in fact, make an entire meal with a jar of pickled onions and some spices." was Eseth's reply, getting some dryed rosemary from another shelf.

It turned out Eseth was right. You could make a whole meal out of rosemary and pickled onions.

***
Redwing stopped by later that day, mostly to chat.

"You might want to be careful this week," he said.

"Why?" asked Eseth curiously.

"For some reason, after the first few light snows, there's an enourmous blizzard. No idea why."

Kaza raised a pale eyebrow. "That's inconvenient. But I suppose it couldn't hurt to stick around here for the next few days."

Eseth growled. "I hate staying inside."

"Nobody said anything about staying inside," said Kaza. "Just stick near the tree. It's not that hard."

Eseth sighed heavily. Redwing patted her on the shoulder, smiling, and got up from the table.

"Leaving already?" asked Kaza.

"Yeah. I should probably get the tower ready. Just in case there is a blizzard."

"Need any help?" asked Eseth. Redwing shook his head.

"No. Thanks for asking. I only need to move things around a bit and barricade the windows." he donned his coat and hat, waved, and climbed out of the tree.

Eseth sighed again. "I think this is going to be a very, very, boring couple of days."
***
Eseth's words proved true. Every once in a while, she would restlessly prowl outside, getting a bucket of water or extra firewood. Kaza contented herself with shaping the inside of the tree, adorning the walls with carvings and smoothing the floor and steps out.

When Eseth's restless boredom reached its peak, she asked Kaza "How do you do that, anyway?"

"Do what?"

"The tree-shaping. You're so good at it. Honestly, is there any part of your magic you're not good at?"

"Oh." Kaza shrugged. "The tree shaping is actually easier than the normal Hydromancy. I don't know why. With ordinary Hydromancy, I lose my grip on the magic all the time, and it's insanely tiring. With the tree-shaping, I just...ask the water in the tree to go where I want it to go, and it does." she shrugged again, and contunued shaping the wall. Eseth gritted her teeth. That was just like Kaza, to answer a question and then go back to whatever she was doing and not say another word.

Right after they ate dinner, they heard the wind howl viciously. Eseth groaned.

"I guess Redwing was right, after all." she said. Kaza went about the hollow, checking to make sure everything was sealed and closed tightly. Eseth dimmed the fire in the lamps, and banked the fire in the stove. She cleaned her teeth, and practically jumped under the covers of her pallet. Kaza went to bed a few moments later, not wanting to stay up in the chilling tree.

The wind howled long and hard, and the snow built up.
***
The next day, the wind had died somwhat, but snow was still falling. Eseth got up first, lighting the lamps and starting the fire.

They were quiet as they sat down to another pickled-onion-and-rosemary breakfast, until Kaza broke the silence with "I've never seen anything like this. I hope Redwing's all right."

Eseth shrugged. "He'll be fine. He's seen two winters like this already. And he did saw the weather it wierd here. It might be beacuse it's an island."

Kaza nodded, still looking slightly worried. "It might be that the big storms like this are blown in from off the coast. It's not a very big island."

Eseth nodded. "Any idea what you want to do today?"

Kaza shrugged. I had an idea to extend the tree to the stream, and then dilute some of the water for a pond, or something."

Eseth raised her eyebrows. "Interesting idea." Kaza nodded. "See, it'd be kind of like a hotspring, if we managed to heat the water up, and since the stream's, like, two yards away, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch."

"Well, I think wall you need to do is dilute the come of the stream one way, and maybe we could dig a pond and line it with stones, and maybe I could keep it heated somehow..."

The spent the rest of the time waiting out the storm talking of their plan. At one point, Eseth said "You do realize we're talking about building some sort of bath, right? Do we have anything else to talk about?"

Kaza shrugged. "It's still snowing, I don't feel like shaping the walls any more, and we don't have anything else to talk about. Face it, it's really, really boring during a blizzard."

Late in the afternoon, the winds stopped howling. Kaza jumped up the steps and looked out of the top of the tree before Eseth could stop her. "Oh my." Kaza gasped.

"Oh, what is it? It's only snow," said Eseth, climbing up beside her friend.

Everything was covered in snow. Ice coated the surface of the nearby stream, and the ground was coated in a good foot of powdery snow. Eseth sucked in a breath. "First off, we should clear a path to the stream." she said.

Kaza nodded. They went back inside, and grabbed their winter gear. As soon as they were ouside, Eseth grabbed a bucket and waded through the snow to the stream, placing a flaming hand on the surface of the water to melt it. Kaza took a somehwat more graceful route with another bucket in tow, scooping up handfuls of snow and placng them in her bucket.

After placing the two buckets inside, Kaza started shaping the many branches of the tree as Eseth started melting the snow outside the tree. She glanced up at Kaza, who seemed to be shaping a new hollow, smaller than but still conected to the main one.

"What exactly are you doing?" Eseth asked.

"Nothing, really. I just need something to do." replied Kaza, her voice muffled by a thick scarf.

"You could help me with this," said Eseth, gesturing to the path she was creating.

"You know, you could just scoop up snow insteadof going all the way to the stream," said a voice from above them.

"Redwing!" cried Kaza as he decended, not actually landing on the snow, but hovering over it.

Eseth grinned at him. "See, I told you he was fine!" she told Kaza. "She was worried about you. No idea why."

Redwing blushed slightly. "Um...oh." he said. Kaza climbed down from the tree and said "So, were you as bored as we were?"

"Probably more so," said he, looking relieved that the subject had been changed. "When snowstorms set in, I usually work as much as I can on the tower."

Kaza nodded. "We ended up talking about making a bath."

"For two hours!" added Eseth.

Kaza ignored her. "We do need one, but it's not really an interesting topic."

Redwing nodded. "It's true. Baths aren't that interesting, even if they are useful." he set down lightly on the path cleared by Eseth, and said "Want to comb the beach?"

"Why?" said Eseth. "There's no point."

"After a storm, things will usually wash up on beaches. It's kind of fun."

"That sound vaugely interesting." said Kaza. "We should do it. It'd be more interesting than what we're doing now, anyway."

Eseth rolled her eyes. "Just about anything's more interesting than hanging around here any more. Even combing a beach right after a blizzard."

So they meandered to the edge of the island, melting and sweeping aside snow. Redwing mostly hovered above the ground, earning himself several envious glares from both Eseth and Kaza.

When they reached the rocky shore, they found that most of the snow had been washed away. Leaping among the huge shale slabs decorating the beach, they picked up several interesting things.

Including a person.

end