No one survives alone in the polar wastes. Those who walk alone almost always do so with the limp of imminent death. They go, with steady gazes and straight backs, to give themselves to the animals and wilderness, lest the tundra devour the rest of the tribe. It's no true sacrifice, this departure, but the last act the dying do for a tribe that has helped them live this long. They stagger through frozen lands that will not accept footsteps, or cast off on floes whose ripples fade with slowing breaths.
Exiles scurry, or run, or trudge with anger warming their limbs, but they too give their lives to the cold and dark in unwilling sacrifice for the tribe. Thus do murderers and thieves make up for lives lost or ruined.
She does not limp or march; she walks the frozen wilds with no one but herself, and yet no thought of death--at least, not her own. She bares her head to the frigid air as though the wind does not howl for her frozen blood, and exposes her hands as though the cold does not reach for her living warmth; each impossible evening she tosses fingernails and hair into the fire.
She wakes one morning to frozen embers and an empty spindle beside her head. The woman who is not exile grows angry, then, and crushes the spindle in her fingers. Her sackcloth double has no spindle, and it has to improvise; the woman smiles a little at the rock dust in its felted palm.
It isn't the first time she's been so insulted by a mosswitch.
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