"Strung as tight as my fiddle," muttered one of the card players. "Say something to him, Axel."

Axel Metzler shrugged a shoulder in frustration, but he turned toward the window. "Set down, Nathaniel, and have a drink. I broke out my best ale, here. And the storm won't be letting up for you staring at it."

"Women will have babies at the worst times," announced the youngest of the men solemnly.

"Now, what would you know about it, Charlie? You got a wife hid away somewhere?"

"A man don't need a wife of his own to see that it's damn hard luck to have run into this weather."

The storm raised its voice as if to argue. The roof groaned in response, and a fine sifting of dust settled over the room and the uncovered tankards.

Axel plucked the pipe from his mouth in disgust and pointed his tattered white beard toward the heavens, exposing a long neck much like that of a plucked turkey. "Shut up, you old Teufel! Quiet!"

The winds howled once more, let out a longish whine, and fell silent. For a moment the men stared at each other and then Axel tucked his pipe back in the corner of his mouth with a satisfied grunt.

A woman appeared at the door from the living quarters just as the man at the window turned. The light of the fire threw his face into relief: half shadow, all worry, his high brow furrowed and his mouth pressed hard. In his hand was a crumpled sheet of paper, which he tucked into his shirt with one hand while he reached for his mantle with the other.

"Curiosity?" he asked, his voice hoarse with disuse.

"I'm right here, Nathaniel." Long and wiry, straight backed in spite of her near sixty years, Curiosity Freeman moved briskly through the room, her skirts snapping and swirling. The hands adjusting the turban that towered above her head were deep brown against the sprigged fabric. She turned to a boy who sat near the fire, big boned, ginger haired, and pale with sleeplessness. "You there, Liam Kirby. Look lively, now. You fetch me my snowshoes, will you?"

He sprang up, rubbing his eyes. "Yes'm."

Axel stood and stretched. "Good luck, Nathaniel! Give Miz Elizabeth our best!"

Nathaniel raised a hand in acknowledgment. "Thank you, Axel. Jed, I was supposed to send Martha Southern word, would you take care of that for me?"

"I will. Tomorrow we'll wet the child's head, proper like."

"We'll do that, God willing."

Liam had gone out onto the porch, but the older woman hung back to put a hand on Nathaniel's arm. "Elizabeth's strong, and Hannah's with her. That girl of yours has got the touch, you know that."

She's only ten years old.

Nathaniel could see that thought sitting there in the troubled lines that bracketed Curiosity's mouth. "Elizabeth asked for you. She wanted you." And me. I should be there.

Curiosity squinted at him. Never the kind to offer false comfort, she nodded, and followed him outside.

Strung out in single file with Nathaniel leading and Liam bringing up the rear, they left the village on snowshoes. They carried tin lanterns that cast dancing pinpricks of light over the new snow: a scattering of golden stars to match the fiery ones overhead. The night sky had been scrubbed clean; the moon was knife edged and cold, as cold as the air that stung the throat and nose.

Nathaniel glanced over his shoulder now and then to gauge Curiosity's pace. Thus far she showed no signs of tiring, in spite of the late hour and interrupted sleep. Frontier women, his father often said. When one of their own is in need, they can set creation on its ear.

He had set out to fetch her almost twenty-four hours ago. She was his father-in-law's housekeeper, but Curiosity Freeman was more than that: Elizabeth's friend, and his own, the clearest head in the village and the closest thing Paradise had to a doctor since Richard Todd had decided to spend the winter in Johnstown; she had always been a better midwife, anyway. With a midwife's sense of timing, she had been ready for him, her basket packed. She wiped the flour from her hands and arms and passed the kneading over to her daughter, calling out to her husband, Galileo, that she was on her way. Judge Middleton was still abed, and they left without disturbing him.

"Let him sleep," she had said, strapping on her snowshoes. "Ain't nothing a man can do to ease a daughter in labor anyways, and my Polly will see to his breakfast. Did you send Anna word? I'd be glad of her help, with the rest of your womenfolk away."

"Liam's gone to fetch her."

"Let's get moving, then. First children ain't usually in a hurry, but you never know."

But the whiteout had come down on them just outside the village, turning the world he knew tree by tree into a flickering mirror of silver and white, impossible to navigate. That they had found the trading post was a miracle in itself; that he had been able to wait there hour after hour without losing his mind was another. Nathaniel could not put the picture out of his head: Elizabeth in labor with only Hannah beside her. He had lost his first wife--Hannah's mother--in childbirth on a warm summer night that felt nothing and everything like this one.

He wiped the freezing sweat from his brow, and increased his pace.

The mountain was called Hidden Wolf, and the high vale where his father had built a homestead forty years ago, Lake in the Clouds. This was a translation of the Kahnyen'kehâka name, but the whites had never found anything better to call the place where the mountain folded inward on itself. Triangular in shape, the valley was big enough for two L-shaped cabins, a barn, kitchen gardens, and a sizable cornfield on its outer edge, where the shoulder gave way to the precipice. At the opposite end, a waterfall dropped into a shallow gorge in a series of glittering, frozen arches. Below it a small lake was ringed with concentric collars of ice.