snowmelt

"My baby! I beg you! Give him back to me!" Hina had cried, on her hands and knees upon the ground. Greatly weakened from the suffering of her childbirth, yet still she had prostrated herself before the Elder.

"Hina..." The Elder's whole being had been cold, her voice and heart hard and frozen, "you have shamefully broken our most sacred covenant. You are too young to understand how you have tainted us, but I have seen the horrors that men are capable of."

Hina had bowed her head, humble and desperate, aching inside and out, body and soul. Meekly, she had begged, "this is my sin, please don't punish my son for it."

"The baby girl is yours to keep. But the boy... the boy is a curse, and he will certainly be our undoing." The Elder had spoken with harsh finality as she turned away from Hina.

But Hina lifted her head, tears running down her cheeks, clattering to the floor as they dripped from her chin to crystallize. The Elder's words had left her with one final hope, a saving grace, a last ditch effort to convince the old woman to let her take her light and joy back into her arms, both her children together. But it had been at the cost of casting away everything else in their stead. Hina would've made that choice a hundred times, a thousand times. "Then I'll leave here forever and take my children, and I'll promise never to return again," she said, voice raised in desperation, "but please, please give him back!"

The Elder had peered back over her shoulder at Hina, and her eyes were cold as the glacier upon which they lived. She had opened her mouth to speak, and Hina felt she already knew what she would say before she said it... except she didn't. Something odd had crossed the old woman's eyes, the briefest of warmth, wet like the first snow-melt of spring, when white still blanketed the ground and the first shoots of grass were only just daring to break through. The old woman closed her mouth, and looked ahead in thought.

When at last the Elder had spoken, voice brittle as thin ice on a thawing pond, she said "go, then. Take the Imiko with you, and never return to this sacred place. May that harsh world of men take this curse away from us."

Her words had said she'd hoped Hina and her children would perish, solving the problem altogether, but the intention of those words hadn't quite reached her usually hardened voice. It was then she walked away from Hina without looking back- and it was the last Hina ever saw her. In that moment, Hina had felt as though her pulse had stopped, and she had been outside herself, looking from outside rather than from within. When finally she returned to herself, her joy radiated through her, and she had felt so warm she almost feared she'd never be of ice again.

"Thank you, Elder!" She'd cried, bowing so low to the floor that her nose had touched the ground, tears clacking like marbles all around her. The Elder said not a word as she left Hina, and that had said more than enough. "Thank you so much!"

---

The day was not yet over before Hina stood on the hard, dusty ground of the world below, the air around her already far warmer than the glacial village. Her old home drifted slowly away, an iceberg in the sky, and when a breeze rushed past, she could feel the cold air it emanated hit her face from where she stood. The sorrow she felt was not from the loss of her home, but that she hardly felt sad about the loss at all. She would miss Rui far more than anything else about the frozen land of her birth.

Her legs trembled beneath her as she watched Hyouga drift slowly away, her body not yet recovered from the troubles of her son's birth. She suspected she may never recover at this rate, but she hardly minded. She was happy with the children she had- both of them, both cradled in her arms. She ignored the way her legs quaked as she turned her back on her former home for the last time, and instead looked down at the gifts she traded it for.

In her left arm lay her daughter, sweetfaced and purer than the softest first snow, swaddled in a soft blanket and fast asleep.

Her right arm, however, trembled with the effort to hold its precious cargo, her skin raw and pink. Even wrapped still in curse-warding bindings and sacred cloth, her son radiated such an intense heat that it scalded her icy flesh. It broke her heart to leave him bound so... but how would she care for him if she couldn't even carry him? It was for the best, she had told the both of them once he had been returned gingerly to her arms, just for now.

Unlike his sister, her baby boy was wide awake. He'd been looking at Hyouga with her, watching it drift away into the clouds. Now, he met her eyes with his. Where his sister was soft, he was sharp, even as a newborn- Rui and Hina had agreed that he was dangerously clever, that he could hear and understand every word those around him said. Hina's heart had swelled with pride. Her clever boy... Those sharp eyes had looked at the other women of Hyouga, hearing their disdain and fear of him, with such burning hatred and disgust. Hina hardly blamed him.

But when Hina smiled down at her little boy, only his face visible between the bindings, that sharp expression, those keen eyes, softened... just for her. Just for her, a smile graced his tiny mouth. Not one of seething desire for violence, but warm and soft, a gentle hearth rather than a roiling inferno, his eyes as big and sweet as his sisters. She loved him with everything she had.

"It's just the three of us now, my darling," she told him, holding both her children closer to her chest, and ignoring the sweltering heat her son gave off. So long as it didn't bother Yukina. Her body ached, but she just put one foot in front of the other, the whole world ahead of them. She had work to do, and children to raise. She could hear a rushing stream nearby, promising fresh, unfrozen water, and birds sung from the bright and green trees all around. "What an adventure we'll have together."