The road up Mount Baekseol had stopped being a road an hour ago. Now it was only a rumor of one, a pale seam between the pines where the snow lay a little thinner, and Ryu Seoha followed it the way a man follows half a remembered song.

He was twenty-five years old and he was burning.

Not on the outside. Outside, the wind off the ridge sliced through his white linen tunic and the thin sand-colored vest he had been too stubborn to trade for something warmer in the village. Inside, where it mattered, there was a fever that had been building for three weeks, a slow bright pressure behind his ribs and eyes, like a pot with the lid held down by a hand. His hands were wrapped in strips of cloth to the second knuckle. He kept them tucked into his armpits as he climbed, and he climbed carefully, because every time he forgot himself, the mountain noticed.

Behind him, in the prints of his boots, the evidence lay scattered. Where he had stepped, green had come up through the snow: tender, impossible blades of grass, a few white flowers no bigger than a fingernail. For one breath they trembled in the wind, absurdly bright against the gray, and then the cold found them and they curled brown and went still. A trail of tiny funerals, all the way down the pass.

Seoha did not look back at them. He had learned not to.

"Six weeks," he muttered, and his breath smoked. "Six weeks until the equinox, and then you can do whatever you like, you traitorous thing. Just not yet."

He was talking to his own hands. It was a habit he had picked up over the winter, along with a few others: sleeping with the window open, avoiding the village well, keeping a pouch of seeds against his chest that he never planted. The seeds were the one thing he had refused to leave behind. A seed-seller who could not plant anything was a joke, he supposed, and he had stopped finding it funny around the time the river rose.

It had gotten worse since midwinter. In the first months the fever had come in small things, a warm flush after a quarrel, a bit of fuzz on a frozen windowpane where he rested his forehead. By the new year it came in floods. He had woken one night to find his bedroll ringed in moss and a lemon-colored crocus pushing up through the floorboards, and had lain very still until dawn, listening to the whole house creak as it began, impossibly, to sprout. Mun Gyeol, who had seen it, had gone gray in the face and said nothing for a long time. Then he had said, "The equinox, boy. Whatever this is, I think it wants the equinox." Seoha had not asked him how he knew. He hadn't wanted to hear the answer.

It had begun in the last warm week of autumn, the kind that tricks a ridge into thinking about spring. Seoha had walked the lower terraces at dawn, as he did most mornings, and the frost on the rice stubble had sighed and turned to water wherever his shadow fell. He hadn't thought anything of it. By noon the ice in the upper streams had broken early, and by dusk the river had swallowed three barns and the whole lower field of the Han family. Nobody died. That was the thing people forgot to say, afterward. Nobody died, and still a village full of reasonable, frightened people had stood at the edge of the flooded field and looked at him as though he were the water.

Thawborn, they called him. Born on the first day the lowland ice broke, to a mother who laughed when she heard the river run. It had been a pretty story once, when he was a boy and his warm hands cured chilblains and coaxed late peaches out of frostbitten trees. After the flood it became a different story. The headman had not shouted. That had been the worst of it. He had only said, very gently, that it might be best if Seoha found somewhere cold to live.

It was Mun Gyeol, the salt trader, who had pressed the idea into his hands like a coin. "If anyone can teach a gift like yours to sit still," the old man had said, loading his sled in the gray before dawn, "it's the keepers of the Baekseol shrine. They've held books older than Cheongha. Go before the pass shuts. Don't wait for spring, because spring is exactly what you don't have."

So he had gone. He had left the next night with a pack of dried millet, a flint, and the seed pouch, and he had not said goodbye to anyone, because there was no one left who would have wanted it. He had walked up the valley road with his hands bound and his head down, past the terraces still scarred with silt, past the house where a little girl he used to give peach pits to had stood at the window and been pulled away from it. He had not cried. Crying made the ground damp, and he had learned what the ground did with damp. On the third day he had eaten a pine cone out of curiosity and concluded that the people who wrote survival manuals were liars.

Now the pass was a white throat closing around him, and the sky above the ridge had turned the color of old pewter.

The first gust hit him like a shoulder. Then the second, and the world dissolved. Snow came sideways, fine and hard, stinging his eyes shut. The trail vanished. Seoha dropped to a crouch, then forced himself upright again, because crouching meant stopping and stopping meant the fever would catch him. He pulled his collar higher. It did nothing.

The heat surged. He felt it coming the way you feel a sneeze, a bright helpless swelling in the chest, and he clamped down on it with everything he had, teeth clenched, breath held. For a moment the pressure held. Then a wave of warmth broke out through his arms and his soles, and the snow around him gave up all at once. It slumped into gray slush that climbed over his boots and soaked into the hem of his trousers, and the wind found the wet and wrapped it in knives.

That was the cost, and nobody in Cheongha had ever believed him about it. Every time the warmth left him, it took a little of him with it. A body did not make heat from nothing. It spent itself. He stood in the slush shaking, lighter and colder than before, his fingertips already numb in their wrappings, and thought, with the clarity of the very tired: this is a stupid way to die.

He tried to remember what the old stories said about the mountain. Cheongha children grew up on tales of the Sentinel of Baekseol, a lord of ice who never slept and never left his gate. The children told the story for dares. Nobody who told it had ever climbed high enough to check.

He pushed on. He put one foot in front of the other and counted, because counting was something to hold. Forty steps. Sixty. The ground began to tilt beneath him, a long slope he had not climbed before, and somewhere in the white he stepped onto a shelf of snow that had been waiting for exactly this.

He felt it go before he heard it. A deep soft settling, as if the mountain had exhaled. His own warmth, leaking through the soles of his boots, had been eating at the shelf's underside for the last dozen steps, and now the whole slab sheared away. Seoha fell. The world turned over and over, white and gray and white, and something struck his shoulder, and something else struck his hip, and then he was lying on his back in a gully with snow still hissing down around him like sand in an hourglass.

He lay there for a while. Slowly the sky came back into focus, a flat white lid. He tried his arms. They worked. He tried his legs. They worked, grudgingly. Beside him the seed pouch had come loose from his coat and lay in a scatter of snow. He gathered it up with clumsy fingers and shoved it back against his chest, and only then did he look for the trail.

There was no trail. The slide had carried him down and sideways into a fold of the mountain, and the snow had already filled his tracks as though he had never existed. Above him the slope rose, featureless. Below him it fell away into more white. He turned a full circle and found no landmark, no tree he recognized, no shape of ridge. Nothing in any direction but the storm.

He thought about the headman's gentle voice. He thought about the little girl at the window. Then, because he was Seoha and could not stay grim for more than a minute at a time, he thought that if he did die here, at least spring would finally be sure to find him, and he laughed, wetly, and was immediately annoyed at himself for doing it.

"All right," he said, to nobody. His voice cracked. "All right. That's... fine."

The cold had stopped hurting, which he knew was a bad sign. A pleasant heaviness was settling over his limbs, and under it, oddly, a creeping sense of warmth, the false kind, the kind that comes at the end. He sat down in the snow without deciding to. It would be so easy, he thought, to let his eyes close. Just for a minute. The wind sounded almost like a lullaby from this angle, and the snow, falling softly, covered everything gently, even the places he had burned.

Something drifted past his face.

He blinked. A mote of light, pale blue-white, no bigger than a moth, wavered through the storm and hung before him as though waiting. Then another joined it, and another, a slow constellation of tiny glowing flakes moving against the wind. They gathered in front of him and began, very deliberately, to drift uphill.

Seoha stared. He thought: hallucination. He thought: the final symptom. But the lights paused when he did not move, and when he still did not move they circled back, impatient, almost insulted, and he heard himself laugh again, a thin dry sound.

"Fine," he said. "Fine. I'm coming."

He got to his feet. It took three tries. The motes led him up out of the gully and along a ridge he would have sworn had not been there a moment before, where the wind seemed to soften and the snow fell in straighter lines. His legs moved without his consent. His thoughts had thinned to a single thread: follow the light, follow the light. Somewhere in the whiteness ahead he glimpsed a lantern, a small steady glow suspended in a hollow of ice.

The lantern was not a lantern. As he stumbled closer he saw that the light was held inside a cage of ice, tended by no hand, burning cold and steady through the storm like a star set down on the ground. Beyond it were others, a long curving line of them, each marking a step of a path that the snow did not cover. Someone had lit them. Someone, long ago or very recently, had wanted travelers to find the way. Or, he thought, a little more soberly, had wanted them to find the line, and stop.

Beyond the last lantern, so large that at first his eyes refused to make sense of it, something rose out of the storm. An arch. A gateway, towering and pale, carved from what looked like frozen water so clear that the snowfall could be seen moving through its walls. It stood against the sky like a held breath. For one dizzy second Seoha thought he saw lines of faint gold running through it, hairline and shining, but the snow rushed between them and he lost the thought.

He stopped.

Because that was the thing, wasn't it? Whatever waited ahead, a shrine, a keeper, a ghost, he was about to arrive the way he always arrived. Hands hidden. Shoulders hunched. Apologizing in advance for whatever he might break. He had spent a winter practicing how to make himself small, and it had worked, and he had never once been less alive.

Maybe it was the cold, or the fever, or the long fall. Maybe he was simply too tired to lie anymore. Seoha held his hands out in front of him and began, with stiff fingers, to unwind the cloth.

He had not seen his bare hands in open air for nine days. They were thinner than he remembered, the knuckles chapped and pink, and a faint warm shimmer rose from them in the cold like heat over a summer road.

The last strip fell away and the heat rushed into his palms like a held breath released. He did not clamp down. He did not flinch. He let it come.

"Hello!" His voice cracked against the wind, and he tried again, louder. "Hello! Is anyone there? I'm not here to hurt anything. I'm only... I need help. Please."

Where he stood, the snow melted in a widening ring. Under it the earth showed dark, then green, and from the green, quick as a spilled bag of beads, came flowers. Plum blossoms unfolded from the bare ground, impossible and pink, and drifted upward on the wind. A circle of spring, ten paces across, sat in the middle of the storm like a lit window. He stood in the center of it, trembling, unhidden, and for the first time since the flood, he did not apologize.

The effort emptied him. His knees went. He crossed the last stretch of path in a stumble, drawn on by the lanterns, and came up hard against a stone pillar rising out of the snow, waist-high, as old and gray as the mountain itself, its face worn smooth except for a single carved line. He caught it with one hand and slid down against it. Beneath his palm, from the thin soil in a crack at its foot, a green shoot nosed upward and unfurled two small leaves.

He would remember afterward that he had not been afraid. He had simply been tired, and warm for the first time in weeks, and the pillar was cool and solid against his back.

Then someone stood on the other side of it.

He saw the boots first, black and plain, set exactly at the edge of the line carved into the stone, not one finger past it. Above them, long layers of silver-white cloth, the hems stiff with frost. Seoha dragged his gaze upward. A man, tall, very tall, and pale in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. Not the pallor of illness. The pallor of snow lit from within. His black hair was tied loosely at the nape and a few strands had come free and lay against a jaw that looked cut from the same ice as the gate. His breath came out as mist. His eyes were gray, nearly silver.

He was beautiful, Seoha thought, with the distant, helpless clarity of the nearly unconscious. He was beautiful the way something is beautiful when it has been frozen in the middle of a sentence.

And he was not looking at Seoha's face.

The silver gaze was fixed on the pillar's foot, on the small green shoot unfurling beneath Seoha's open hand, on the ring of blossoms behind him bleeding color into the dark. The man stared as though he had forgotten what green was for. Something moved in the severe, still face, a crack so fine and brief that Seoha could not have said what it was. Grief, maybe. Or hunger. Or the first flicker of a very old fire. A single plum petal drifted across the line and settled on the stranger's sleeve. It did not melt. Neither did the frost around it. They simply lay there together, pink on silver, as though they had been waiting a long time to meet.

The man lifted one hand.

It was a long hand, bare, the knuckles pale as river stones. Frost ran along the fingertips in delicate branching patterns, and it reached toward Seoha slowly, the way one reaches toward a bird that might fly. It crossed the carved line. It stopped.

A hand's breadth from Seoha's own, it stopped, and trembled once, and did not close the distance. Between the two palms the air shimmered, one side cold enough to fog, the other warm enough to sweat, and in that thin trembling space a single snowflake touched down and became a drop of water and, before it could fall, became a petal. Seoha watched it go. His eyelids were so heavy. His own fingers twitched, as if of their own accord, curling toward that frost-bright hand. He did not know why. Some animal part of him, the part that had spent a winter being flinched away from, recognized something it had never seen before: a person holding himself back not out of fear of Seoha, but out of fear for him.

He felt, rather than heard, the stranger's breath catch.

"You should not be here," the man said. His voice was low and rough, the voice of someone who had not spoken aloud in a very long time, and there was something in it that Seoha was too far gone to name. It did not sound like a threat. It sounded, absurdly, like a plea.

Seoha tried to answer. He wanted to say that he knew, that he was sorry, that he would leave the moment the snow let him. But the warmth had gone out of the world and the dark was rising to meet him like water, and the last thing he saw was the pale, frost-bright hand hanging in the air above his own, not touching, not retreating, as the snow closed over everything.