knew without a doubt that they had belonged to Joseph. My heart sunk as I realized that all the hope Greta had held for her son had been for nothing. Joseph had been here. And he had never returned.
By the end of the summer, Ciba was my constant companion. It was the last month of her pregnancy, or so I guessed. She didn’t know when she had become pregnant, and Uma did not keep a record of the weeks that had passed. But it was clear that a shift had taken place—Ciba’s legs had swollen and she had trouble walking up the path to the hot spring. She struggled to do simple things, like wash her clothes in the stream or make tea on the fire, and she was tired most of the time. She would curl up on the bed in the hut, her hair twisted over her body, and fall asleep for hours at a time.
Ciba’s skin had become even more pale, if that was possible, dark circles forming under her eyes. I suspected she had become anemic. With all the medicine in Uma’s hut, there were no vitamins, no iron pills, nothing to ensure she had proper nutrition. To make matters worse, she was too tired to walk far from the hut and was beginning to lose her appetite. Aki and I brought her a bowl of food from the grotto each night. She would eat a few bites and smile with gratitude, before turning over and falling asleep.
I was skeptical of Uma’s ability to care for Ciba. The entire scope of the Icemen’s prenatal care involved herbal teas, bathing in the hot spring, and extra food. I explained the kind of care a woman would receive below, the vitamins, the sonograms, the blood work to check for iron deficiency, the tests for high blood pressure, but Aki and Ciba had no idea what I was talking about.
Once, when Ciba was particularly weak, I told Aki we should bring Ciba down the mountain, to the castle. Greta would take care of her, and I could get her proper medical care, bring a doctor to look at her. I could get her vitamins and iron supplements at the very least. Aki only looked at me with his large, cool gaze, a gaze that contained the history of suffering and isolation his people had endured, and I knew that it was impossible. Ciba could not be seen by anyone below. Bringing her to my world would compromise her life. It would compromise all of them. This was the true dilemma of the Icemen. Not the harsh conditions of the mountain, not the lack of technology or medicine, not even their dwindling population. There was no place for them below. My kind had made sure of that. To survive, they must hide.
On evenings when Ciba felt strong, we ate together in the hut. Aki did not alter his routine and ate with the others in the grotto, often returning after we slept. And so we laid out bowls of food by the fire, sat on the bearskin, and did our best to communicate, speaking in fragments of her language I had picked up from the children. We spoke with gestures and laughter, and while there was much that was lost, I felt close to her even in the absence of understanding. We would drink herbal tea Uma had brought to soothe Ciba’s discomfort, and I would tell her about my life before I had come to their village. My parents. My town. My school. She wanted to know more about Luca—had I loved him? Did we have a child? Did I want a child? For the first time, I expressed how bereft my inability to have a child had left me, how I wanted to hold a baby in my arms and see life flash in its eyes. Ciba put her arms around me, comforting me, heartbroken by my loss, as if it were her own.
Uma came every day to check on Ciba. She would sit with us and translate when we couldn’t understand each other. It was on one of Uma’s visits, a night when the air buzzed with the sound of birds and mosquitoes outside the window, that I tried to tell Ciba that we were related by blood. We sat at the table, the three of us, drinking tea and eating purple radishes Uma had brought from the garden. I told Ciba that Leopold and Zyana had