As she forced open the door against the onslaught of snow-laced wind, she slid down, shivering in the cold and wet. Akar slipped past her. When at last she recovered herself and rose and closed the door, she leaned back against it to face him, her emotions strained to the limit. When she saw what he carried she knelt down and embraced him and wept. Though weak and injured himself, his mobility hampered still further by the snow, somehow he had done it. A large rabbit lay on the floor beside him. 'How did you do it?' she stammered. 'When we needed it most.' Again she buried her face against him, in her exhaustion unable to stop crying. 'Because he has the heart of a champion,' said Kalus, himself both moved and ashamed. The help unlooked-for had arrived, and they would live a little longer. Chapter 21 The next day Kalus felt a little better. The small portion of meat he had been able to push past his swollen throat had calmed his delirium, and seemed to help his body generate a little warmth of its own. But he was still very sick, and any attempt to get up and move about was met with failure and a stern rebuke from the girl. She didn't realize, and possibly shouldn't have, that to Kalus being helpless was the equivalent of being dead. This attempt at the least physical exertion, walking, was his way of rejecting fear and trying, impossible as the task seemed, to turn away from the inner darkness that told him his life was over. Because Kalus, too, had great heart. No matter how many times he was broken, he had always been able to rally somehow and go on. The problem now was that he had lost sight of that faith and hope, the belief that no matter what happened, he would always find a way to survive, and keep the spirit alive inside him. His confidence in himself, at best of times uncertain because of the severity of the roads which led to manhood, was all but extinguished. There had been so little margin for error in his life, and worse had come to worst so many times, that he could not help but wonder if he possessed some terrible flaw, some shortcoming which made failure inevitable. But when he looked at this more closely, he knew in his heart that he had always done his best: that he had taken the only paths open to him, that he had never quit, or expected anything to be easy or free. What was it then that defeated him? To this he had no answer, only frustrated rage that having no release, turned inward upon itself. The bitter maze of his emotions had joined together into a tightly knotted and irremovable clot, blocking out all light and making life, even the simplest continuance, seem utterly impossible.