With a snap of the reins, the woman guided the horse down the alley, around to the gate towers, and quickly out between them.  He ran after her, but stopped at the gate.  The wagon made its way slowly up the snow-covered road, skirting the edge of the woods and heading north, then east, along the road.  Kringle ran up the inside stairs to the ramparts and watched the wagon fade into the whirling snow until it was gone.

Exhausted, he slumped down on the wall.  “Now what, Merwen?  There’s no Castrum anymore, no one here, no one to help me.  Now what?  I’ve got to find you.  But how?”

The morning wore on, gray and cold.  His shoulders ached, his stomach burned with emptiness, and his feet were frozen.  Long after the wagon was gone, he found himself staring at the spot where it had disappeared, wondering whether letting the woman go without him had been a mistake.

But how could he be expected to know what to do?  Every moment was new to him now.  Hadn’t Merwen taken him in twelve years before and rarely let him out of her sight?  Hadn’t they hidden in one hut after another after another after another until she felt they were finally safe at the Bottoms?  The Bottoms!  That little house was a part of his life he had no hope of recovering.  He was alone.  He didn’t know what to do.  And he was hungry.

“Very hungry,” he grumbled.  He peered into the pocket of his cloak.  No matter how little he had eaten over the last few day, pinching ever-smaller bites of bread from the tiny bits Merwen had made him stuff in there, his stomach hadn’t been full since he’d left the Bottoms.  So, was there anything more in there?  He dug his frozen fingers in to try to feel something his eyes hadn’t seen.  But no.  There was nothing else.  The five crusts had finally run out.

“Fine,” he said to himself, and, “all right, then,” and “oh, well.”  He might have cursed.  He certainly thought about cursing; there were some quite bad curses he was beginning to think of and might have spoken.  But it wouldn’t have changed things.  It was all the same, either way.  He was hungry, alone, and without a single idea of what to do next. 

It was a good thing, then, that a movement near the edge of the woods happened to catch his eye.  When he looked he saw a tiny thing of white and brown and black swoop down from the gray sky and drop to the ground between the wall and the forest.  It was a bird, and it was pushing the snow aside with its little beak – flick, flick, flick! Kringle jumped on the wall.

“What?” he said.  And again, “What!”

Was it…a sparrow?  It was a sparrow!

“Oh, wait!” He ran down the stairs two at a time, tore through the gate, and raced across the snow toward the forest.  “Wait…wait…”

Flick, flick! The bird dug at the icy crust and into the snow, probing, flicking, bobbing, until it stilled and dipped its head into a hole.  Kringle ran to the bird, watching its tiny beak clamp on to something hard and small.  In a flash, the sparrow was back in the air, winging into the sky.

“No, wait, wait, wait –”

But the bird looped up and away so quickly into the gray clouds that it was gone before he knew it.  He watched and watched the skies, but it did not reappear.  Gone!  Gone.  All the way gone.  Then, just as he was about to turn away, he heard – Oh, glory that he heard it at all – he heard the sound of his name being spoken from beyond the clouds.  It was a sound more said than rung, more sung than said.  It was the sound of his bell.

Kringle!

He jumped in the snow and roared with joy.  “The bell!  Merwen! Merwen! The sparrow found the bell!”