In that freezing cold kiss, Misaki found a subtlety she had never known in her husband. He was not a single slab of rigid ice. Beneath the frozen mountain, there was the swell of tides. Beneath the snow, there was the bubbling of the Kumono spring and the rivers it sent racing beneath the ice and deep underground. Beneath the shiver of pines, their roots reached like fingers into the soil to grasp at the spring-warmed core of the mountain.
