Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Spring will come soon.
Istirred feebly awake in the afternoon hours.
The house was stone-quiet, but my ears rang sharply with echoes of the blacksmith’s torment. The horror of the night clung like rotten flesh to my bones.
I tiptoed down the stairs, straining my ears before I stepped onto each landing to ensure there was not a whisper, not a breath. From the fireside armchair came quiet snoring. I glimpsed a head of black curls and a soot-stained hand as I slipped past.
There was no trace of Adrik nor of Lorell.
The door to the chamber was firmly closed.
Adrik was not in the kitchen, not in the workshop, not cutting wood.
I was restless to find him. To redeem the favor.
I wandered aimlessly through the streets, past locked doors and sealed shutters, hoping and dreading to catch a glimpse of golden locks and a hateful sneer, well-deserved.
The cold had grown teeth in the night, and it prowled the town like a hungering beast. A thick, brownish veil of woodsmoke shrouded the skies.
This winter…
What a strange, brutal thing. What a horrible, haunted forest.
I’d grown in the soil of the Ravenwoods, the vilest place in the land, and still I shivered as I glanced at the black trees, creeping like a sickness over the hills.
A slice of wind shoved me aside, whistling furiously through the streets, chiming as it pelted windows and shutters with ice. I cowered against the nearest door to shield myself from swirls of needle-like snow.
“Inside with you, girl!”
A wrinkled hand shot from a barely-open door and yanked me through. I found myself trapped in a dim, narrow maze of towering bookcases with a very short, very old woman. She looked sternly at me, stray white curls peeking from a flowered headscarf.
“You must not linger in the cold.”
I nodded, dazed from the stifling warmth, and from the thick, sweet scent of aged parchment.
The woman let go of me and hobbled wordlessly to the counter tucked against a far wall.
I’d landed in the bookstore and this was Olva—whom I knew only from Bahra’s laments about brambles in the garden and a lost antique vase, which Adrik had found, after a long search, under the old woman’s bed.
He’d murmured something about pesky household spirits and always leaving a bite on the plate to appease them.
Olva paid me no further heed, which suited me just fine.
I wandered among the bookshelves while I waited for the wind to ease, but it battered the walls loudly and relentlessly.
At the far end of the store, light filtered through a frosted window.
I could not bear to look at Lorell’s red-and-white speckled roof, and I could bear even less the thought of looking away—as if the house might vanish if I blinked, and I’d wake up to find that none of it had been real.
I did not know which was worse: To have found and lost it, or never to have known it at all.
The sharp ring of a bell tore me with a flinch from my woes. Instincts sharpened by a decade of the hunt kept me rooted beneath the window, hidden behind a shelf. The floorboards creaked beneath heavy steps. I retreated further into the shadows, holding my breath.
“Have you heard?” The voice was deep, unfamiliar.
“It is true?” croaked Olva. “There is nothing left?”
A sharp breath in the silence. “Not one grain of wheat.”
“No carrots either?”
“No carrots either.”
“No potatoes and no cabbage?”
“No, Olva, nothing at all. The fields are bare.”
A long sigh, another too-long beat of silence. “The stores are full,” said Olva. “We will last a while.”
“That we will,” said the visitor.
“Spring will come soon.”
“That it will.”
I waited until the footsteps faded and the bell above the door quieted, and then I waited another while before I put on my brightest smile, bid Olva farewell, and hurried with dread-blurred vision back into the winter afternoon.
Spring will come soon.
The lie clanked like shattered glass in my chest as I stumbled forth. Deep inside, unease had taken root on that horribly quiet storm day. Now, there bloomed a vicious tangle of terror. I’d ignored the whispers of the wind, the terrible cold, the too-long winter.
I should have died in the wasteland. I should have put that glass shard to use when the hounds came, but because I was weak-hearted, I’d faltered—not once, but twice.
I’d faltered twice in the face of death.
Now the town was paying the price for my selfishness.
I should have known that this cold was not normal.
That my magic had plunged Wildemire into a deep, terrible winter.
I’d sentenced these people to starve. To become trapped in a tomb of ice.
I had to find Adrik. Once he purged me of this magic, the thaw would come. It had to.
“Hello?”
I winced, torn rudely from my frenzied thoughts.
I’d run blindly down the street, right past the bakery and tavern.
The voice came from a door half-hidden behind a veil of rambling roses.
A woman stepped forth, bright and beautiful.
The sun painted rainbows into her stark-white curls.
Despite the bitter cold, she wore only a light lace dress.
The scent of tea drifted past her into the street, along with the lively tune of a harp.
“You are Evana, no? I’m so glad to meet you at last!” She clutched the hem of my coat and pulled me with startling strength through the door. “Adrik’s been going on and on about you, and I’m sick of it. Come in, come in, I’ll make tea while we talk!”
This could only be the famous Zora. Adrik, for all the talking he’d supposedly done, seemed not to have mentioned that such enthusiasm frightened me, and that I made for poor company.
If the veil of roses at the door had alarmed me, the inside of the teahouse had crawled from my nightmares.
Wherever I looked, alive things gawked back at me: From every corner and from the rafters sprawled ivy, blossoms sprouted from gaps in bricks and floorboards, moss blanketed the ceiling, adorned with wildflowers and other such horrors.
It must have been Almira’s doing. The magic in the teahouse was almost as dense as the scent of lavender and honey.
The breaths I sucked desperately through clenched teeth turned foul on my tongue.
The monster within me opened a sleeping eye.
I stuck my hands into the pocket of my coat to hide the tremors.
Against the knotted scar bloomed warmth.
The pebble Adrik had given me hummed strangely in my palm, as if an echo of his laughter lingered in the stone.
When Zora returned with tea, the panic had lost its edge.
On her shoulder perched a plump robin. I accepted this without question.
The scent of flowery magic had me so dazed, I would not have batted an eye had a tame bear stepped out between the vines.
I peered closer, intrigued. It was not a robin at all.
It was a bright-red and quite alive milk jug.
Zora waved it away and it vanished with a sullen shake of its bottom into the thicket.
“Excuse him. He’s too curious for his own good. He’s the first one I enchanted and I must have overdone it a bit—rather bold that one. The others are much tamer.”
Indeed, the thicket teemed with fluttering and buzzing things. A flower-painted teapot floated close, peering into my glass as if to ask whether I needed a refill. Porcelain plates stacked with Sai’s finest treats drifted from table to table. In the back, a harp plucked its own strings.
I was no stranger to magic, and I’d seen stranger things than this, but never something quite so wondrous. The mages who dwelled behind iron-wrought gates to ward off the faeries kept to themselves above all else, and they bothered not with such small magics.
“This is lovely,” I said quietly. A pair of watering cans returned from their task of nursing bright-blossomed wisteria. “I never knew mages could do such a thing—give life to items, I mean.”
"Neither did my masters. A lack of will rather than a lack of skill, I reckon.
A bunch of old bummers, the whole lot of them—concerned only with tomes and such.
" A sliver of caution tightened Zora’s bright features.
"I began to experiment in secret. It took me ages to liven up something other than a book.”
“You were apprenticed?”
“Sure was,” she said with displeasure. “I spent five summers in a wretched tower before I returned to Wildemire. It was the eve of Adrik’s coronation, and do not tell him this, but I’m still mad he stole my grand moment.”
His coronation—
I’d ignored what had been right there: Adrik’s concern for the town and its people, the strange tasks that kept luring him out into the snow.
I’d never considered it, for it seemed a strange secret to keep.
The faerie kings paraded their crowns with pride, surrounded themselves with large courts of powerful creatures, feasted in halls of moonstone and marble.
Had Adrik not claimed he lived in a cottage near the river?
He cooked for us at night, brewed potions until his hands blistered.
I imagined he’d be quite bothered by a crown for how much he loved to draw his hand through his hair.
Zora had clasped a hand over her mouth as if desperately to keep more secrets from spilling. “He never told you, did he? Foolish bastard.”
There was a knot in my throat that had no right to exist. A bitter taste. Had I not kept a thousand secrets from him, too?
A draft came from the door, slamming it with a crack against the white-bricked wall. The wind hissed and filled my nose with the stench of dead things. I stiffened—
The monster lurked within me, wide awake. I’d not noticed it, distracted by the wonders of the teahouse. It drummed its claws against my ribs as it climbed forth, click click click.
That stench.
That smell of festering mud and half-gnawed bone. That draft, cold and hollow as it swept through the corridors of a blackstone castle in the swamp.
A flash of red in the window.
Hello, little bird.
“Are you alright?”
I laughed shrilly and strangely. My veins thickened beneath the skin, a foul darkness creeping like a disease up my arms. I stood amid tangled vines and fading roses, gasping with terror. The vines writhed in anguish, and so did the monster within me.
I shrieked, bones creaking from the strain of containing such vileness.
I splintered.
It came like the blast of ice that had frozen the river, swift and complete. Magic bled from me like tar, just as it had that night beneath the ribbon-hung elm. It hissed darkly in my ear before it seeped into stems and blossoms and vines.
I saw the scream on Zora’s face before I heard it.
She stumbled as my power unfurled, as it curled its vile fingers around the vines and urged them forth.
They slithered like snakes over the ground, weaving around chairs and tables, tightening.
I screeched as wood splintered, glass shattered.
I pinched the knotted scar but the vines crept forth—closer and closer to where Zora cowered against a crumbling hearth.
“Please!” I cried.
I knelt beside her, tearing at the vines that twined around her feet, her fingers, and soon her neck.
It took no longer than one dull, aching throb of my heart to turn life into death. To kill came to me as simple as a breath.
It had been so since I'd been little more than a babe.