Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Until the moon has waned and waxed again.
Adrik must have carried me to bed after I’d fallen asleep for I stirred awake at dawn amid silken sheets.
Heat welled beneath my skin at the thought, despite the chill that came from the frost-adorned window. My heart felt raw and feeble—like something worn thin from overuse. I remembered the terror and the hurt of the night, distantly. It seemed much less terrible from the comfort of a warm bed.
Beneath the ribbon-hung elm scurried a slender shadow.
I caught a glimpse of copper-red fur and a nose black as a button.
How good to see the little fox alive and well.
Was it still starving? Had it followed me here from Lorell’s house in hopes of being fed?
Or was this just a random fox beneath a random tree and I was going a little mad?
The whistle of the kettle lured me to the kitchen. There was a long, delicate silence when Adrik looked up from his book. I did not know why I froze for a beat or why his smile, still soft with sleep, felt more intimate than I could bear.
“Did you rest well?” he asked.
I nodded, cheeks aching as I attempted to dull my smile. A sweetness lingered in the air. Adrik watched me with quiet interest, leaning against the kitchen counter. The silence prickled with the same static I knew well from chasing through the forest at the brink of a summer storm.
“I should head back to Lorell,” I said, nervously pulling at a loose thread in my blouse.
“I must find Yavor,” said Adrik at the same time. “There is much to prepare for a possible journey through the wasteland.”
Yavor’s name stirred memories of a bone-white gaze beckoning me close. I shivered. “How is Emond?”
The brightness drained from Adrik’s face. He busied himself with the steaming kettle, hands shaking a little. “The cold lingers. As does the strangeness.”
“The woman we found in the snow the night you killed the hounds—what happened to her?”
A muscle stiffened in his jaw. “She is alive.”
“Alive and well?”
“Just alive.”
I swallowed the terror and said quietly, “The dream I had about Emond—I think I had the same dream, the same vision, about her too. There was a third one, was there not? An old woman on a bed of moss and mushrooms.”
Adrik flinched, spilling scalding water over the counter. “The miller?”
“I saw her, too.”
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
“I have seen stranger things than this,” Adrik said gently, setting the kettle aside to muster me. He must have realized how it pained me to admit these things. “I do not think you are mad. These visions might help us find a missing person sooner, if it happens again.”
Before the forest feasted on them. Before the mists turned them into strange, mindless things.
“Does it happen often?”
“Sometimes,” he said with a dark glance at the dawnlit forest. “We believe that the mist calls them close. Almira controlled it well. She is too weak now.”
Until the moon has waned and waxed again.
That was how long Almira had left. Adrik had been searching for a witch for moons, he had claimed.
He had found me at the last moment. I traced the hollow between my collarbones, where the missing weight of my mother’s amulet lingered like the kiss of a ghost. It had protected me, after all.
It had kept me hidden, until I had bartered it away and allowed the spirits to guide Adrik to me.
“You never asked me about the hounds,” I said, reminded sharply of their severed heads in the snow. “Did you not wonder why they’d come to Wildemire that night? Did you not wonder why I’d fled into the forest?”
Adrik froze for a beat. “I’d met them already in the wasteland. I knew you were hunted before I ever brought you to Wildemire. I was desperate enough to take the risk.”
My hand flew to my thigh, the healing wound sore and throbbing from last night’s chase through the forest. “No wolves?”
His features scrunched into a pained grimace.
“The hounds were ruthless, and I had not expected them. I never meant for you to get this badly injured. One slipped past me while I dealt with the rest.” He’d come closer, arms slightly raised as if he wished to touch me but did not dare.
“Forgive me. I will wear the guilt of that night so long as I breathe.” A light protest came from my lips.
Adrik only smiled. “It is but one amid a thousand stains, Evana. I will learn to live with it, as I do with the rest.” I watched darkness gather in his eyes, and I watched it fade.
“You never asked about the forest-touched wolf in the window. I expected you’d be curious about the strangeness living in our woods. ”
Forest-touched. That was what they called it, the strangeness. “I was afraid you’d wonder why odd things happened around me. I was afraid you’d think I was mad.”
“I’d not think less of you, even if you were mad.
I have always had a fondness for the wild and for the mad.
” He said it lightly, as if there was no question about it.
As if being mad was just another way to be; not a reason to give someone only the blackened bread, to close shutters and lock doors.
He would not think less of me for the madness, but he thought less of me for the bargain I’d forced on him. I twisted my hands into a knot, afraid that a part of him loathed me still. Beneath the silver wave on my palm lingered the weight of our trade.
“Forgive me for the bargain,” I whispered. “I was desperate and afraid, and I did not know how else to protect myself.”
“I understand.”
I said, with a smile and a glance at the kettle, “Fulfill my favor, Adrik. A glass of tea is all I ask.”
We returned, free from the bargain and bright with the lingering warmth of tea, to Lorell’s house. Our gladness was a fleeting thing, stolen quickly by the sight of a horse and a stag tied haphazardly to the fence. Yavor swept from the house, armed to the teeth, a letter in hand.
“Marin,” he said with a dark look at the forest. “Olva says he went out in the night. He has not returned.”
“I had no dreams,” I said quietly to Adrik while Yavor readied the mounts. “No visions. I would tell you if I did, I swear it.”
“I know."
I followed his gaze to the road. To the churning mists I knew lurked not far beyond. “Be safe.” It came out sharp—a command. I stuck my hands into the pockets of my coat and clutched the still-warm pebble tightly.
Adrik’s lips curled at the corner. “Are you worried for me, Evana?” I was about to shake my head in fervent denial, but I froze.
With his thumb, so lightly it might have been the kiss of a summer breeze, Adrik brushed a curl behind my ear.
His fingertip grazed my cheek, chasing a shiver over my spine.
“I have much to say,” he murmured, “but for now, let me say only this: Even if I were not king, and were we not cursed to suffer this winter, and were all that I had to guard my own selfish heart—” he paused to draw breath, “I would be just as glad that you stayed.”
He looked back at me—once, twice, a third time—as he joined Yavor and his two younger brothers in the street and mounted the stag.
They disappeared swiftly beyond the roadbend.
I told Lorell my tale that winter morning. He said nothing, but he reached out with shriveled fingers to pat the table where he’d assumed he would find my arm. I slid my hand quickly into his to spare him from embarrassment.
I had, it turned out, grown extraordinarily fond of the old man.
While I rummaged through my half-packed satchel for my set of colors, I came across the useless map.
I was about to fling the thing carelessly into the hearth, but I faltered and flipped it open instead, driven by a spark of intrigue.
There were the wastes, the moorlake, Mount Briarfell.
At its cracked foot, where I’d added the inkstain and scribbled the town’s name, was only blank paper.
King of the Forgotten Lands, the spirit in the ruin had called Adrik last night. A land where the spirits lingered. A land of wondrous magic and good-humored faeries. A land concealed from endless wars, unscarred by battles waged for crowns and thrones.
A doomed land, without me.
I busied my restless hands for hours with a pair of scissors and sheets of paper drenched in bright colors.
No matter how often I glanced from the window, nothing stirred at the edge of the forest save branches in the wind.
Bahra, who watched me with devilish eyes from a tower of books, assured me fretfully that Adrik would die and we’d mourn him horribly.
By noon, I sat amid a hundred paper flowers. My mother had taught me, when I was little, how to make them. She used to sell them in the village square, back before the whispers began. The villagers grew afraid of the flowers, as they were of all things she touched; cursed, they claimed.
At my patience’s end with Bahra’s woes and my own restlessness, I bundled myself in wool and pelt and set nervously off to the teahouse.
I’d assumed Zora had gone with Adrik and the brothers into the forest, as she had done before.
But when I came through the door, I stumbled straight into her arms and we tumbled, both of us, with a gasp and a shriek to the floor.
“Forgive me,” I gasped, heart burning with guilt as we sat amid dead things.
The teahouse had turned into a graveyard.
“I did not mean to harm you.” I shoved the paper flowers at her.
“Here. It is far from the same, but I thought these might brighten the place some.” I flushed with shame as Zora looked between me and the sad bundle of flowers.