Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Littered with hazards, this town.
Islept fitfully in the nights of the waning moon.
The bed was strange, the sounds were stranger, and I often startled awake thinking I heard howls in the wind, paws in the snow, the terrible gnash of teeth in the creak of wood. When I woke, drenched in cold sweat, I’d clutch the still-warm pebble for a fleeting moment of relief.
I worked my fingers raw and blistered, twisting nettles into talismans. I tied one to the door, another to the window, one to the iron-wrought bedframe, but they repelled neither the nightmares nor the dread that surged whenever I looked outside and glimpsed the churning mists.
The storm had come swiftly for the far hills.
Until the moon has waned and waxed again.
None of us said it, but the stiffness between us betrayed what we all feared: That we would not have as long.
Almira faded. She faded with every hour and with every breath, and I could do nothing but tremble like a withered sapling in the sharp winds as I sacrificed rivulets of blood to the soil and to the river—to no avail.
The cold and the dark seized me, and the monster broke loose, and magic bled like tar from my cursed fingers.
The earth around the burrow was black like a fire-scorched glade, the soil red with blood.
“Focus,” Almira snarled at me from her bed of withered autumn leaves. Her impatience wore on me, though I knew it stemmed from fear, not malice.
“You must rest,” I’d chide Adrik whenever we met for supper with Lorell, frightened to discover another shadow on his face. He cooked bland stews of whatever edible thing Lorell gathered from the shrinking stores—shrivelled potatoes, bruised apples, coarse grains, and cabbage, a lot of it.
“You too,” Adrik would murmur with a dark glance at my mangled palms.
Despair would lure us back into the cold before we’d finished our meals. Back to the burrow to spill blood into the earth. Back to the castle to prepare for the impossible task of moving a thousand people and more through snow and storm and stone.
The moon faded, just like Almira, thinning to a sickle.
I glared at it, pale against the dawnlit skies, as I brushed aside the curtain of wilted roses and stepped from the teahouse.
The cold bared its teeth and sank them through layers of pelt and wool—the coat no longer kept me warm.
I became even colder at the sight of a deep red cloak and the only face in town that wore a permanent look of displeasure.
Malek stood among the naked trees in the square, grunting as he shook the snow from his shoes. They did not seem like the sort that kept out the cold and neither did his cloak.
“Good morning, madam,” he said as I passed. He did not look like he was having a good morning at all. I’d seen him a few times when I’d gone to the castle, weaseling around the kitchens, but never in town. “I was wondering if you could guide me to the teahouse.”
“Good morning to you, too, sir,” I said in my brightest voice. I knew from experience that those determined to be ill-tempered found nothing more irritating than being greeted with cheer. “Is it not the perfect weather for tea?”
His forehead twisted with irritation. “Yes, but where do I find it?”
“Just through this door,” I said, pulling his cloak gingerly that way. “Do you come often to the teahouse?”
“No.” He halted at the door, leaning over the frame as if to peer inside with unseeing eyes. “There is much to do at the castle.”
“No one lives there.”
He huffed. “The horses do, and that bother of a stag.”
I left him to grumble to himself. The encounter put me in bad spirits, and there was not much cheer to be found at Lorell’s house either.
The cold was worsening still, and with the approach of the storm had come a whisper of fear.
It reached us in the form of Bahra, who had ventured out into the cold to rid the tavern of mice and returned with frozen whiskers.
She huddled miserably against Lorell’s hearth and allowed Adrik to feed her smoked sausage, for she was quite certain that she was close to death.
“Ada, the dear girl, did not dare to leave the house at all this morning. Good for her, I say. Littered with hazards, this town. Yavor—poor boy, as if he’s not suffered enough!
—slipped on the doorstep at first light and had I not cushioned his fall he’d have broken his neck and died.
Quick, girl,” she hissed at me, “look from the window and tell me if the tavern still stands. I went this morning for a feast of mice and I still shudder to think of it. You should have seen it, boy! The roofbeams were cracking, I swear it, and I am blessed to have escaped with my life.” She licked her lips and let out a pitiful meow, which prompted Adrik to fetch the last bits of bacon from the kitchen.
Bahra purred. “But no one has it quite as bad as dear Ilvar, and Kalina has it even worse! Leaking again, that roof of hers, and she is all out of firewood. For days now she’s been miserably cold and no one has time at all to help her—”
Adrik had heard enough at this point and he set grimly out to find firewood for Kalina. “Spring will come soon,” he muttered as he left.
It sounded like a curse.
The moon waned, the storm waxed, and the days blurred into a swirl of blood and snow and dread.
I noted the passage of time only by the approach of the mist, looming just behind the near hills.
One morning, when I came huddled in a blanket into the teahouse—I often helped Zora in the morning hours before Almira woke to snarl at me—I looked from the red-latticed window beside the hearth and spotted a wandering doe in the neighboring garden.
The creatures of the wild had long made comfortable nests in garden sheds and kitchens, but there was a stiffness to its motions that made me peer closer.
It lifted its head to blink at me. To stare at me with bone-white eyes.
Let me see you. Let me taste you.
I shrieked, stumbling into the bony arms of the withered wisteria. Zora came flying with a clatter, alerting the doe. It pricked its wooden ears and moved closer. A sheen of glitter crept over its hind leg and face—like the frost-flowers adorning Emond’s arm.
Zora went rigid beside me. Her voice was hollow as she said, “This is what you and Adrik saw in the forest? This is what the mist will make of us?”
“What do we do?” I asked, breathless with terror.
Zora sucked a sharp breath through her teeth. A flame gathered in her open palm. Over her face fell a darkness, a bitterness. She flicked her wrist. The flame vanished with a hiss. At the doe’s hooves, the snow began to burn. The creature was ablaze within a heartbeat, wooden as it was.
“Come,” I said, pulling Zora gently away from the window.
In her haunted eyes still flickered an echo of the flame.
I settled her into an armchair tucked into the farthest corner, away from the doe’s horrible cackling and thrashing.
Her skin was hot as a stove. I wiped her brow with a wet rag until her skin cooled and she came with a shudder back to herself.
“It wears on me,” she whispered. “The magic. The death.”
I held her tightly against my aching heart while she cried. “I understand.”
The wind whistled furiously through the door.
Let me see you. Let me taste you.
Let me show you what he did to us.
I fought the urge to cover my ears just to drown out that anguish. Did Zora not hear it?
I watched from the window as Yavor and his two brothers chased their horses over the hills to relight the flares. Had the whispers alerted them? Had they heard it too, the pain in the wind? Or had they simply seen the fires dwindle?
Did no one else hear that anguish?
The flares remained feeble and wavered often. I could not stand to look at them, so I stared at the frozen treetops, shimmering in the morning sun. The pair of elms loomed like two ancient creatures with ragged beards of frost over the river. My gaze slipped between them into the forest.
A little fox slid through curtains of thick, thrashing ivy. It was going to the pond on the far hills. To the ancient oak.
The vines hissed like snakes as I brushed them aside, slithering smoothly through the snow. One coiled around my ankle, slowing me as I waded through waist-deep snow. I stumbled once, and another time. I sighed as the shifting forest tilted and I fell into a bed of squirming things.
Let me see you, hissed the vines. Let me taste you.
I cackled as the snakes wriggled over my bare feet and into the leg of my trousers. In my veins began a tingle, a prickle. My blood writhed and thrashed, my skin too tight to contain the life keen to sprout from me.
A vine burst from my elbow, another from my palm. A third tickled the back of my throat and broke loose between my lips. They grew long and thick and lush, twining around the branches of a near tree, weaving me to its trunk.
Oh, what an honor to nourish its shivering twigs.
To let my blood seep into the ground and warm its cold, cold roots—
“Evana!”
A grip on my arm attempted to pull me from the tender embrace of the vines. My heart ached and yearned for their touch, and for the fox on the hill, and for the ancient oak, like a string tied to my rib, coaxing me forward.
“Evana!”
The string snapped. I tumbled backwards into the snow, but I did not fall softly. I fell with a crack against something hard and flat, knocking a soundless scream from my chest. I was not in the forest. I was in the teahouse, on the floor beside the window, blinking up into Zora’s frightened eyes.
“Evana,” she whispered.
I clenched my frozen hands to hide my scraped palms, desperate to conceal the evidence of my madness. How could I explain that I knew the forest paths though I'd never walked them? That I'd stood beside a frozen pond and sunk beneath it without ever leaving the town?
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
“This was one of the visions, no? The ones you told me about?”
“Someone is lost to the forest,” I croaked. “We must find them.”
Adrik had gone to the glade that morning to restock the woodpiles, alone—I’d pleaded with him to take help, but he’d sharply refused.
“I will go with the brothers," said Zora. "You must stay here, Evana. If the forest takes you, Wildemire is doomed.”
We raced to the forge and found all three of the brothers in the soot-blackened shop. Ilvar, the youngest, stood bent over the furnace, and Radan was hammering a sword into shape. Their cheeks were still red from the cold, from the strain of chasing over the hills to light the flares.
Yavor came to greet us. We had seen much of each other this past moon, the three brothers and I, for they often dined with us at Lorell’s house.
Their grieving minds found no peace at the forge, where every soot-stain reminded them sharply of their father’s strangeness and where his mutterings still turned into shrieks come nightfall.
“Someone is headed to the pond,” I said quietly.
Yavor mustered me with the keen interest of a scholar.
I’d learned about him, as we talked over flavorless stews, that he’d never quite known what to do with the hammer and much preferred the library over the forge.
He had devoted his work to researching ancient smithing techniques and enchantments, and he carried—much like me—a notebook wherever he went.
“How do you know?” he asked.
I flinched, looking shamefully down at my hands as I said, “I saw it."
“A vision?" I awaited the derisive laugh that had haunted my mother's steps through the village, the gleam of scorn that had followed her like a shadow. But Yavor gave me only a sharp nod and said, “Good. Then we might still find them in time.”
Zora and the brothers rode out, veiled with torchlight and armed to the teeth, and I stumbled to the burrow where I watered the soil with my blood.