Chapter 23 #2
Up here, I breathed freely.
“A week, perhaps. The water strengthens her, but it cannot cure her. She does not suffer an illness. She is simply… old. She is old and she carries this weight—” Adrik shook his head, guilt drawing shadows over his face.
His gaze darted to the fissure. From within came a soft, fractured glow.
“I must go alone. The spirit of the water is feeling vicious. The magic it guards blurs the lines between life and death, and such magic demands a price.”
I shivered, struck with unease. “What is the price?”
“A test of will. You must promise not to follow me.”
“I will do no such thing.” He was mad if he thought I’d hiked through rock and snow just to watch him do something foolish from afar and leave. “You have five minutes. If you are not back, I am hauling you out. I am a whole wicked witch, remember?”
Adrik drew a sharp breath, braced his shoulders, and grinned. “A wicked witch set on tormenting me. I will be back within four.” He bowed low, voice light with mischief as he murmured, “How about a kiss for luck, Ana?”
I gave him a saccharine smile, heart fluttering like a startled bird. “How about one for triumph? I will make it well worth it.”
A low groan slipped from his throat before he withdrew to muster me with one raised brow. “One kiss to be called in whenever I wish, fulfilled on the spot?”
“I thought you had no love for bargains.”
“Not for bargains, no.”
He vanished with a wink into the cracked ice—leaving me alone to ponder his words, spoken so carelessly and rashly, he must have meant them in jest. I counted the seconds, mind frayed with nerves.
Adrik did not return.
Dread coiled my stomach tightly as I approached the fissure.
A gasp slipped from me as I stepped inside, echoing crisply between mirrorlike walls of ice.
Pink dawnlight caught in the facets, shrouding the aisle in the softest morning glow.
I pressed a hand to the pale blue ice, wonderstruck.
Icicles, thick as trees, sprouted from the frozen floor and as the breeze danced past, it drew a harplike tune from them.
I treaded cautiously deeper, alarmed by such loveliness. In these lands of faeries and trickery, beauty existed only as a warning—a snare better appreciated from afar.
The aisle narrowed as I went and spit me out at its end into a vaulted cavern of blue and pink. A pond of silver stretched before me, as if starlight had bled from the skies. Around one side of the cavern ran a crescent shelf of ice, broad enough to allow passage to a frozen terrace on the far end.
It was there, Adrik kneeled.
He was not alone. A woman stood before him, bare-skinned and achingly beautiful—wild as the sunlit tides and soft as a peach blossom. He watched her with rapture, that woman, with a dreamlike smile.
As if he knew her.
As if he…
An ache that had no right to exist yanked sharply at me. Through the cavern swept a mournful wind, stirring the woman’s dark curls. In her copper-brown eyes gleamed such life, such power—
I blinked, struck.
She was a mirror image of me, distorted into something much brighter, much lovelier.
If I was the callousness of winter, she was the spring.
If I was the violence of a storm, she was a summer breeze.
She was who I might have been, were I not hardened with sorrow and forever tainted by the stains of my own vileness.
Adrik did not seem to notice the wrongness about her.
He smiled as she stepped forth and brushed a finger over his jaw.
He smiled as she bowed low to whisper something in his ear.
The wind carried her hiss around the cavern, sharp and drenched with the poison of a snake.
He still smiled as she took his hand. As she drew him to the edge of the terrace.
As he dipped his boots into the lake of liquid starlight.
As she took him with her, the vicious spirit of the water.
Still, Adrik smiled.
Heart burning with terror, I flattened myself against the ice and crept closer. The slick, cracked path slowed me to a stumble, boots finding no purchase.
The lake rippled, water splashed. It lapped gently at Adrik’s shins, at his knees. He would follow that spirit into the endless depths. He would happily let her drown him—let this too-radiant image of me devour him.
I knew that I must not call him. I remembered now the tale of the water spirit and the besotted men it lured into its realm.
A test of will, Adrik had said, and one he was going to fail.
A shard of ice splintered with a terse crack beneath my step.
I reacted, moved by sharp impulse, a moment before the spirit did.
I must not look at it. I must not let its gaze snare me, too.
I slipped as I spun to face the wall. Nails cracked as I clutched desperately at the ice.
One foot slipped with a splash into the pond, freezing water sinking its teeth through my leather boot.
I pulled myself with wheezing breaths back onto the ice, watching through the reflection in the ice as the spirit sneered at me.
I returned its vicious smile, for I knew the tale of the little girl who had tricked the spirit into releasing its catch. I remembered that I was not powerless.
I might not know how to wield this magic of mine, but I knew now how to draw it forth. To defeat this spirit, I needed not command my powers. I needed only to let the corruption run its course.
I yanked the knife from my belt, trembling as I drew the blade over my palm. I licked the blood and let a drop trickle into the pond, another and a third.
Deep within me, the monster stirred.
I drew breath and I sank to my knees to dip my hand into the biting water. Inside me, darkness rolled in like the tide. I welcomed the claws crawling from the depths. I allowed them to twine around my arms, to drag me back into the darkest corners of my mind.
The lordling and I stood on a hill above the fields. Rot from crops, he whispered. Make them famished down in the vale. Make them starve, little bird.
I did not attempt to fight. I beckoned the darkness to drown me, and I relished the anguish as my veins thickened with rot.
Hello, little bird.
I splintered.
Dark magic bled from me, spilling like ink into the pool.
I laughed shrilly as the spirit of the water reared its head, pain muddling my senses.
The water darkened, no longer made of stars but of a moonless night.
The spirit wailed, terror roiling in its gaze as the water retreated.
It would perish if severed from its home amid the currents.
The little girl from the tale I remembered had known this.
It had saved her brother then, and it was going to save Adrik now.
In its panic, the spirit lost control of its power.
The illusion cracked. Nails sharpened, the skin paled, and its face pulled into something long and sharp, with bladelike teeth. Its sleek silver strands swirled weightlessly in the air. The eyes were sharp as a honed blade.
Its blood was blue.
It gushed like a fountain from its chest, drawn forth with one swift swing of a sword. Adrik lunged once more, but he faltered. A shriek of fury brought the cavern to a tremble. I cowered against the wall to shelter from the rain of ice come loose from the ceiling.
“Evana!”
I sobbed, shielding my face as I moved blindly towards Adrik.
The anguish of magic waned slowly from my veins, leaving me breathless and weak.
I squinted through the sleet into the dark waters.
Adrik had made it to the edge, pulling himself back up onto the terrace.
I saw nothing of the spirit save a slice of pale skin amid the currents, much like the bloated, washed up corpses on the fishdocks.
It was not dead nor dying—but it was retreating to lick its wounds deep beneath the dark surface.
The half-submerged mouth squirmed into a grimace, like a fish writhing on a shorebank.
A long hissing breath came from its blue lips.
Through the cavern swept a gust of wind, like the swift, devastating slice of a blade.
I stifled a shriek as it cut me where I stood, shoving me violently aside. Ice clanked as the wind whipped past.
I screamed Adrik’s name and he mine, but the gale stole our voices before we found each other in the blur of black and white.
It gathered like a whirlwind near the terrace, where a trickle of shimmering water poured from a crack in the wall and landed, with a sharp plink plink plink, in a moonstone basin tucked between two pillars of ice.
As the wind breathed over them, the drops froze in the air—like pearls threaded on string.
The storm stilled as suddenly as it had begun.
In its wake, what remained of the pond lay like a black, unblinking eye in the heart of the cavern. I sobbed as Adrik’s arms came fiercely around me, plucking me off my feet to draw me against his thundering chest.
“Evana,” he murmured into my hair, so quietly I did not know if he’d meant for me to hear. “You wicked, beautiful witch.”
This magic of mine, vile and dark, had saved us.
It had saved us.
I had saved us.
Just as I had that night beneath the ribbon-hung elm. It was not evil, that magic. Never had been. It had taken the form of the vileness the lordling had channeled into me. He no longer controlled me now. I was free to choose how to use this magic. And I’d chosen to use it for good.
I would choose over and over to use it for good.
“The spring,” I gasped, coming sharply back to myself. I glanced past Adrik’s shoulder at the frozen drops afloat in the biting air. A thick knot of ice adorned the fissure, trapping the healing water deep within. The spirit had known what we sought. It had punished us for its defeat.
Adrik cursed as we stepped between the pillars of ice. “We will take the drops and let them melt,” he said. “It is not much, but—” Another curse as he plucked one of the drops from the air. It was not frozen water, but a perfect iridescent pearl.
Almira will fade come moonrise.
We had nothing with which to stave off her death but a handful of useless pearls. Then how long until the mist would devour the town? How long until we were all mindless half-dead?
I stared at the basin, into the mirrorlike sheen over the frozen water. At the woman who stared back at me. A light flickered in her gaze. She was bright, despite her burdens and her grief, and she was almost as lovely as the face the spirit had worn.
She was who Adrik saw in me.
A thought tugged at me, ludicrous and daring. I’d made no progress spilling blood into the earth down by the burrow. I’d not breathed a sliver of warmth into the cold, not a sliver of life into dead things. And still…
Here, in the ice ablush with dawn and with such new lightness in my chest, I could see it. I could feel it at the tips of my fingers; a most curious magic, keen to burst forth. It ached to dance along the ice and bathe it with golden dust.
“I could thaw the spring,” I whispered.