Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
We lived in gardens of everbloom.
Icame back to myself as we passed through the gate, as if roused by an urgent call.
I sat against Adrik’s chest, caged in his arms, fingers tangled in the silken coat of his stag. Yavor rode at the spear, head high with pride and jubilee.
The thaw had come.
The river rushed with meltwater and already the hoofbeats turned into squelching steps. The trees glistened as if decked with diamonds.
“Rest,” Adrik whispered against my ear when I stirred.
I could not. There was a whisper in the wind. It spoke, with new aliveness, of a cat-shaped hill and a pink-blossomed tree, of a wild witch who had carried for five winters the weight of a storm. The wild witch who had lived, against all odds, to witness the dawn of another spring.
“Almira.”
We chased the stag down the mud-slick street, hearts ablaze with fear and with an aching inkling.
We flew over the footbridge, beckoned by that whisper in the spring-warm breeze and by the tall apple tree that rose like a beacon from the hilltop.
It stood in full bloom, branches bowed beneath the weight of blossoms.
We found Almira resting at its gnarled foot. Her face was shadowed by her straw-hat, but even so I caught a glimpse of apple-red cheeks and a toothless grin.
“Ah, girl,” she said when I stumbled with a sob into her arms and cradled her hands.
“The wind sings your praises. I believe you’ve another admirer.
” With her knobbly finger, she brushed a tear from my cheek and tutted.
“Now, now. You’re in the prime of youth, girl, and spring comes.
There is no time for such grief when there’s dance to be had. ”
“I might be in the prime of youth,” I said desperately, as if my denial might stave off the whisper of death in the air, “but you are in the prime of age.”
Her grin softened. “That I am. It is always good to end things on a high note, no?”
“Please.” I placed a soft kiss on the back of her shrivelled hand. “Just another while longer.”
“And then another, and another.” She cackled.
“I’ve lived this life to the fullest, girl, and I’ve stretched it far beyond its time.
” She looked with twinkling eyes up, where Adrik kneeled beside me.
His tears gleamed like pearls in the spring light.
“I never told you this, because I believed you knew: This town is thrice as bright for your presence. You need not lift a finger for it, except to water the plants, boy. The girl will have her hands full.”
Death grew impatient—he slid his greedy fingers like cold water over my neck and stretched them for Almira. I shuddered.
“Forgive me, girl,” she breathed. “I believed in you since the winds first whispered your name across the vale, many moons ago. I saw so clearly the brightness you would bring to us, and I grew afraid that your fear might still chase you away. I should not have lied to you.”
“Be free of guilt,” I breathed. Our moments were counted and I had yet to make them count.
“I will see to it that this land and its people remember you, always. I will spin your tale into the roots and into the riverwaves so that a thousand years from now, they will sing of the wild witch who lived among them. We will set the table for you at every meal. We will dance your dances.”
Almira died still smiling.
I stayed with her until her fingers grew stiff with death. I stayed with her until darkness fell over me.
I woke to the merry crackle of a fire and two bickering voices.
“—give her another flask.”
“If you give her another, she’ll not wake at all.”
A low snarl. “There has to be something I can do.”
“You can sit still and be quiet for a moment,” said Zora impatiently. “She needs rest and she will wake no sooner for your obnoxiousness. If I were her, I’d sleep a while longer just to prove a point.”
Another snarl.
I pried my eyes open with great irritation. It seemed I could never have a moment’s peace. “I have a better idea,” I said hoarsely. “Why don’t you bite each other’s heads off somewhere I cannot hear you?”
“Ana,” breathed Adrik.
“You know I am alright.” I’d been determined to give him a piece of my mind, but I found my words tinged with amusement. “You made that stupid bargain, remember?”
He gave me only a soft smile before he buried his face into the sheets at my waist. Zora sniffed, as she did whenever she was annoyed, but her eyes were bright and her lips quivered.
“Are you alright?” I asked her.
“I’m as lively as the spring flowers, and there’s a whole bunch of them out there.” She tilted her head. “You?”
I said with a groan, “As if I was hit by a rockslide.”
“Ah, always the sunshine,” she said with a grin. “Let me get you a cup of tea.”
She left us in thin, breathless silence.
“Forgive me, Ana,” whispered Adrik, a sheen of guilt veiling his eyes.
“I did not know, I swear it. I thought the spirit haunted me for what I did in the north. I thought the faeries and mages that followed me when I first arrived had cursed the land. I thought the spirit loathed me for bringing them here. I never realized—” He shook his head, bowed again beneath that neverending guilt.
“It cursed me whenever I went into the forest or when the flares went out. I did not know what to do with its anger. I thought I was going mad.”
“I heard the whispers too,” I said. “Whenever the fires died, the wind would speak to me. I thought I was mad too.” I let a finger glide over the sharp edge of his jaw.
“Perhaps we are both a little mad, King of the Forgotten Lands. It is a good thing I have always had a fondness for the wild and for the mad.”
That cold in his eyes cracked. As he looked at me, his features melted into something achingly soft. “Then I shall strive forever to be both.”
We laid Almira to rest that same night.
We gathered at the riverbank beneath the burrow—all of us, a sea of a thousand and more candles. We laid her, dressed in a gown like moonlight, upon a float woven from branches, cushioned with moss and autumn-gold leaves.
I wove fireflies into the leaves, and as we sent her gently along the river, I collected their sparks. The float burst aflame.
I sang to the river as it carried Almira forth, and the river sang back to me.
To her. I spun strings of silver from its starlit waves and I placed blossoms on their foaming crests and I calmed the tides as the townsfolk set, one after the other, their candles adrift in the current.
We sang for her all night, and we danced until the eastern skies shrouded the world with a veil of pink.
Before we left the riverside, I announced that there would be a dance at the castle. There was, I knew, no better night for one than the full moon, but we had no time to wait for such a thing.
We put Zora in charge of the dance and suffered for it. Once I’d slept for a night to recover, I had not one quiet moment. There were gowns to be designed, decorations to be crafted, and cakes to be baked.
The forest-touched thawed.
Their gazes cleared two mornings after we had freed the spirit, and they began once more to speak in their own voices.
A strangeness lingered: Lorell’s beard remained frost-specked no matter how warm the house, Marin’s hands still wore a coating of rock, and from Nasha’s head sprouted a tangle of vines.
We did not mind. We had, all of us, seen stranger things than this.
Sometimes, when the night was dark and cold, they grew even stranger—there would be ice in their veins, and that horrible white sheen would settle over their gaze again.
When it happened, we wrapped Lorell in blankets and moved his chair close to the hearth.
It would vanish, that strangeness, if he sat there long enough while Sai held his hands and spoke of the spring.
Three mornings after the thaw had come, Lorell joined me as I sat in the parlor. He was clutching the booklet of spring poems and he said, lips quivering, “Let me read to you, girl.”
He knew every poem by heart. I suspected he had for a long time.
While the town became merrier and merrier with the advance of spring and dance, I sunk into a miserable state.
A striking lack of tasks awaited me whenever I woke.
The earth burst alive with spring whether or not I wove golden threads of magic into the earth.
I’d grown a peach tree in Adrik’s garden and adorned it with enough fruit to last him three seasons.
It was the only noteworthy thing I’d done since our return from the forest.
Wildemire needed me no longer.
Adrik needed me no longer.
No one had asked me to remain, either. I was free to leave, but it did not feel as freeing as I had expected. On the morning of the dance, I found a scribbled note stuck to the container of my favorite tea.
Follow the tracks.
I frowned at the instructions as I hurried into the thaw, mud squelching horribly beneath my boots. Ah, the finer sides of spring. I almost wished for a return of the winter, such gloom had befallen me.
A track of pawprints led me down the lively street, through a gap between the boutique and the potter. I followed the tracks over a rose-veiled bridge. I’d never been to the riverside hill. It was a wild thing of thick brambles, knotted roots, moss-draped floors and a steep trail to the crest.
A soft laugh came from a birch. Adrik leaned against it, aglow with golden dawnlight. “Whose murder are you scheming?”
I pursed my lips, irked by his cheer and by the meltwater trickling from the trees into my curls. “You could not have chosen a drier place for a meeting?”
“Of course I could have.”
He chuckled at my indignant snort, tangling our fingers as he pulled me swiftly up the slope. My heart stuttered. There’d been no time for much save a stolen glance over a pile of garlands, or the secret brush of our hands as we passed each other in a hall bustling with people.