Chapter 4
Audra threw open her door and tore down three flights of stairs, shouting for all to hurry downstairs.
“What is it?” The merchant by the window looked up from where he sat with his registers, his voice a startled yelp as Audra sprinted into the room, four guests hot on her heels.
The two little girls, still playing their game at the table by the fire, looked at Audra, their eyes wide and frightened.
She must look absolutely unhinged.
She felt unhinged. She wished that was all this was—losing her mind. She wanted to have imagined it … She did that sometimes. Daydreamed too much. Too vividly. But this wasn’t one of those times.
“Something is happening in the harbor, the—” She swallowed, coughing. Her mouth had gone dry with fear.
“Well? Spit it out, Audra, you’re upsetting our guests,” commanded her father.
He was wide awake now, his block of wood and whittling knife forgotten where they’d landed haphazardly on the bar.
He looked so small. Ancient. When had he shrunk so much in size?
He was supposed to be big and tall and powerful and—
“Something is happening with the Mist,” Audra gasped. “It’s expanding, swelling, it’s—it swallowed a ship.”
To their credit, nobody called her a liar or questioned her, though she knew the words she’d just uttered, in that order, didn’t seem to make sense.
The Mist didn’t move. Low tide. High tide.
The hurricane that almost blew this very inn off the cliff when she was eleven …
Even those winds hadn’t affected the Mist. Couldn’t affect the Mist. Nothing could.
The Mist was a constant. It neither swelled nor expanded, and it surely didn’t swallow ships.
Everyone moved at once, rushing toward the western wall of the room where a panel of windows faced the sea. They shoved tables and chairs aside, clambered onto the benches, to see the harbor below.
Or where the harbor should have been.
Where there once was a clear view of the docks, now there was nothing but an expanse of white. As if the world had disappeared entirely.
A woman screamed.
The mother of the two girls, who had been awoken from her drunken slumber, stumbled into the room and picked up her daughters, cradling them to her.
“Alright, nobody panic,” her father said. “Audra, check and see if anyone is coming.”
She was grateful he hadn’t said any thing coming. She didn’t want to think of the guardian beasts fabled to haunt the Mist.
“Summon Emyre from the stables—he may need to follow the sound of your voice.”
Audra cursed as she searched the tap hall. Many frightened faces. None of them Emyre’s. Why hadn’t he come inside yet? She’d told him to be in for dinner!
She raced for the front door and threw it open.
The Mist had breached the cliff at the back of the inn, but the courtyard, at the front, was clear.
She stepped out into the square as she called for him to come in from the stables, but an unnatural wind wrenched away the sound of her voice.
She called again. Even as she cupped her hands and yelled with all her might, no sound carried.
It wasn’t that the wind outmatched her voice in volume. Instead, the whole world seemed muted, the edge of sound dulled so it could not cut through the peculiar thickness of the air. Though the wind tore at her dress, her hair, stinging her eyes with gravel, sand, and bits of shell.
Yet, she realized with a deep chill of horror, the wind made no sound.
She would have to retrieve him from the barn. Soon, the Mist would reach the courtyard. She opened the door to the inn and closed it behind her, cutting off tendrils of vapor floating just above the ground, reaching to get in. Mist, and yet it didn’t burn her ankles. At least that had been a rumor.
“Audra!” her father cried, from the threshold of the inn, the door clenched in his fist.
“He can’t hear me. I’ll have to retrieve him. Lock the door. I’ll knock three times so you know it’s me.”
“You’ll suffocate if you go out there!” someone cried.
“Or burn!” shouted another.
“Don’t let her back in. The Mist might not stay outside as it is!” a man insisted. One of the Boars from room seven, Audra thought, but she couldn’t be sure, because she had already turned to leave.
“Come back to me, Audra.” Her father’s voice was thick with fear.
The door slammed shut behind her. She couldn’t hear the lock click, but she felt the vibration of the wood against her back. The press of solid oak was the only thing grounding her as the Mist devoured the world.
Though the Mist muted everything around her, the rush of blood, the pounding of her heart, beat as a cacophony in her ears. Her palms were slick with sweat. She was so afraid. More afraid than she had ever been in her life. She couldn’t see the stables anymore.
She pressed the sleeve of her sweater to her face, covering her mouth and nose, though she knew that if there really were poison within the Mist, wool wouldn’t save her.
The mosaic, her mother’s mosaic, had disappeared.
She took a step off the landing, and the white cloud swallowed her too.
Suppressive silence. The world was gone. She took a halting step forward. Her chest tightened as she held her breath, refusing to breathe in the Mist.
The fog was thicker than it had been just seconds before. It pressed into her eyes and ears, and when she gasped for breath, her aching lungs outweighing her desire to survive, it tried to fill her mouth.
That’s what it means to be brave.
She heard her mother’s voice from another time, a different world, one where the Mist wasn’t something she ever thought about, because it was just simply there, like the sky above, the ocean below.
Yet Aisha’s words came softly, a reminder of a time she had lovingly brushed Audra’s damp curls from her chubby, salt-stained cheeks.
She’d been awakened by Aisha’s gentle caress, and she had blinked in sleep-addled confusion.
It was the middle of the night. The only light in the room silvery, cast from the moon.
Audra must have been screaming in her sleep again; her throat felt raw, and it hurt to swallow back sobs that came suddenly with the remembrance of the dream she’d been trapped in.
It had been filled with creatures carved from evil; they had no flesh on their heads, only bleached white skulls.
No eyes to see, though they tracked her every movement.
Razor-sharp talons had reached for her, seized her. They wanted to rip into her.
They wanted to … She’d been too afraid to fight back, too afraid even to run.
That’s what it means to be brave; to be scared, so scared that you can hardly breathe or think—but I want you to fight anyway, my gift, fight whatever it is that scares you so. Fight it despite your fear.
Aisha had laughed then, rich and warm and familiar, as she wrapped Audra’s quilt around her small body. She’d pull her out of bed so she could cradle her to her chest, rocking her in that comforting, instinctual way that mothers do.
Audra, my wild girl, when you are scared, you must fight … Fight just to spite your fear.
Audra closed her eyes against the white, gasping against the sharp, violent pain of missing her mother, of wanting her here, more than she ever had in her life.
She could still feel the phantom weight of her mother’s arms wrapped around her.
Hear the sound of her steady, ever even, ever calm heartbeat, where Audra’s face had pressed to her chest. She was transported, feeling even the softness of the worn quilt, the squares and the stitching, the same age as Audra, wrapped tightly around her.
She could do this. She had no choice.
Emyre was out there.
Audra had walked from the front door of the inn to the stables every day of her life since she could toddle; she didn’t need to be able to see to know when the toe of her boot would knock against the lip of the stables’ doorway, and a layer of hay would yield beneath her boots.
But nothing could prepare her for the eerie silence. There was no familiar crunch of hay, not a chorus of neighs or stomp of hooves.
She cupped one hand around her mouth, calling out for Emyre, trying to project her voice through the stables. She shuffled forward hesitantly, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end, as she trailed her hand from stall to stall. The ladder should be just up ahead.
She found it, thankful that her parents had never altered the stables.
She began to climb the wooden rungs, blind though her eyes were open.
What if Emyre wasn’t up here? What if he was frightened and fell from the ledge?
Or worse, what if she had passed him in the courtyard, and he was lost or confused?
Walked too close to the cliffs? Her heart raced in her chest.
Futile as it was, she still called to him as she climbed, though her voice made no sound.
When she reached the loft, she lifted her knee onto the ledge and hauled herself up, crawling forward slowly. The fog was so dense that she could feel it on her face like cloth.
She crawled through the hay in the loft, though the wood beneath the hay was rough, and she risked splinters.
She didn’t want to startle Emyre. He was jumpy enough on a good day; she didn’t want to risk shocking the boy, him falling.
She inched farther in, hands searching before her, sweeping hay aside, feeling it beneath her fingers, but not hearing the rustle she knew should be there.
Not smelling its dry, grassy smell, nor the tang of animal dung that permeated the stables.
Audra gasped when she felt something soft and warm—a leg. Emyre! She shouted his name through tears. She’d found him!
The boy attempted to yank free of her grip, scrambling backward and away from her.
She held on even when he kicked out with his other leg, his boot connecting with her shoulder.
Pain flared up, but she pushed it aside, grit her teeth, and held on to him, reaching out with her other hand until she felt the thin bones of his shoulders and pulled him to her, pressing his face to her chest.
She brushed her hands gently against his cheek and hummed.
He might not be able to hear her, but she was sure he could feel the vibrations in her chest; she whispered in his ear, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.
Tentatively, he reached up with searching fingers and felt her face.
As recognition filtered from the warmth of her cheeks to his fingertips, his rigid body relaxed entirely. He knew who had him.
She squeezed him tightly once more before crawling back toward the ladder, pulling him behind her.