Chapter 7
SEVEN
To the ancient oak.
The trouble with needing something from Adrik was that I’d have to suffer his presence to discover what I might offer him in return. That, and the humbling awareness that I had nothing at all to give.
I was glad when Almira came that evening with an offer to help me wash. The rosewater and dried petals she sprinkled into the bowl worked a small miracle and I felt, for once, a little less like a feral beast.
“This one certainly needs a lot of convincing,” said Almira, frowning at the snow-buried garden.
I tensed with terror. The peach tree, withered and strange, jutted like a totem pole from the snow.
If she looked closely, she’d see leaves veined with tar, a sickness creeping up the stem.
But Almira did not look closely. She only swirled her blood-specked hand, and the garden burst to life.
Gold dust settled over vivid blossoms and succulent leaves.
“Almira!”
She was swaying, face like ash beneath her wide-rimmed hat. Her hands trembled as I braced her. She mumbled—no, cursed—under her rapid, rattling breath. With bloodless fingers, she reached for a flask on her belt and took a sip. A little color returned to her lips.
“No need to be worried for old Almira. It was the brisk walk, I reckon. These legs are not quite as sprightly as they used to be.”
“Let me call for Lorell—”
“No, girl.” I flinched at her sharpness. “There is no need to trouble dear Lorell, nor the boy. I shall see to it that I rest. You had better do the same.”
She hobbled swiftly to the door as if once more in hale shape. Her rebuke chased a flush of shame over my skin. I watched her bitterly as she vanished into the twilight. I was no good at unraveling the finer undertones of a conversation.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
How was I to secure Adrik’s favor if I caused offense whenever I opened my mouth? What could I offer someone who lived in a town of such wonders and strangeness?
The trees began to shiver on the far hills.
A furious wind whistled over the roof and forced its way through the window.
I shuddered and turned the pillow thrice.
Before sleep took me, a tingle crept over my spine and gathered at its base.
I braced myself for a pair of bone-white eyes in the window, for the hollowness of a half-alive voice in the wind.
But beneath the fir’s lowest branch waited only the luminous gaze of a fox.
I snapped awake in the late hours of the night as if roused by an urgent call.
The moon hung like a harvest sickle above the river.
I was alone and the world was quiet. There was nothing of interest that might have torn me from sleep, but my blood hummed with feverish unrest. As if someone had called me, indeed, and I needed only to heed that call to find something fantastical—
My keen gaze slipped again and again to the edge of the woods, through a gap between two elms and into the night-dark forest.
A little fox darted between withering branches; a terribly listless thing. It was going to the far hill. To the pond amid frozen reeds and thin-stemmed birches. To the ancient oak.
I laughed harshly as I followed the fox, stumbling over white-capped mushrooms and cackling toadstools.
The forest was vivid despite the winter, roots climbing like knobbly fingers from a blanket of moss and flowers.
I wheezed from the strain of forcing my old legs to run, but I could not rest. Not before I’d seen to it that the little fox ate the berries I’d gathered near the mill.
It would starve before sunrise.
Deep in the forest, toadstools grew as tall as my knee, my hips, my shoulders. They laughed jauntily as they burst forth between rotten leaves and began to dance—around and around and around in a flash of snow-white and blood-red.
Let me taste you, they sang.
I shrieked as I slipped, tumbling to the forest floor.
Red juice welled between my wrinkled fingers while I lay stiff as something dead on a bed of evergreen needles.
The moss shivered and crept closer, nibbling like a fish at my fingertips.
The button mushrooms snickered and popped—one, two, three—from my shrivelled skin. It tingled.
Oh, what an honour to feed this frozen soil.
To nourish these roots—
I woke with a gasp from the dream, hands as cold as ice.
A flicker of light moved swiftly along the riverbank. Five riders on horses—no, four on horses and one on a tall-antlered white stag—spurred their mounts to a gallop and vanished along with their torches into the dark forest.
I had not woken from the far light, but from the same tapping that had announced Lorell’s visit last night.
He came in a knee-length nightdress with a bowl of creamy mushroom soup and another basket of potions.
I clutched the steaming bowl tightly to warm myself, but when Lorell handed me a spoon, I found my appetite for mushrooms rather lacking.
My arms still tingled—
Lorell flinched when he brushed my frozen hand. “It will be spring soon,” he grumbled. “Adrik must fire the hearth when he returns.” Before he left, he gathered at random a stack of books from the shelf and placed it on the nightstand. “For your leisure.”
I waited until the tapping had faded to reach for the books.
Lorell, it turned out, had provided me with a collection of old journals, filled front to back with indecipherable scribbles.
I flipped curiously through them, eager to find something foul about Adrik, or a secret I could use to lure him into a bargain.
In the third journal, between two half-torn pages, I came across a yellowed map, stiff with age.
I pried it open, tilting it so firelight streaked across.
As I traced the path I’d travelled, I shivered.
There was the abandoned shore, the moorlake.
The horrible wasteland, spreading from the heart of the land like an inkstain.
Mount Briarfell rose sharply from the hills at the edge of the wastes.
But in its shadow—no matter how fiercely I squinted—existed no town with the name of Wildemire.
I slipped the map back into the journal and cast it under the bed, unsettled. An unfinished thing, that map, or one so old that the town had not yet grown large enough to warrant mention.
I devoted my attention to the only novel amid the stack: The Adventures of Bearded Ivar. Though not terrible for a children’s book, it did not capture me well enough to prevent my thoughts from wandering to far places.
If I was clever and sharp enough to strike a bargain with Adrik, I would not have to chase the snow into the mountains come spring.
I would not have to clear the shelter of two seasons’ worth of cobwebs and dead things and live off whatever hapless creature tangled in my snares.
I dared not think further than this, but my sleeping mind had been less cautious.
Hopes had blossomed in the dark corners.
I’d dreamed of far turquoise shores, of bustling cities nestled along white lagoons, of theatres and exquisite boutiques and other such wondrous places.
My mother had dreamed of them, too—but a poisonous love had bound her to a small life with an even smaller man.
Of all the cages I knew, I’d always feared love the most.
I would not repeat her mistakes.
I would be free.
I needed only to find a crack in Adrik’s charm—a weakness to prod, a desire to exploit, a vile secret to use as blackmail. There lurked an ugliness behind his handsome features and rich clothes, I knew it. I would find it.
Dawn stained the wispy clouds pink. Something stirred at the edge of the forest. I feared I’d slipped into another strange dream, but it was merely the flicker of torchlight.
The riders returned and passed in the street below—three black-haired men, a young woman with snow-white curls and, on the tall-antlered stag, Adrik.
He carried, draped in pelt, a lifeless figure.
The wind stirred as they passed. A hand slipped from the bundle of furs.
It was black with death.
I retreated into the pillows with a gasp. Bile bit the back of my throat, stirred by memories of a frostbit hand tangled in the briar, bone-white eyes blinking and blinking.
That hunger. That anguish.
The whispers in the wind.
I pinched my eyes shut and pretended, for my own sake, to sleep.
I slept fitfully and I did not wake until midday sun gilded the snow.
Two moons had gone since the solstice. The world was much brighter now.
Spring would have long adorned Kresting’s bluffs with a mantle of fresh green.
In Eldevale the blue ice over the lake would be fighting a losing battle against the turn of seasons.
Here, in Wildemire, the thaw seemed in no haste at all.
I watched Adrik through the window as he approached, his cloak billowing around his tall, well-built frame like dark smoke.
He might have looked as imposing and haunting as the faerie warriors I’d watched from my tavern room—passing through Kresting on snarling bears and vicious wolves—had it not been for his good-humored smile and the moss-green gaze alight with mischief.
I had to make his visit count. I had to be sharp and awake, and pleasant.
To find a secret, a desire. A vileness. To secure the bargain.
Adrik snapped a finger as he passed the peach tree. A fruit dropped readily into his waiting palm.
“Hello,” he trilled as he stepped inside, sinking sharp teeth into the peach.
He groaned quite obscenely. The faeries, unlike most humans, had few reservations when it came to exhibiting their pleasures.
He held the peach out to me with an embellished bow.
“Would you like a bite?” I sealed my lips tightly.
He laughed, as if he enjoyed my agitation.
“No? Perhaps this—” he conjured a platter of candies from thin air, “—will please you more.”