Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
A favor for a favor.
While Adrik cooked that evening, it began to snow again.
As we sat for a supper of cheese-stuffed mushrooms, a hearty pork stew, and carrots glazed with honey, Adrik entertained us with tales of Sai’s grandest adventures and best pastries—a little too cheerfully and brightly. He tried to hide it, but I caught him glancing from the window again and again.
"Enough about the baker," sputtered Lorell after a while. His lips twitched, and he was mangling his slice of bread with a knife.
There came a knock and—before I’d looked up—the creak of the door and a breath of horrible cold. Yavor swept inside, coat and hair white with snow.
“Forgive me,” he said with a glance at our half-finished meals. “Pa has still not returned.”
A strange look passed between him and Adrik.
“We must go now,” said Adrik. I’d barely blinked before he had gathered his boots and slipped tensely into his cloak. The firelight painted his face with dark shadows and turned him into something that frightened me, almost. “Before the storm worsens. If he has been gone since morning—”
“Since the night,” corrected Yavor with a tremble. “We just learned from Kalina that he passed the farms still in the dark. She thought he was heading for the tavern, but he never arrived.”
Lorell, who’d ceased his assault on the bread, said with surprising firmness and feeling, “Emond will be fine. You must not linger in the woods.”
I flinched before I’d quite grasped the horror of what was unfolding.
As if my mind was slow to capture the thought that lurked at its edge, but my body was quick to remember this: brambles biting at a soot-blackened apron, the weight of a sturdy hammer to carve a path toward a frozen pond, ice pecking at grime-stained hands.
These same hands, three decades younger, now helped Adrik to fasten his scabbard while I reeled from dark, dark dread.
Yavor, eldest son of Emond. The blacksmith, gone since the night and I… I knew where to find him, did I not?
I knew there’d be something horrible in that pond on the hill, something dead and blue, adorned with delicate frost-flowers.
I bit back the sting of bile, shaking like a storm-tossed leaf as Adrik said to Lorell and me, “If we do not return, leave us to the forest. No one else will risk their life, understood?”
His gaze lingered a moment too long on mine, as if he’d seen a sliver of something strange in it. He tilted his head in quiet question.
I could not tell him. What madness had befallen me to even consider it? What madness had awoken deep within me to torment me with dreams of the dead? Not dreams, but visions.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
As vile as the rot and better off dead.
I could not tell him. But to let him ride into the storm without direction, to let him risk his life just to save myself from shame and scorn—I was not so heartless, was I? I was not so spineless. He saved my life before he knew me, and I hesitated to save him now? To return the favor?
It struck me like lightning and twice as painfully—I swayed as an aching clarity came over me. I knew what I must do, and I knew…
I knew we’d eaten for the last time together at the table, and that I’d never see that unguarded smile of his again. That when Adrik looked at me next, it would be with contempt, and that I’d deserve it.
A favor was what I needed from him, and at last I had one to offer in return.
“I need a word,” I said to Adrik with a voice as hollow as an echo.
He must have caught the apprehension on my face.
His features tightened as we walked to the chamber.
In the air between us crackled a horrible tension.
We stood, after he’d closed the door, for an unbearable moment in stiff silence.
The hearth hissed as if it already knew of my betrayal. A tear licked my cheek.
I said, voice thick with pleading, “If I knew any other way… You must know that this is not how I wished it would go. You must know—” I cut myself short with a sob. He had retreated; already, and I’d only just reached for the knife I was about to plunge into his chest. “I must ask for a bargain.”
As if I’d breathed too harshly at a flame, the light in his eyes vanished. In its place bloomed darkness, like an inkstain spreading over moss-green silk.
“Ah,” he said slowly, with the dark, low lilt of a faerie.
“I was a fool, after all. Tell me, Evana. What could you possess that interests me enough to put myself through such torment? What could I possess that you could not just ask from me? There is little, I fear, that I’d not have given you for free. ”
I caught a sob between my teeth. “I could not risk it. I could not risk even the slightest chance—” I could not risk returning to a cage.
A binding favor. I’d lived too long as a slave to risk anything else.
“I must ask you for a binding favor bestowed upon me. In return… I will tell you where to find Emond.”
For a beat, he was still as the frozen river and twice as cold. Then, slowly and horribly, rage thawed his features and he looked no longer half-human. “You would let Emond die?” he whispered with the sharpness of the winter wind. “You would let Yavor and me die in search of him?”
“Please, Adrik.”
“How do you know?”
“I dreamed of it.”
He laughed bitterly. “I’m supposed to trust a dream? I’m supposed to trust that you speak the truth?”
“Have you any other choice?”
“Then tell me, Evana. Tell me where he is, and if we find him there, I will grant you your favor, bargain or not. Do not make me—”
“No,” I said tersely. His coldness had turned me callous in return. I stood there, frigid and lifeless as a river-rock. “I need a true bargain.”
“You would ask me—” He shook his head as if to rearrange his shattered image of me in his mind. A vile creature. That's what I was. “Then state your terms.”
“I will tell you where to find Emond as soon as the bargain is made. In return, if you find him there, you will grant me one favor to be called in whenever I wish, and you will fulfill it on the spot.”
“Ah,” Adrik said with a smile that was no smile.
“That is no good, Evana. Favors are a potent tool. Wars have taken a turn and lands have disappeared for a simple favor.” He trapped his chin between long fingers and observed me darkly.
“How about this? I will grant you one favor to be called in whenever you wish, fulfilled on the spot, so long as that favor will bring no harm to this town or its people.”
I said, like a small and broken thing, “You believe I’d ever hurt this town? These people?”
“It seems that I had a great many misbeliefs about you until now,” he said harshly. “I’m not willing to take the chance.”
It stung more for the kernel of truth in it. “I agree,” I said numbly.
That smile that was not a smile widened horribly; thin and sharp like the edge of a blade. “Then let us mark it in blood.”
He’d swept so close his whispered words stirred my hair, and when he drew his knife, his hand brushed my side.
I ached to curl into him and take it all back, and I ached at the same time to run from whatever beast I’d awoken in him.
Adrik opened, without a sliver of feeling, a thin cut on his palm.
I flinched when he grasped my wrist—but he was horribly tender with me as he raised my hand between us and brought the blade to my palm.
I felt only a fleeting sting, quick as a kiss.
His hand swallowed mine whole as he held it.
Adrik spat the words of the bargain with a sharp, clipped tongue. I repeated them quietly, throat tight with tears. He dropped my hand as if burned by it and I found, where he’d drawn my blood, only a thin silver line—curved like riverwaves, or the currents of a mild summer sea.
“There is a pond,” I whispered. “In the eastern forest, on the tallest hill beyond the fields.” I barely dared to speak the words, so horrible and final were they. “You will find him in that pond.”
Adrik did not linger once it was done.
He left me in the darkness and I stood frozen beside the cold hearth until the front door closed with a screech. Until the thunder of hooves passed in the street. Until the flicker of torchlight I’d tracked blurredly through the window vanished among the shifting trees.
I did not allow myself to weep.
I gathered a few belongings scattered around the chamber—the notebook, the set of stained colors, a handful of garments—and stuffed them without care into my satchel.
I was no longer welcome in this house. I felt it in the stiffness of the air.
I dared not imagine what the spirits of the home might do to me if I upset them further.
I did not have to linger long. Just until Adrik returned from the forest with the blue-tinged corpse of the smith. Just long enough to demand the favor.
From the satchel I drew the light pouch of coins.
As the shadows on the floorboards thickened, I counted them—once, twice, a dozen times.
Just enough to rent a room in the tavern.
Just enough to last me until the thaw unfroze the path to the mountain pass.
Just enough, if I asked for the cheapest room, if I helped with dishes and cleaning, if I bought only the scraps from the butcher.
I had survived worse hungers and worse odds.
At the bottom of the satchel, crinkled and half-torn, was the useless map.
I had no trouble finding Mount Briarfell in the dim candlelight.
It loomed like a sharp-toothed predator over the edge of the waste.
But there was no town, far and wide, called Wildemire.
On the cluttered desk I found a quill and ink and placed a stain where I imagined the town.
I scribbled its name carelessly beneath.
The torchlight returned before the ink had dried. I caught only a glimpse of the riders in the street—four on horses and Adrik on his white stag—before I hurried into the parlor.
“They are back,” I said quietly to Lorell.
He’d not moved from his place huddled against the window since I’d last seen him, and he continued to stare blindly at the dark edge of the woods, gnarled fingers rigid as roots in his beard.
Hurried steps disturbed the quiet. The door swung open.
In with the snow came a man who was barely a man and one who looked just slightly older—Yavor’s younger brothers judging by their black curls, bronze skin and grime-caked hands.
Behind them came Yavor, then Adrik. He carried a large bundle of pelt.
“Quick,” he said sharply. “To the study.”
I smelled, as he swept wordlessly past, a crispness of ice and frozen earth.
From the bundle of pelt slipped a hand, blue with death.
I recoiled, catching a shriek between pinched lips.
Lorell shuffled swiftly after them. I watched, from where I’d grown roots on the floor, as they spread a white sheet over the bed I’d called my own for a fleeting moment, and placed the frost-adorned corpse of the blacksmith on top.
A whisper of wind stirred the air. I shuddered as it grazed my jaw as if to beckon me forth.
Let me see you, it hissed tenderly. Let me taste you.
The corpse stirred in the wind, rolling rigidly to the side. Its white, lifeless gaze sank into mine.
It blinked.
“Let me see you,” whispered the blacksmith. “Let me taste you.”
I screeched, tumbling against the table and knocking our abandoned plates with a clatter to the floor. The bloodless lips had moved. I’d seen it. I’d seen it—
Let me see you!
His wail, wild and feral, echoed violently through my flesh. Adrik moved like a shadow to the chamber door, stealing my view. In his eyes was only darkness.
“There is a bed in the attic. Do not disturb us.”
He closed the door on me.
The bitterness of the wind and the blacksmith’s wails followed me as I stumbled up a winding staircase and another.
I heard them still from the straw bed in the cold, wind-lashed attic.
I huddled in its furthest corner, draped in moth-eaten blankets, hands pressed to my ears to drown out the horror.
I stared and I stared from the round window in the roof, mind numb with terror, until a sliver of blue brightened the skies.
I fainted.