Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Nothing but death awaits in the forest.
Irefused, for a heartbeat, to look.
Nothing about the low, gentle voice boded well for me.
“Evana,” Adrik said again, desperately, and I became weak.
I glanced up into moss-green eyes, and I wished to vanish. I had no use for that soft, haunted look he wore. His compassion only sharpened my shame. I found my fingers tangled with his, keeping me from clawing without thought at the knotted scar. He held me tenderly, though I did not deserve it.
“Evana, are you harmed?”
“It was you.” I shivered violently. “The fox. It was you.”
“I am half of a faerie, remember?”
All these quiet evening hours and restless nights, the foul blood of hounds spilled in the snow, the half-dead woman, the strange wolf. He had been there. He had been there, and he’d never said a thing. I slackened in his grasp, struck by a desperate, urgent thought.
“Fulfill my favour. Rid me of this vileness. Rid me of this wild magic. My mother… She asked the spirits for it. She cursed me with it. Please. Ask them now to free me from it.”
I loathed the flicker in his eyes—the understanding. “That is why—” He interrupted himself with a shake of his head. “I cannot grant you this favor.”
“Please.” I lurched at him, wild with hope. It was slipping from my grasp, that hope, scattering like snow in the wind. “You hear them as she did. Please, Adrik. They might listen to you. They might yet free me from this burden.”
“I cannot.” A shadow fell over him. “The terms of our bargain. Your favor cannot harm the town or its people. What you ask of me will bring us to ruin.”
I clasped his cloak, desperate to make him see sense.
“No, Adrik, I will bring this town to ruin. This is no normal winter. I am killing the forest, the town, the harvest. You will die because of me, because of this vile magic. You said once that you must ensure that these people do not pay a terrible price for sheltering me.” I drew a sharp, burning breath. “Zora has paid the price.”
His palm came to cup my jaw, his heat stinging my icy skin.
“Zora is fine. She’d burned the vines into a crisp by the time I arrived.
” I did not know what I’d expected of him—anger perhaps, or more of the same loathing that had blossomed late last night.
I had not expected such grief. “You did not curse us. We have suffered this winter for five years.”
Had I not felt the truth of it in the hiss of the wind? In the gaping wound buried beneath ice. In the anguish that sprawled from the darkest corners of the soil into the spindliest roots. The grass shivered with it and the trees wept.
“Five years,” I breathed. “How?”
“A curse. We do not know much, save this: That a group of faeries and mages attacked the town on midsummer eve, that it began to snow that night, and that the forest has not been the same since. It is vengeful, and it tears people from our midst who venture too far inside. The wind brings these horrible half-dead beasts into town whenever the flares weaken.” His gaze pierced me as he said, “I told you nothing but death awaits out here.”
“How have you survived for so long?”
“Almira,” Adrik said darkly. “She cannot lift the curse but her magic guards us from the brunt of it.” He glanced at the storm that lurked like a beast in wait at the far end of the road.
“She tames the storm as well as she can. She provides us with the harvest. Her magic alone is the reason we live.”
He did not say the words, but he wore their weight like a veil over his face. “She is old. Her magic fades.”
“Indeed.” Hope bloomed softly and strangely on his face, starkly out of place amid this grief.
“We have never had such cold, never this much snow.” With another glance at the churning mists, he said, “The storm draws close. What it does to the beasts, what it did to Emond—it will do the same to all of us. Almira cannot hold it much longer. She will die from the strain, and we will become strange things that are not quite alive, not quite dead.” He said all this with much grief, and with an keenness I could not fathom.
“We thought—no, I thought—that you could help us.”
I blinked as if shaken from a dream, certain I’d misheard, or that I’d lost the thread of our conversation. I shrouded my thoughts for a moment with denial, but my heart had already begun to crack.
“You knew,” I said numbly. “You knew of my magic. How long?”
“Does it matter?”
“How long?”
Adrik refused to look at me as he said, “Since I first saw you in the wasteland. Since the pond became dust.”
I yanked free of him. “You were there.”
The snow and trees blurred into something dark and twisted as I went back in my mind to that hill amid rock, the pond amid stone. I remembered a forest black with death, and the distant gnash of teeth, and I remembered—only now—a pair of dark, luminous eyes among the weeping branches of a willow.
The sharp, cunning gaze of a fox.
He was half of a wicked faerie, was he not?
Perhaps I’d been as blind to his vileness as he’d been to mine before I asked him for the bargain.
An ugliness lurked behind his handsome face and good humor—I’d known it from the start.
I was hunting, he’d admitted when I’d asked his reason for venturing into the wasteland.
I thrust the words out before I choked on them. “You let it happen. You allowed the wolves to come. You did not save me at all—you trapped me here.”
Through the blur of rage I saw Adrik reach for me. I recoiled with a cracked sob and he stumbled, sinking to his knees in the snow. He remained there.
“I’d been searching for a witch for moons.
I did not know you then, Evana. I had to ensure you’d remain long enough in Wildemire that I might convince you to save us.
To settle among us and bear Almira’s burden.
” He lowered his head, a king bowing under the weight of an invisible crown. “I meant only to save my people.”
“You meant to use me.”
“I meant to offer you a home. A place to live and a purpose.”
“A purpose, perhaps, but at the cost of freedom. I have lived such a life before.” The rage in my veins had burned out quickly.
In its wake remained scorched earth and a hollow cold.
I wanted to despise Adrik more than I could.
How could I blame him for choosing his people over a strange, half-dead witch?
I was not so selfish to think that he should have honored my freedom more than their survival.
Somehow, it did not ease the hurt. “I cannot help you,” I whispered. “I cannot save your people.”
A snarl broke from his throat. “You’d leave us to die? You’d leave us to the ice and the mist? You’d let our children become mindless beasts of the wild, all because I offended you?”
“It may surprise you,” I snapped, “that some things are not about you. You are not so important to me that I’d kill thousands to spite you.
” I softened a little under his anguished gaze.
“I possess no magic that can help you, Adrik.
Mine is as cursed as this forest. It will bring death before it ever brings a sliver of life.
You are better off abandoning this place and rebuilding elsewhere. "
“We cannot.” His voice was hollow as the wind. “These people are as stubborn as they are kind. They refused to go when the winter first began. Half of them refuse even now. Some believe that we can break the curse, still. Some believe that the thaw will come tomorrow.”
“And what do you believe, king?”
He twitched as if the word cut him. “I believe that you are our last hope, Evana. I believe—” he drew a shaking breath, “I know that we have waited too long. That even if I convinced them to go now, we would not make it past the forest. There are babes, and the sick, and the old. Almira is weak. I believe—” His voice cracked on a sob.
I could not hate him enough to wish this weight on him.
“I did not ask to be king, Evana. These people put their faith in me because I saved them once, and now they hope I will save them again. I do not deserve that faith. I can never live up to it.” He paused again to breathe, a broken rasp that burrowed like a knife into my chest. "I have to try. Please, Evana. I will not ask again that you stay. I ask only that you help us escape. That you hold the storm long enough to let us pass into the wasteland. I will convince them to go. I will make them see sense.”
“I cannot,” I whispered. “I cannot, Adrik. This magic... I was not born with it. I was cursed. It kills. It has from the beginning.” I reached out to trace the shoulders curved under the burden of a death-damned people, but I remembered myself and buried my hands in the pocket of my coat. “I would help if I could.”
Adrik's gaze flickered to the churning mists.
From their depths came a furious, biting wind.
“The storm comes. It will reach the town before the moon has waned and waxed again.” He reached cautiously for me.
I did not shrink from him this time. His warmth dulled the bite of the cold, the ache in my chest. “The road will be impassable before sunrise. I will let you go tonight, while you still can. I will let you go, I swear it, but listen to me first.”
With a flick of his wrist, Adrik conjured a gathering of lights. They danced like fireflies amid the ruins, spilling glimmers of gold over moss and stone. His face glowed faintly in the light.
“I see your fear, Evana. I see it, and I know it. I have lived that fear. I came to this town a broken warrior with a magic that showed me only the misery of the world. Almira taught me that my magic will mirror what I channel into it—fear, anger, warmth, life. Magic is not good nor bad. It is not kind nor vile. It can be whatever we want it to be.” He coaxed my hand gently from the pocket and cradled it as if to share the last shred of warmth lingering in his palm. “May I show you?”
Dread sprawled through me, veiling for a heartbeat all sense and reason.
I feared that he was wrong about my magic, and I feared even more that he was right.
That I had spent all these seasons running only from myself.
I ached to tear my hands from his grasp and flee into the mist just to avoid learning the truth—but I looked at him, drew breath, and I said, “Show me.”
The warmth of a sunlit wave swept over me.
A sparkle danced in the dark and nestled into the corners of my vision.
The world swam, became brighter and softer, blurred at the edges.
Adrik still kneeled before me and we were still in the ruins—but not quite.
We had stepped beyond a veil. On this side of it, we were not alone. Spirits drifted endlessly past.
There lived small ones between mossy stones, larger ones amid splintered beams, bright ones in the hollow trunk of the tree that upheld the roof with a gnarled branch.
Some of them possessed limbs and little heads, like dolls made of rock and leaves.
Others were like shadows, drifting past like a winter breeze.
There were those that flickered like candlelight, and others that slithered like water over rocks. These were the lesser spirits.
There was one at the far end of the house, nestled into the maw of a crumbling hearth, who watched over his kin with one keen eye.
The other eye honed in on Adrik. It was a bearded creature, small and grey and hunched like an old man.
It melted a little whenever I looked straight at it, and when I glanced from the side, it grew tall and bright.
You bring a visitor, King of the Forgotten Lands. I remember her. In another life, beyond another veil, I believe I watched her dance.
I should have been frightened or unsettled, but there was no place for such things in my wonder-struck heart. Was this what my mother had seen? Was this the realm she had visited often? Was this the veil behind which she had vanished for hours in the long and dark winters before her death?
“We cannot stay here long,” said Adrik with a voice like a dream and a gaze veiled with a sheen of liquid gold.
“This is the tale the spirits of this house will tell me when I am vengeful.”
The ruin tilted once, spinning me wildly around.
A man, blurred like a ghost, cowered in the shade of the cornerstone. He clutched a satchel in one hand, a knife in the other. Moonlight caught on the tip of his blade. Outside scurried a shadow, panting and cursing. The man in the shade readied his knife. He buried it, with a cackle, in flesh.
“This is the tale it will tell me whenever I am grieving.”
The world tilted once more.
A woman, young and scarred from the blight-fever, bent over a figure bundled in pelt.
The ruin was not yet a ruin—just an abandoned, cobwebbed house.
Amid the bundle lay a man, face flushed with fever.
The woman wept for him. The stars burned brightly through the night, then faded—one by one. So did the man.
“This is the tale it will tell me when I am glad.”
The ruin was neither a ruin, nor abandoned.
Two women stood on the threshold of a quaint stone cottage, hand in hand, and peered into what was about to become their home.
A place to call their own. A house in which to raise their future children, sit side by side by the fireplace, and plant a wild garden.
The vision faded and the house crumbled—abandoned after the women and their children and their children’s children had gone Beyond. We returned to our side of the veil, Adrik and I, hands entwined like vines.
“Almira can teach you, Evana,” he said. “She can teach you, as she taught me, to wield this magic. To turn this burden into a gift.”
The wind whistled through my teeth and rattled my skull. I reached into the pocket of the coat, remembering weakly that I’d found a small comfort within, not long ago. The pebble was still warm, as if left to bask in the sun. It hummed with a faint echo of a brighter time.
Was I truly so feeble of heart to run? To choose certain death in the wasteland over attempting to save these people?
If Adrik was right and fear corrupted my magic rather than a foulness within me…
If there lived not a monster deep inside, but a power that might lead the town through the storm—I was not so spineless to run from it, was I?
“The hounds,” I breathed with sudden terror. I had not seen a trace of them. “Did you kill them tonight?”
“There were none.”
Whatever thin passage remained through the storm, the beasts must not have found it. What a vile thing, this mist, if it repelled even such horrid creatures.
I clutched the pebble, feeling like a bird set free—or, at least, as free as a bird allowed to choose its own cage.
“Take me back.”