Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
It is a misery, and it is a joy.
Ihad not made it far from the town.
I must have wandered in tangles through the shifting forest, for we passed the gate within a half-hour. Adrik half-carried me through the snow in his fox form.
A bridge creaked underfoot, guiding us over the frozen river and down a twisting lantern-lit path into a meadow.
Amid a half-circle of pines, nestled against the edge of the forest, stood a charming cottage of steep thatched roofs, latticed windows, and green shutters.
A pair of oaks stood watch over a frost-withered garden.
Amid the naked bushes drifted motes of light in a brine-scented breeze.
“Home,” said Adrik roughly. He’d looked strong and awake in his fox form, but now the strain of his burden gathered like shadows in the hollow beneath his cheeks. “No need to spend more time in the cold than we must, unless you’d rather return to Lorell—”
“This is fine,” I said.
It was a well-loved place, filled with well-loved things.
A home brimming with keepsakes. The shelves were packed with favorite books, the armchairs worn thin from long winter eves spent among friends.
A home that honored the spirits and received their blessings in return: Talismans dangled over thresholds, the broom stood on its head, and through the parlor window, I glimpsed an old elm hung with fluttering ribbons.
Huddled into a fireside chair, I watched quietly while Adrik lit the hearth.
On the mantle sat a collection of animal figurines, carefully arranged.
The same was true of the shelves, tables and desks: Thousands of knick-knacks, placed with much love—candles, ornaments, stacks of letters, flower-painted porcelain and dried bouquets.
I’d not taken Adrik for a collector, though the faeries were known for it.
I came across a pair of socks amid the cushion, half-embroidered with winterberries, autumn-red leaves and a little robin. A mirror image of the drawings that graced the front of my notebook.
“I am making them for you.” Adrik's gaze was dark with apprehension as he observed me. “Forgive me. What I did, I did out of despair.”
“I understand.”
I did not blame him for his choice, knowing now the burden on his shoulders. This hurt of mine was a terribly selfish and intimate thing.
I care, he had said.
It was not a lie. He never claimed to care about me. He cared about his people, as he should. About their survival. About this town. He cared about me because he had use for me. A means to an end—every word, every smile, every minute spent warmly together. It was all tainted now.
“Evana.” He came closer with slow and cautious steps, as if to approach a scared animal. “I never wished to hurt you. I never wished to—”
“Please,” I breathed. “If nothing else, spare me at least your feigned concern. I know what you want from me now. I have agreed to stay. Let us not pretend that there was more to it.”
“Is that what you choose to believe?” He had the nerve to look struck. “That I am so calculating and heartless?”
“I see no evidence to the contrary,” I lied, glaring at the socks.
He knelt before me, this strange king without a crown, and he took my hand almost harshly in his.
“Do you not have it before you?” He pressed my palm to his chest, right over his thundering heart.
“Did you not feel it in the hours I spent looking at you while you listened to my tales? I tried, Evana. I tried not to notice you, and still—I know that your breath will hitch when I speak of a kiss. That your cheeks flush neither the shade of a rose nor that of wildberries, but precisely the pink of a winter sunrise above the far hills, and that I feel a little drunk whenever I am the one who caused it. That you will get wistful whenever I speak of the spring, more so even than I, and that you will smile softly and secretly when I make a fool of myself. That you look never more alive than when I speak fondly of wild things, for deep down you must know that you are one of them.” I must have stared at him with such horror, he withdrew his hand and said, “Yes, Evana, I notice you even when I try my utmost not to. I think about you far more than I ought. It is a misery, and it is a joy.”
Because I was weak-hearted, I wanted to accuse him of lying—it seemed more prudent than to allow his words to take root in my mind.
But there was such rawness in his gaze, such fearful anticipation, that I found enough courage to say, “Your eyes are the color of rivermoss speckled with golden late-winter sun.” I stared past him into the flames, unable to bear his tender surprise.
“I notice you too, Adrik.” We remained in sharp silence until I whispered, “May I tell you a tale?”
That night, I told him the tale of the girl who ran through the woods with the wind, and of the monster who had carved himself a cave into her wild heart.
In the Before, I was a wild and curious thing; fingers stained from berries and dirt, arms scratched red from thorns, bare feet sullied with mud from the creek. I chased the birds and the breeze into the glade, and I sat amid flowers to sing ancient songs to the wind.
A man came for us on the brink of my fifth winter, and he found us—my mother and me—curled up beneath the gnarled elm.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
As vile as the rot and better off dead.
That was what they said in the village, and the man and his knife had come to make it true. My mother pleaded with the spirits, that night beneath the elm, and the spirits felt wicked and generous. They cursed me with a gift; a gift that saved us from the man who’d come to kill us.
I killed him first.
In the After, my mother changed—grew sickly and feeble of mind—and she claimed that this was the reason: That the spirits had warned her of vile creatures who sought to abuse my powers, and that there lived a faerie in the near swamp who’d heard of the girl with the wild, dark magic.
That he had sent his hounds after me, as he did with all strange and powerful things.
My mother claimed she had bargained with the spirits for my protection, and to grant them strength, she fed them slivers of her mind.
She kept me well-hidden for six bleak and lonesome winters, until she died on the brink of the seventh—she had not truly been there in a while, a husk without thought except for an iron will to save me.
The spirits abandoned us that night.
My father, though I am loath to call him so, was absent on his better days and a terror on his worse. He was a slave to the bottle, and when spring came and the lordling of the swamp found me, my father sold my magic to him.
I knew peace only in the winter, when frost crept over the hills and the land lay buried beneath a layer of snow. Then, my magic burrowed into a dark hole within me and there it slept, fitfully and easily disturbed, until spring brought the land once more to life.
I ran when I was seventeen. I was fortunate that winter came early that year and that the snow began to fall that night.
My magic went to sleep, and the lordling’s hounds lost my trail.
Over the winter I found work in Kresting, and come spring I chased the snow deep into the mountains.
I almost starved that year. I knew not how to hunt and I lived on nuts I gathered at the base of withered trees and on scraps left by other beasts.
That is what I became that spring: a beast. A wild thing, but not the lovely sort of wild I was in the Before.
The words came easily from my lips. As if I had long shaped these unspoken darknesses into a tale in my mind. As if that tale had rested so long on the tip of my tongue, waiting to be released, that I was at once lighter in the absence of its weight. I felt, for once, no shame at all.
“The hounds hunt me still. Come spring, I must go into the mountains and hide in the snow. That is where I was going when you found me.”
A crack ran through Adrik’s eyes, a fissure beyond which danced a flame. He drew my hand once more roughly to his blazing heart. He was shaking.
“Say the word. Say it, and I will hunt that faerie to the edge of this world, into the torment that awaits him Beyond. Say it, and I shall become a hound under your command.”
I was inclined to curb such dramatic declarations, but his rage was a spark and I was but a withered tangle of dead dreams and hopes. It set me ablaze, that spark, like a flame catching kindling. Rage flared in hollows and forgotten corners, chasing the ice from my bones.
I laughed sharply. “You forget yourself, king. Revenge, I fear, must wait. Your people need you more than I do.”
He retreated swiftly, as if indeed remembering himself. “Forgive me, Evana. I have nothing to offer but my sword and my rage.”
In the warmth of the fire, and under the heat of his stare, my thoughts melted like wax. I sank deeply into the cushions, and before darkness took me, I murmured, “You have given me much more.”