Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
You wicked, beautiful witch.
The moon began to wax.
The cold, somehow, worsened and the town’s charm cracked at last. We’d run out of corn, I learned one morning from Olva, and out of carrots too.
On the fields remained only frost-burned remnants of cabbage, and even Almira’s garden succumbed at last to the winter—I found it dead on the same morning I first caught a glimpse of the storm from Lorell’s kitchen window.
Sai no longer baked cakes. He made hardtack from coarse grain and water, and I caught him weeping one morning over a cold stove.
I invited him to join Lorell at the house.
The old man had grown listless in Adrik’s absence, and I sometimes glimpsed him clutching the booklet of spring poems as if he wished to ask for an hour of reading but did not dare.
Sai agreed with quiet delight and when I came for supper, I often found the pair in the parlor armchairs, aglow—despite the darkness—with firelight and rapture.
I saw little of Adrik, and when I did we spoke softly and wearily over the crackle of a low fire in the workshop.
Our burdens seemed somehow lighter here, as if kept out by the mist that lingered on the lowest step.
I would spend some hours fixing drawings in the tomes while Adrik brewed potions.
He did not like to talk of his preparations for the evacuation, and I did not like to talk of my lessons with Almira.
So, we pretended for an hour or two that neither of our burdens existed and we spoke of brighter things.
Of paper flowers and embroidered socks. Of what we might do should we witness another spring.
We would not.
I felt it deep, deep within—where my magic rotted and writhed.
Even the wind had frozen and there was a stillness to the land that made me shiver.
A stillness before the storm. I never lingered near a window long enough to watch for the little fox or for the mists that loomed behind the trees.
I did not think I could bear to see it, but I heard in the streets—whether I liked it or not—that the mists were coming ravenously for the plains.
A week was all we had left.
A week, and all I had accomplished so far was to spill so much of my own blood that Almira’s burrow reeked of it.
She no longer rose from her chair when I came.
She did not even lift her head while I took the knife to my palm and felt into the earth.
I felt only its anguish, trapped for so long in the claws of winter.
I carried that anguish with me long after I left the burrow.
I carried it like a weight I could not shed through dreamscapes of half-dead creatures, of whispering winds, of memories buried deep, deep within, gnashing like hounds at their chains.
I carried it to Zora, who cleaned the cuts and bandaged the palms I’d slice again come morning.
I carried it to Lorell’s house, where we sat with Sai and Zora and with Yavor and his brothers for meals that tasted of dust and bitterness.
We never told Adrik that his cooking had changed, or that his potions no longer worked, or that the tea he made was always cold.
He was gone more than he was here—preparing to move a whole town into the wasteland and beyond should I, against all odds and reason, learn to tame the storm. In his absence, I grew colder.
A week before the full moon—I had just roused the teapots from their slumber in the cabinet—a dark figure stood in front of the teahouse. I peeked outside and stifled a sigh when I spotted a deep red cloak.
“May I help you?” I asked Malek, mustering my most welcoming voice despite his frown.
He grunted. “Do you work here?”
“I do.”
“When are you opening?”
“Whenever the first customer arrives.”
“How will you know that a customer has arrived if you are not open?” I made a soft, non-committal sound, which irritated him enough to narrow his scarred brow. “Well,” he said impatiently, “I am a customer.”
I smiled and flipped the sign on the door. “Then we are open.”
“The owner is not here?”
“She will be down shortly, I presume.”
“Then I shall return at a later time. Thank you for your efforts, madam.”
I watched him scurry like a dog up the street toward the castle hill. When I told her later of the encounter, Zora only laughed.
“Ah, that’s just Malek,” she said. “He’s always been like this.”
“She is asleep,” said Adrik when I arrived at the burrow that morning.
He was stacking firewood beneath the dead willow. I knew this meant he’d tried to wake her and found that he could not. That he’d checked her pulse and her breathing and dribbled five spoons of cabbage soup into her mouth to strengthen her.
I stood shivering amid shrivelled roses, a withered thing amid withered things.
There was nothing left within me. Not a kernel of hope.
Not a shred of warmth. I’d stood bleeding in the snow and bleeding in the river.
I’d felt through the earth into the darkness and I’d allowed it to devour me, again and again.
I’d walked the depths of the darkest times and vilest memories. I had braved them alone, and nothing.
“It smells like blood inside,” Adrik murmured. He’d come close, not close enough to touch. As if scared I might crumble if he breathed too harshly at me. “Like yours.”
“It needs to be done.”
“Perhaps it is time to attempt something new.”
Rage welled sharply within me, plucking the words from my tongue. I hissed brokenly and then I wailed, unshackled at last from the mask of numbness I’d been wearing. From the chains I’d used to leash this terror threatening to drown me.
“I have tried it all. I have tried and tried and tried, Adrik. Do you not think I have given it all that I have? All that I am? You do not get to come here and tell me that I am not good enough.”
“That is not what I said,” he murmured. The shadows and the ice melted from his face.
He took a step and another, and then he held me as one might cradle a cracked glass just to keep it from shattering fully.
His breaths brushed slowly and sweetly over my neck.
In his embrace, the blade of sorrow dulled.
“You have been alone to bear this burden, have you not?” he whispered into my hair. “Forgive me, Ana. Forgive me.”
I shuddered in his arms, undone by his warmth. “It is not your fault.”
“I should have asked more. I should have known, when you refused to talk about your lessons, that something was amiss. Does Almira guide you? Does she walk you through wielding your powers? Or have you been watering her floors with your blood in silence?”
Face pressed into his shirt, I mumbled, “I prefer the silence over the snarling.”
“She snarls at you?” Adrik slid a finger under my jaw to raise my chin. There was a certain tilt to his brow that told me he was quietly furious.
“She is weak. It wears on her mind.”
“She is strong enough to snarl at you.”
I made a pathetic sound, something between a sob and a scream. “I do not know what to do, Adrik. I do not know.”
He drew his thumb tenderly over my cheek.
“You are coming with me. No more spilling blood amid the roses.” I shook my head, frenzied.
I could not afford to lose a minute, not a second.
Adrik hummed, a twinkle in his eyes—tired and a little clouded, but a twinkle still.
“You are coming with me. The king orders it.”
“Tell the king I do not care for his orders.” The words came sharply, but I could not conceal a sliver of amusement. Ice trickled slowly from my veins, thawed by the flutter of my heart as his breath swept over me. I’d missed his mischief.
“The king might exile you for such treasonous words.”
“I do not think he would dare,” I whispered sweetly. “I think he enjoys my presence too much.”
“Too much for his own good,” Adrik agreed, lips tilting into that teasing smile I’d not seen in too long.
“He seems, in fact, to have a rather excruciating weakness for you. I think it would delight him immensely if you agreed to come.” The smile sharpened, and his voice lowered.
“If you refuse, he might just whisk you off. He is half of a wicked faerie, after all.”
I raised a brow, breath quickening. “He forgets that I am a whole wicked witch who might just punish him for such ideas.”
“Tempting.”
A shiver of something I’d well subdued swept over me. An echo of a moonlit night on a marble balcony, of the taste of peaches and the tides on my lips. Adrik’s eyes darkened and it was, for once, not the darkness of grief.
I retreated, frightened of how quickly he burned through my fences.
Had I not decided, in the dark hours, that whatever unspoken thing lingered between us was better left to rot?
Had I not sworn to be cautious and sharp, and to guard my heart above all?
I could not afford such distractions, and neither could he.
“Fine. Where are we going?”
Adrik lingered in the space where we’d stood tangled. “The mountains. Almira will fade come moonrise without another vial of healing water.”
There was a pond, not far, Adrik told me as we hiked up the castle hill and made for a path hewn into the rock behind a squeaking iron gate.
A pond, and a well that had existed long before the lovers first arrived in Wildemire.
It lay tucked into a hidden gorge of ice and snow, and it hummed—as we neared—with a strange power.
We trekked a winding path deeper into the snow, until Mount Briarfell loomed over us like a vulture, and the path disappeared into a fissure in the ice.
“How much time will the healing water give Almira?” I asked.
Far above the town, the air was crisp and sweet with dawn.
I drew the cold deeply into my chest. I’d been holding my breath for the better part of a moon.
The stench of blood had gnawed at me. The doubting eyes watching me from a deathbed of leaves; the withered roses, dead willow, the black-veined earth.