Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
You must make haste, girl.
“The water lilies have died, girl.”
I’d returned restlessly to the burrow at dawn after a fitful hour of sleep in a fireside chair. We had passed out in Adrik's parlor, all of us, tired from dance and song. Zora’s snores had stirred me awake.
I found Almira wading in her freezing pond, her rags bundled up at her thighs. The healing water had worked a small miracle on her. I’d not seen her this alive since she'd made the river dance, almost a moon ago.
“Come, girl,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Bring them back.”
I did not flinch at the sting of the blade, nor at the taste of copper on my tongue. A drop of blood bloomed like a crimson inkstain in the murky water.
The monster within—no, the magic within—pricked its ears.
A shiver danced over my spine, like the teasing touch of a warm, familiar hand.
I drew breath and dipped my fingers into the freezing water.
Its cold depths devoured sound and breath.
It was dark down here, save for a tendril of light from above, tainting the water green.
Pain swept sharply through me, from the heart of these lifeless depths into mine.
I clenched my jaw to contain a shriek, delving deeper into the water. Lifeless things drifted in the current. Darkness sprawled at the bottom, black claws climbing out to coil around me and drag me down, down, down.
The darkness drowned me.
A faerie clasped my chin. He screeched with glee as thorns burst from the earth and strangled the life from the old tailor. Rot from life, he shrieked. Make them scream down in the vale. Make them choke, little bird.
Feel the pain. Accept it. Let it pass. But I was drowning in it. I swam for the surface, thrashing. The claws held me fast. There was no life here, not a sliver of warmth—but I remembered…
I remembered where to find it.
I slid my hand into the pocket of my waterlogged coat. Warmth bloomed in my palm. I tightened my fist around the still-warm pebble.
I did not falter before the darkness. I stepped through it, and I was free.
A summer tide surged in my chest and trickled warmly through my veins: A magic most curious. I let it spill from me like a golden thread. I guided it into the depths of the pond, flooding the frozen currents with warmth.
I imagined a wild, wild revel of life; flowers and petals and fish and frogs.
The water sighed in delight.
“That is quite enough, girl!”
I could not make sense at first of the sight before me. There was Almira, gesturing wildly at me, and a thicket of leaves and flowers around her.
She grunted, splashing in the water. “Help me, girl. I cannot get out.”
Indeed, the lilies had grown thickly and densely, barring her escape. I tried my best to don a sombre expression as I snatched her walking stick to move the flowers aside. “I did it,” I whispered. “I did it.”
“Well done, girl,” said Almira, wringing murky water from her dress, “if a bit over the top. We shall work on your restraint next. Now come, girl. Let us plant a seed.” With a toothless grin, she placed an apple seed in my palm. “I have always wanted an apple tree in my garden.”
We planted the seed at the top of the cat-shaped hill.
We planted it deep, deep beneath the snow.
“Adrik!” Lorell cried when I came to his house at noon.
He was pacing the parlor and his face lit up with such relief when he heard the creak of the door, I felt cruel to correct him. His sigh of disappointment was deep and my pride, I’ll admit, a little wounded.
“Good afternoon to you, too,” I snapped.
“It is not that, girl,” he grumbled, sinking into the chair just to stand a moment later. “They are searching the forest again.”
I froze, dread rendering me stiff. “Who is lost?”
“It is Nasha again. They wish to cut her free, at last.”
We sat in silence with a meagre meal of old potatoes neither of us touched.
Lorell busied himself with opening and closing the kitchen cabinets, rummaging through our dwindling stores, and muttering under his breath about pastries and bakers.
When I informed him that it was time for supper, he flinched and patted his bright-red cheeks.
“You head to the bakery, girl. I cannot bear to face him tonight.”
Once I’d returned laden with chocolate tartlets from the bakery, I read to Lorell until the moon hung over the river, a silver half-coin. Torchlight ruptured the darkness between the trees. I leaped from the chair.
“They are back,” I whispered, holding my breath until I caught a glimpse of copper-red in the snow. “He is back.”
Adrik came through the door with a breath of cold and snow, and with a murmur of brine.
I did not see much of the figure bundled in his arms, but I glimpsed a blackened hand and a tangle of vines sprouting from ice-blue veins.
I coughed on a mouthful of bile as I led Lorell after him into the chamber.
When I left to collect Nasha’s wife, I found Almira at the door, face grave and pale as death.
“The wind whispers,” she murmured. “Go home, girl. Rest. We do not need your help tonight, but we will need it tomorrow, and we will need it more and more in the days to come.”
I snapped awake that night, as if roused by an urgent call.
The wind came through the window, filling my ears with a strange whisper.
It led me down, down, down the stairs, that whisper, into the teahouse.
I sat for hours on the floor, golden magic spilling from me as I breathed life back into the death I’d wrought.
I began with the tulips and I did not rest until the roses blushed anew, golden-leafed vines glistened in the candlelight, and thick moss draped like a cloak over the ceiling.
I laughed, breathless and faint, before the world turned black.
I stirred awake still on the floor, blinking up into a pair of dark and worried eyes. Zora scolded me thoroughly, and she would not rest until I was tucked into bed with food and drink, and had sworn an oath not to run to the orchard that same night, as I had first planned.
A madness had taken me. It trickled through me like the static of a coming storm—I found no rest in the bed and none in the kitchen and so I snuck, without alerting Zora, out into the snow-swept streets.
The skies were clear and the stars burned brightly.
In the wind rang a call to make haste, to make to the fields, and to run as swiftly as I could.
So, I did. I sat amid rotten, frostbit crops and—fingers closed around the still-warm pebble—I began to breathe life back into the harvest. I bestowed leaves upon peach trees, bright blossoms onto the wildberry bushes, and I let carrots sprout from the frozen earth.
I reached the burrow at sunrise, breathless and a little wild, hair wet from snow and dew and tears. The wind had urged me there. It had whispered of the wild witch who had come to the end of her strength.
“Tell me how to hold the storm,” I said as I came through the door. Almira was pale as a ghost. I knelt beside her, cradling her trembling hands. Her life was waning; I smelled death in the cold. I saw it in her white-lipped smile. “Tell me how I can free you of this burden.”
“You know,” she said in a paper-thin murmur.
“You have heard the whisper of the wind. You have walked to the pond on the hill, have you not? You have seen the ancient oak. You have felt its anguish.” I clasped her hands tightly, terrified.
I was not prepared for this task. It was too soon, too much.
“You must go there. You must go to the heart of the pain, and you must embrace it. You cannot heal it. You can only contain it.”
“I will,” I promised, though I knew not how.
I had not learned enough. I had not practiced.
I needed more time, but time was feeling ungenerous and death lurked just a whisper away.
I said, with resolve fueled by despair rather than hope, “Let the storm come, Almira. Let it come, and I will catch it. Do not die for it.”
She searched me for a breath, urgently. If she doubted me, she hid it well. Her gaze became firm as steel and soft as spring.
She closed her eyes and breathed out—
The wind hissed, screamed, shrieked. It crashed against doors and windows, lashing the glass with shards of ice.
“You must make haste, girl.”
I did not know where to go, but when I stepped outside the wind swept me forth. It drove me brutally toward the footbridge and further, shoving me up the snow-swept slope of the wildest hill. The path was steep and slick, the storm as sharp as a blade pressed to my throat.
From the crest I saw little of the town, none of the forest. The storm lashed snow across the vale, shrouding the streets in ghostly white. I caught only a glimpse of the churning mists—so near that it loomed like a mountain, a mirror-image of Mount Briarfell, over me.
It would reach the town before noon.
Come dusk, we would roam the streets half-dead.
I carved a thick, deep line into my mangled palm and I drank greedily from the cut. The blood sat harshly on the tip of my tongue and trickled with a hiss from my lips, poking crimson holes into the snow at my feet.
The magic pricked its ears.
A shiver traveled over my spine, drawing a gasp from my cold lips. I buried my fingers deep, deep, deep into the snow. Beneath the ice, the earth was weeping. Shivering roots sprawled like veins through the hill and into the forest.
Pain swept sharply through me, from the heart of the land into mine.
The wind stole a shriek from my lips. A gaping wound lay buried in the snow. An oozing thing from which darkness bled into the near and far reaches of the forest. It clouded, like black smoke, every nook of my mind. A horrible, violent thing that made me blind with guilt and sorrow and fear.
In my mind, I chased that darkness past rock and past stone and along the frozen riverbed.
To a hillcrest where a pond hid amid frosted reeds and three thin-stemmed birches.
To the ancient oak, its lichen-draped trunk as thick as a castle tower, gnarled like the face of a wise woman, its arms sweeping as if to embrace the world, its naked crown scraping at veiled skies.
Deep within its knotted roots lived the darkness.
I could not bear to look at it. I knew that darkness. I had lived that guilt, that sorrow, that fear. I was living it still.
No one understood. No one ever asked. No one could imagine—
This loneliness. This ache to be seen. This urge to tear my chest wide open just for someone to look at my heart and see the cracks, the scars—because I had no words for it, and I feared, above all else, to die quietly with my tale forever unheard.
I would be forgotten, dust returned to dust.
I was cold.
It was not the cold of winter, and not that of the snow. I knew it well. It was the cold of death.
I shivered where I stood.
Was I still on that hill or had I sunk beneath it?
Was I to die here?
Had I not died long ago, on a mist-veiled autumn eve beneath a ribbon-hung elm?
I did not remember life.
I did not remember warmth—
—but I remembered where to find it.
I clasped the still-warm pebble between fingers stiff with death. Warmth bloomed feebly against my frost-adorned palm.
And I remembered… I remembered that I was no longer alone, my tale no longer unheard. That a pair of arms would catch me, when I returned to that hilltop.
I did not falter before the darkness.
I stepped through it, and I was free.
It surged within me like a tide and it trickled like light through my veins: A magic most curious.
I gathered it gently in my palms like catching sunlight from riverwaves.
I was the seed of a tree, buried deep beneath the frozen earth.
I imagined the warmth of spring and the hiss of raindrops burrowing through the soil to quench my thirst. I burst alive, and though it was dark, I knew where to find the light.
I was small and young and fragile, but I carved a path through the ice until I breathed air.
I grew there, upon the hill, taking root.
I weaved these roots like golden thread far and wide: Into the soil and around the trees, into the riverwaves and ponds and mudlands. I breathed warmth back into the forest. I breathed it into the ancient oak.
I spun my magic around its bleeding, aching heart. It shivered as I touched it. I imagined settling there among the tangled roots, beneath thick arms and bare branches. Its pain eased. The mists, lingering just behind that ancient tree, halted.
The earth hummed in delight.
The wind brushed my cheek before it settled, a kiss farewell.
I returned—eyes snapping open—to a town bathed in golden light, and to a pair of moss-green eyes.