Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
Tell me, and I will let you go.
“Ana.”
We knelt face to face in the snow, Adrik and I.
He was cradling my hands, pressing them to his lips as if to breathe warmth into something frozen—life into something dead.
I glanced past him at the forest. No churning mists.
No storm, not a cloud to be seen. Just frozen trees catching the sun and gentle hills under bright blue skies.
The cold was tamed and it was I who held its leash.
It was I who had grown the roots that flooded the forest with warmth.
I ached under the strain, as if clutching the edge of a cliff, fingers cramping and hands weak from the effort.
I knew relief awaited if I just let go. Relief, then death.
So, I held on, clenching my jaw. The ache remained an itch at the back of my mind.
A black stain on a blank canvas that drew my attention and scattered my thoughts.
“Almira?” I managed to croak.
“She will be fine.”
“The town?”
“Safe.” Adrik cradled my cheek. “You?”
I did not know what to answer. How to speak of such pain and sorrow. How to explain to him the weight of the storm.
If I lost control of it… If the magic slipped from me… “I can manage until… for a while… I can manage until we are prepared to leave.”
A shadow passed over Adrik. “Come,” he said.
He plucked me like a wildflower off my feet, cradling me tightly against his chest as he strode downhill; so tightly I felt the thud of his heart against mine.
I must have fainted, for when I came back around we were at the castle.
Adrik whisked into the reading room and placed me gently on a settee.
I huddled beneath a blanket and stared unseeing into the distance.
I was drawn tight like the string of a bow, but worse.
As if something deep within me—something with claws and fangs—tore me slowly apart.
I was not strong enough for this task. The storm would slip from me too soon.
“How did you know it was time?” asked Adrik, kneeling beside me.
“The wind…” I shook my head to clear the daze, a vain effort. “You must go, Adrik. Tell the people to gather. I do not know—” I coughed, breath thin with exertion. “I do not think I can hold it for long.”
“Almira can show you—”
I laughed bitterly. “Almira almost died, Adrik. She almost died from this burden, and she is much stronger than I.”
“She is old. You are not.”
My fingertips tingled with cold. I stared at the anguished, furious lines on his face and choked on a terrible realisation—that he’d thought I would change my mind.
That he’d hoped I would choose to stay and to shoulder this terrible burden for the town rather than lead his people through the storm.
I could not… I could not…
This was just another cage in another place, trapped for my magic, used and abused for my powers. I would be a tool again. A tool, and never something more. Never free.
“We cannot remain in these cursed lands,” I hissed. “You knew—”
“I knew that you were afraid. I knew you did not yet see the beauty and the power of your magic.” Adrik rose, looming like a thunder cloud.
I leaped to my feet, anger filling me with new strength.
“How can you wish to leave and let all this come to ruin now that you know you possess the power to save it? We will figure out how to break this curse, but until then—”
“You would ask me to bear this burden? For however long it takes, you would make me suffer like this? What if we never figure it out? Would you demand that I shoulder the storm until I fade from it, too?” A veil shrouded my thoughts, thick as a churning wall of mist. I could not think past it—I could not think past the anguish.
He wanted to use me. To wield me. I was just a tool, just a power for him to command.
He was half of a faerie, after all. “You would sit by and watch me die for it like you did with Almira?”
I’d gone too far. I knew it as it spilled from me, this horrible accusation.
Adrik reeled as if struck, face for a moment slack from the impact of my despicable words.
I could not even claim it had been a mistake.
I’d shaped the words carefully into a knife and aimed it thoroughly at his weakest spot.
He left me alone in the cold. His steps echoed from the moonstone, ringing sharply in my ears long after the door had slammed behind him. His hurt lingered, thick and haunting. I stood for a long time as if one with the marble—cold and stone-hearted.
This was who I was. A wild creature, something venom-tongued and sharp-clawed. I was not used to being around others and I never should be—
I stilled, blinking as if torn from a nightmare. A convenient excuse, Adrik had called it once, and it was nothing but the bitter truth.
If the town thought me mad for chasing half-crazed with regret through the snow, I did not care. I did not feel their stares and I did not feel the cold—I felt only the breeze at my back, like a guiding hand as I ran to the riverbank.
I caught a glimpse of him before he dipped behind a cluster of birch trees, down where the river coiled around a rock.
I chased after him, steps like whispers in the snow.
If he heard me approach, he did not let on.
He stood there, in the shadow of the rock, staring with such gloom and despair at the blue ice that the words froze for a moment in my throat.
“Forgive me,” I breathed, heart and voice cracking.
He did not turn. I stumbled down the ice-clad slope and touched his shoulder before I’d thought better of it. He tensed, but he did not recoil.
“I have lived much of my life in a cage. I’ve had to hide and I’ve had to run and I’ve always had to bow to the will of others. I am terrified of stepping from one cage into the next, Adrik. I am terrified that I will never be more than a tool.”
My own words cut me deep. Perhaps the part of me that longed most to be understood, was the part most afraid to be seen. But Adrik—he understood. He lived with the same fear; that he possessed no worth other than serving the greater good.
Adrik closed the space between us, breathing warmth over me, and he stood so close that he might have heard the stutter of my aching heart.
“A convenient excuse, I reckon,” he said, a sharp echo of a quarrel long past. “To pretend that you cannot see how utterly adored you are just for you. You know what I think? I think it is easier to act like nothing but duty ties you to this town than to admit that you are scared to call it a home.”
He brushed a stray curl from my face, gently and furiously. There cracked something in me, another wall worn thin by his tender persistence.
“I have not had a home since I was seventeen, and not much of one before that either.
This—“ I gestured around me, “—is all I ever told myself I did not need, just to survive the loneliness.” I shivered as I said out loud the thought that was splitting me apart.
“I ache for the girl who needed this town and never found it. That is the untold side of your tale—this town might have a curious habit of finding the right people at the right time, but what of all the others? Not all of them find it, Adrik. I did not find it.”
“You found it now. You are here, and you are about to walk away because you think it is easier to leave than to risk losing it.”
“I know it is.”
His hands came to cradle my face—to brush my tear-streaked cheeks.
His heated gaze twined with mine, stealing my breath.
I remembered, faintly, that he was mad at me and I a little mad at him, and I remembered from when I’d recklessly kissed his cheek that he tasted of all the things I held dear.
He smelled of them, too. Of the wild and of the cold, and faintly of peaches and honey.
I remembered that I liked his softness, and now that there was no trace of it, I found that I liked that too—the harsh lines of his jaw, the greed in his flame-lit gaze, the slight roughness of his hands against my skin.
“Then tell me, Ana. Tell me that this can never be worth any pain. Tell me that this-” he tangled a hand in my curls and searched me for an answer, wildly and desperately, “—can never be worth the risk. If you must walk away, then shatter my hope first.” He bent lower, so low I did not know if his breath or his lips brushed the corner of my mouth.
“Tell me, and we will lead these people through the storm. Tell me, and I will let you go.”
I could not. How could I tell him such lies when he had laid his truth bare before me? How could I cower in the face of his courage? It had cost him to be so raw. I caught the nervous flicker of his gaze as he awaited my verdict. As he prepared to be cut down where he stood.
Fear seized me so viciously, I almost did what I knew best—turn cold and callous and break something just to hide my own cracks. But I drew breath, and I looked at him, and I calmed.
And then, I pushed quickly to the tips of my toes, and I kissed him. I’d meant for it to be quick, chaste. A misstep while drunk with the heat of a quarrel.
It was not chaste, and it was not quick.
Adrik melted into me and I into him, and from his chest came a sound that made me lose all sense; cracked with relief, wild with despair. He kissed me like that, too—frantically and fiercely. His arms caged me as if they’d been waiting for this. I knew mine had.
Beneath his lips I became a wild thing, but not the fearful sort of wild. It was the lovely sort of wild—the brave and daring sort of wild which had once lured me into the midnight forest to bathe beneath the moon. I’d known hunger, but never quite like this. Never quite so vicious and urgent.
I slipped a hand to his neck, nails dancing gently over his skin to lure another groan from him.
Adrik drew back, eyes bright with need. “I did not think—” he whispered, voice low. “I did not dare hope.”
He watched me as he brushed his lips to mine, once, twice.
When I gasped, he weaved a hand into my curls and tilted my face toward the skies; toward him.
He kissed me deeper, snarled impatiently when it was still not enough.
The ground vanished. I wound my legs like vines around him while he held me, pressing me so fiercely against him I felt the ripple of muscles beneath the leather.
I followed these carved lines with searching fingers, drawing sounds from his throat that rang like music in my ears.
“Ana,” he breathed against me.
I did not know if it was a curse or a plea. He nipped at my lower lip, leaving a delicious sting.
We tumbled into the snow, never breaking the kiss.
I was afraid if I stopped for a moment to think, the spell of madness would break and we’d come back to our senses. I let Adrik wrap me in his cloak, hand dipping under my blouse, fingers sinking fiercely into my skin to draw me closer.
I might have died like this, oblivious to the cold around us for the heat within me, had his hair not tickled my nose and coaxed a breathless laugh from me.
I pulled away to glance to the side. It was not his hair that tickled me—it was a blade of grass, long-stemmed and feather-topped and green and alive. I stared at it, uncertain whether I should be glad to see it or furious with it for interrupting.
“Ana,” Adrik breathed. He was not looking at me. Propped up on his elbows, reddened lips parted, he stared somewhere between us.
I knew what I’d find before I looked, and I laughed. I felt it in the breeze: A sliver of warmth. I felt it deep in the soil where we had kissed: A sigh of relief.
A whisper of new life.
We lay, limbs and clothes tangled, in a bed of wildflowers, in a glade amid the snow, brimming with spring.
“I have never seen such aliveness,” Adrik whispered. He was looking at me now—tenderly.
I could not speak. Cautiously, for a small part of me still feared that I might kill it, I reached for a pink-blossomed flower. I caressed it, brushed its petals. The air stirred with golden dust. The wind sang and the flowers brightened.
Their scent stirred a memory, just as it had the morning I’d first come to the workshop.
I remembered a meadow in the prime of spring near the creek.
And I remembered… I remembered not just that my mother sang madly to the wind.
I remembered that the breeze filled with warmth and that I’d listened in awe to her song.
I remembered that the wind sang back to us.
That it brushed our hair, gently and sweetly, as if we were something dear to it.
I remembered…
I remembered that there lived happiness in the corners of my memories. That there had been much darkness, but there had been brightness, too.
For a long time, still wrapped in Adrik’s cloak, I sat amid the flowers and cried.
There was such light and relief within me, such weightlessness and gladness, that I knew not how to contain it.
Magic spilled like a golden river from me into the world.
It thawed the riverbank and adorned the trees with emerald leaves and plump fruit.
It tethered me, that golden river, to the earth and to the skies.
I belonged here, to these soils veined with the golden roots of my magic.
I belonged to these wilds.
This burden would not break me, for I would not have to bear it alone. I saw it clearly, beneath these bright skies: That I’d found a purpose here amid the flowers and in this strange, wonderful town.
I blushed as I untangled our legs and cloaks and straightened my blouse.
“Come,” I said breathlessly to Adrik. “There is much to do.”