Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
Just a mad woman with mad visions.
Islid, cursing and screeching, over root and stone.
Down, down, down the frozen slope I tumbled, to the fir tree shrouding the foot of the hill in shadow. I screeched Adrik’s name and I sobbed it, thrashing wildly to regain my footing. I would kill him for this. I would tear him apart.
To shove me. To sacrifice himself for me. How dare he?
The forest blurred; spinning into glaring white with patches of green. How dare he leave me alone in this world when I’d only just found him?
A scream came from the crest.
No, not a scream.
A wail, long and anguished.
Faint from the fall, I crawled on bruised hands and knees over biting ice.
Toward the blurred outline of the hilltop.
Toward the tall figure shrouded in thick, white mist. I did not feel the cold, nor the pain—only the aching pull toward that hillcrest, toward Adrik. He would not die. I would not allow it.
I howled in fury as the mists churned, sharpening his screams into something feral.
His wails poured like an avalanche down the hill, knocking me back, drowning me with his anguish.
I saw nothing but him—at the top of the hill, his striking face contorted into something bizarre, his limbs stiff with tension but twitching as the mist danced around him.
Our eyes tangled one last time, like a kiss farewell.
The mists swallowed him.
I screamed for him until my throat bled. I screeched, nails breaking as I clawed at ice and roots and earth, pulling up just to stumble and fall, again and again. As if the forest itself was determined to stop me from chasing Adrik.
The mist billowed on the crest, but it no longer crept closer. It had taken what it desired. It had taken him from me.
A roar of fury ripped from me, like a knife through the throat.
He was alive. The earth still echoed with his heartbeat, quick and aching.
I tightened his cloak around my shoulders, breathing in his scent, and I searched, with numb fingers, for the still-warm pebble as I had done a hundred times before.
There was only cold in that pocket. No echo of his voice, his laugh.
None of the warmth that seemed to pour from the stone whenever I held it.
As if a sliver of him lived within.
I flinched, stung by my own thought.
A pebble, imbued with an echo of Adrik’s warmth.
A drop of his magic, alive in the calming tea he brewed, in the meals he conjured, in the potions that worked wonders.
A sliver of his kindness, channeled through his magic into the world around him.
I’d felt it that morning when I first wielded my powers at the mountain spring: His warmth sweeping over me like sunlit waves, infusing me with courage. He had channelled his magic into me.
I trembled as I thought of the tale of Wildemire’s first house. Had Adrik not said that the girl possessed a touch of the same magic? An echo of her kindness and her welcome still lived in this town. It had a knack for finding the right people at the right time because of her.
Heart pounding, I looked to the mist.
What if those who communed with the spirits could not just coax memories and emotions from them, but imbued the spirits in turn with slivers of magic? Magic was, after all, a river and it carried into the world whatever we fed it.
What if Adrik had done just that when he’d come to rest at the base of the eldest tree—the gnarled, knotted oak from which darkness spread into the veins of the forest. The tidekissed warrior, broken and jaded from the war and from the hunt. Had he not told me that he’d prepared to die there?
What if his magic, like mine, had manifested as a curse born of fear and guilt and sorrow?
An echo of his pain, alive in the eternal winter over Wildemire.
I had to find him. I had to tell him it was not too late to change the course of our tale. He had inspired me to rewrite mine. I’d help him do the same. It did not have to end like this. Not with cold and loss.
Not with fear.
I collected a drop of blood from the slice above my heart, brushed it to my lips and into the snow.
There was no still-warm pebble in my palm, but I did not need it.
I remembered warmth. It lived in flower-tiled hearths and in soot-covered stoves.
It lived in the pockets of fur-lined coats and beneath quilted blankets.
It lived in the old alchemist who grumbled more than he spoke, and in the soldier who was a baker at heart, and in his child who breathed life into the mundane.
It lived in the king who never wished to be king but loved his people too fiercely to refuse them a thing.
It was almost too much to bear; the joy of it all.
I let it free.
A summer tide surged within me, and it trickled warmly through my veins: A magic most curious. I cradled it like golden light in my palms, letting it spill into the earth. The roots and the trees sighed in delight.
In a small circle around my feet, the snow melted; feathery grass shivered in the breeze, and when I stepped forth, wildflowers blossomed beneath my feet. Tender leaves popped from the branches I brushed carelessly aside. The air was sweet with the scent of damp, living earth.
On the crest, I reached out to brush a finger against the wall of mist. It bit me, a short, sharp prick like a thorn. I spun golden threads into its churning depths until it moved aside with a sullen growl.
I stepped into its cold, wet embrace. I gasped, drawing air into my lungs.
It turned into steam, leaving me choked for breath.
I was trapped. Trapped in a ravine of stark white walls.
Trapped amid clouds intent to strangle me.
The path narrowed as I pushed breathlessly forth, slick tendrils brushing against me, pricking me.
There was no sound at all, nothing to betray wherever the mists had taken Adrik.
And yet—
I knew.
I’d stumbled there on naked feet—an old miller, an alchemist, a blacksmith. I’d seen in my mind the gnarled oak beyond the pond. I carried the burden of its anguish and its fury and I knew—
I knew that I had to go to that oak.
That I would find Adrik there.
I stumbled through the bramble, screeching as I came across gold-tinted snow and the reek of rot.
I hurried past, retching and hoping not to catch a glimpse of tar-black claws, a striking face, dead and shredded.
I slipped at the edge of the pond, barely catching myself before I tumbled through the human-shaped hole in the ice.
The mist grew thicker still, despite my magic.
It was stronger here, so close to the heart of the pain.
I coughed into the hem of the cloak. I could scarcely see my own outstretched hand.
The mist writhed, brushing my cheeks with wraith-like fingers.
Tendrils curled up my nose, into my mouth, my mind—
My thoughts ran slow as mud and came in fragments. I began to inspect one idea and ended with another, over and over. A moment later, I had no recollection of it at all. I was cold. I had to go home. Adrik was lost. I had to find him. I was cold. I had to go home.
Again and again.
I hissed as a thorned branch kissed my cheek.
Its sting bloomed on my skin, the pain clearing my thoughts for just a moment.
I’d gone in circles around the pond, flattening the snow beneath errant steps.
While I looked in terror at the evidence of my madness, I felt it tug at me once more.
The veil of mist snuck up my nose and into my mouth, turning my thoughts into clouds.
I clenched my teeth and I buried my nails into the knotted scar on my palm. The pain anchored me. It was enough to buy me a minute or two. I shivered violently, panic rising as the mist pressed in.
Had the spirits forsaken me? Had I angered them in some way, or—
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
A madness, my mother’s murmurs deep in the night, and the incense she fed to the hearth to please the spirit, and the twigs she buried at the house-corners.
She never dared to go into the forest without asking its spirits for permission, and she took a talisman with her, woven of nettle and pine-needles.
And I remembered... I remembered not just that the wind roared and my mother made us stand foolishly in an unshapely circle of birch twigs.
No, I remembered that the storm gentled as we huddled together, that it brushed blossom-sweet kisses to the crowns of our hair and allowed us soon to carry on in fairer weather.
I’d beg her, whenever we walked into the village, to wear her clothes as normal people did and to put her shoes back on, but she’d claim that the villagers were madder than her for refusing to heed her.
With numb, trembling fingers I unfastened my bootlaces.
I hissed at the sting of cold as I stood in just my embroidered socks in the snow.
I hung the cloak over a branch and slipped out of my blouse, cursing as the wind lashed my bare skin.
I trapped a scream between my teeth as I rid myself of my trousers.
With shaking hands I grasped its seams and turned it inside out, then slipped back into it.
I did the same with my blouse and with the cloak.
My mother had taught me this: If I wished to find the path back home to go barefooted, and if I wished to find the path ahead to put the shoes on the wrong foot. That is what I did with a pained groan. It made my feet ache.
I scraped my hands raw as I tore twigs from the birches and stuffed them into the folds of the cloak. I noticed only when I sat near the pond, bleeding fingers twisting the nettle I’d grown with magic into a misshapen talisman, that I was laughing.
I was mad.
It was not the madness of the mist.
It was the beautiful, breathtaking madness of allowing myself to honor the ways my mother had taught me. Of realizing that she had, after all, possessed more sense than those who had called her senseless.