The dove’s wings flap and ruffle in my hands. When I open my eyes, its heart pounds so hard that its breast moves with each beat. Those little eyes flutter open, too, and then it’s up, flying from wall to wall.
Worried the little one might be scared and confused, I shove open the shutters and try guiding it outside. When it lingers, wings flapping wildly around my head, I grab the broom and swat at the air, until it finally gives up and dives for the window.
Smiling, I hurry to the ledge and watch the dove take off into the cold day, vanishing in the distance near the orchards and the forest’s boundary. I’m a little tired and dizzy, and a cold sweat slicks my brow, but I’ll recover.
For a long moment, I close my eyes, smile fading as a familiar eeriness settles within me. This is the strangest part of healing a life so close to its end, when the stolen death coils inside me like a sinking shadow. I only have a handful of deaths tucked away, but I feel the darkness of each one.
Finally, the eerie feeling passes, and I move to close the shutters. Instead, something makes me pause and take in the view of another morning in the village—possibly my last.
To the west, where Frostwater Wood curves over the hills that lead to the western mountain range, the midnight shift of Witch Walkers moves along the forest’s edge near the watchtower, gliding through the gloom like ghosts. And in the mist, just beyond the village green, a few women appear from the east. They carry baskets of apples on their heads, surrounded by chilly clouds of their own breath. All else is calm. For now. A village on the cusp of waking for the most dreaded day of the year.
After stoking the fire, I exchange my cloak for a shawl and head to my worktable. The sun is almost up, which means Finn will wake soon, and like the others carrying their apples, Mother will return from the orchard at any moment. There’s work to do, a plan I must see to the end, though it’s hard to imagine leaving everyone and everything I’ve ever known.
But I cannot stay. We live in a world where war simmers between two of Tiressia’s continental breaks—the Eastland Territories and the Summerlands to the south. For centuries, every eastern ruler has tried to conquer the southern lands, longing to claim the City of Ruin—a citadel believed to hold the Grove of the Gods, the burial ground of Tiressia’s deities.
Or so says the myth.
To the Frost King’s credit, I’ve never known war, even in a world divided. Tiressia once existed as a single continent populated by people of all kinds. A massive quake struck the land five thousand years ago, dividing it into what would eventually become four kingdoms, each with its own god—including the archipelago to the west of the Northlands, known as the Western Drifts.
The Northlands have remained neutral under a centuries-old treatywith the East, though our citizens—whether protecting the coast, the mountains, the valley, the Iceland Plains, or the king himself—must live according to the Frost King’s wishes, guardians of this land above all else. It’s noble, I suppose, to give up one’s freedoms and family to live a life of magickal servitude, but it’s also not the life I want. And each Collecting Day, I’m reminded how little say I have in the matter.
I believe I now have the power to change this. To end the Frost King’s immortal life and make us a free land governed by its people. Free to live aswechoose.
And that’s what I aim to do.
Father’s old whetstone sits at the bottom of his trunk. I gather it from beneath his other work tools and scoop a cup of rainwater from the wash bucket for the grinding task. Just as I sit to work, Mother bursts into the cottage carrying a bushel of apples. She kicks the door shut, but not before a bitter wind out of Frostwater Wood follows her inside. With a grunt, she drops the laden basket on the hand-woven rug covering our wooden floor.
The cold wraps around me, and I tug my shawl tighter, the colorful one Nephele knitted ages ago. Lately, my sister’s memory is everywhere. Even the rime-covered apples at my feet make me think of her. Nephele looks very much like my father—her snow-white skin, pale blonde hair, and sky-blue eyes. Yet she loved the orchard and enjoyed the Collecting Day harvest like my mother. She also didn’t mind living on the Northland Break, one of four land masses that made up Tiressia’s shattered empire. She wasn’t bothered by the touch of winter that clings to our valley after every harvest moon either.
I’m the opposite. I hate living in the Northlands, I hate the Collecting Day harvest, and I hate this time of year. Each passing autumn day is another reminder that the Witch Collector is coming, and that Silver Hollow, with its rolling green hills and sun-washed flaxen fields, will soon be buried beneath winter’s suffocating frost.
Though I’m the spitting image of my mother, with our dark hair, tanned skin, and midnight-blue eyes, I like to imagine that I’m more like my father when it comes to living in the North. He enjoyed telling me stories of his time on the southern coast—about the sun and the beach,and swimming in the waves. He always spoke about it with such fondness.
Mother wipes a strand of gray hair from her brow and props elegant hands on her wide hips. “I know you’ll think I’m foolish,” she says, “but this will be a good day, my girl. I feel it in my bones.”
Mother’s witch’s marks are few, her magick simple. The swirls of her ability glisten under a fine sheen of cold sweat, faint silver etchings curving up the tawny skin of her slender neck.
Setting the cup of rainwater aside, I force a smile. My fingers are stiff with cold when I sign, “I am sure you are right. I should get to peeling.”
A beat later, I spin on my stool, turning away from her and those knowing eyes. My smile vanishes as I light the candles that illuminate my work area. I want to avoid this conversation. This confident speech happens every year, and every year the Witch Collector proves Mother’s intuition—or wishful thinking—wrong.
Still, I could never call my mother foolish for hoping for the best. Though a dreamer with her head in the stars, she’s the wisest person I’ve ever known. It’s just that this day is never good, and this year it might be worse than ever before.
Because of me.
I unlock the worktable drawer and retrieve our salvation. The reason I’ve found such bravery for taking back our lives: Father’s old knife.The God Knife, he called it, said to have been fashioned by an Eastland sorcerer from the broken rib of a long-dead god. It had been missing since the winter after my sister was chosen to go to Winterhold, lost in the snow-covered fields the day Father’s heart stopped beating.
A few weeks ago, a group of farmers found the blade during harvest, half buried in the soil of a soon-to-be fallow field. Warek—Finn and Hel’s father—recognized the knife by its unusual white granite hilt, strange black blade, and the amber stone set into the pommel. He made sure the farmers returned the weapon to my mother.
“What’s so special about a God Knife?”I asked one night when I was still small enough to sit on Father’s knee. He carried that knife everywhere he went. There was no question that it was important.
He’d just come in from harvest. I still remember the way he smelled: like musk and field. I traced the green veins in his hand,following his dark witch’s marks—the marks of a reaper—that branched like black tree roots over his knotty knuckles.
“The God Knife is a god remnant,”he answered. “God bone, fashioned by the hand of Un Drallag the Sorcerer. It harkens to the soul of the god from whose body the bone was taken. It can kill anyone and anything, the blessed and the cursed, the forever living and the risen dead—even other gods.”
“Yet you keep it,”I’d signed, not understanding the depth of his words, or that they would one day change my world.
His only reply had been: “Yes, daughter. I keep it. Because I must.”
