Let me see you. Let me taste you.
My blood turned cold. A painful prickle crept down my spine. I glanced over my shoulder, expecting a bone-white glare, a grotesquely wounded creature. There was nothing save a few red-cheeked children, huddled against a near door to weather the wind. Adrik had gone ahead. He stood rigidly at the top of the stairs, staring where the sun hung low over the forest. The flares on the hills had died. I climbed the steps, heart pounding from pain, from bracing myself against the furious wind. Swirls of ice lashed me as I stood beside him.
“Go inside,” he shouted over the storm.
From the mountain came a crack and from the heart of the town a deafening clang. Then, so abruptly I swayed where I stood, the storm died.
Silence gripped the world by its throat.
We stood, all of us, in complete stillness—even the river.
A sheet of blue ice lay over it, trapping riverwaves mid-rise. The result was something beautifully grotesque; a wild ravel of frozen spires and spikes, iridescent in the fleeting sunlight.
“Spring will come soon,” said Adrik, but even his good humor could not conceal the tremble in his voice.
He set wordlessly off to relight the flares.
THIRTEEN
A favor for a favor.
While Adrik cooked that evening, it began to snow again.
As we sat for a supper of cheese-stuffed mushrooms, a hearty pork stew, and carrots glazed with honey, Adrik entertained us with tales of Sai’s grandest adventures and best pastries—a little too cheerfully and brightly. He tried to hide it, but I caught him glancing from the window again and again.
"Enough about the baker," sputtered Lorell after a while. His lips twitched, and he was mangling his slice of bread with a knife.
There came a knock and—before I’d looked up—the creak of the door and a breath of horrible cold. Yavor swept inside, coat and hair white with snow.
“Forgive me,” he said with a glance at our half-finished meals. “Pa has still not returned.”
A strange look passed between him and Adrik.
“We must go now,” said Adrik. I’d barely blinked before he had gathered his boots and slipped tensely into his cloak. The firelight painted his face with dark shadows and turned himinto something that frightened me, almost. “Before the storm worsens. If he has been gone since morning—”
“Since the night,” corrected Yavor with a tremble. “We just learned from Kalina that he passed the farms still in the dark. She thought he was heading for the tavern, but he never arrived.”
Lorell, who’d ceased his assault on the bread, said with surprising firmness and feeling, “Emond will be fine. You must not linger in the woods.”
I flinched before I’d quite grasped the horror of what was unfolding. As if my mind was slow to capture the thought that lurked at its edge, but my body was quick to remember this: brambles biting at a soot-blackened apron, the weight of a sturdy hammer to carve a path toward a frozen pond, ice pecking at grime-stained hands.
These same hands, three decades younger, now helped Adrik to fasten his scabbard while I reeled from dark, dark dread.
Yavor, eldest son of Emond. The blacksmith, gone since the night and I… I knew where to find him, did I not?
I knew there’d be something horrible in that pond on the hill, something dead and blue, adorned with delicate frost-flowers.
I bit back the sting of bile, shaking like a storm-tossed leaf as Adrik said to Lorell and me, “If we do not return, leave us to the forest. No one else will risk their life, understood?”
His gaze lingered a moment too long on mine, as if he’d seen a sliver of something strange in it. He tilted his head in quiet question.
I could not tell him. What madness had befallen me to even consider it? What madness had awoken deep within me to torment me with dreams of the dead? Not dreams, butvisions.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
As vile as the rot and better off dead.
I could not tell him. But to let him ride into the storm without direction, to let him risk his life just to save myself from shame and scorn—I was not so heartless, was I? I was not so spineless. He saved my life before he knew me, and I hesitated to save him now? To return the favor?
