The hand around mine fluttered again.
I snapped with a gasp back to myself. Water bubbled merrily from the crack. A sob broke from me, filled with awe and disbelief. Gold dust settled over the ice, over my hands, in Adrik’s hair. He laughed, brokenly and softly, as he twined our fingers and brought my palm to his lips.
“Evana,” he whispered. His breath tickled, startling a snicker from me.
“I missed you,” I said to him without thinking. To see that smile again, unguarded, was almost more joy than I could bear. I noticed only now how dark we had become. How shrouded in the shadows of our burdens.
“Come,” he said, smiling as he pulled me to my feet. “We shall live a little.”
We gathered in Adrik’s cottage that eve—Zora, Sai, Lorell, and the three brothers—for a small celebration. I had barely deterred Zora from inviting the whole town for drink and dance to the castle. I was nowhere near so confident that this cautious progress meant I could tame a cursed storm.
Still, we ate in high spirits that night and even Bahra, who took it upon herself to finish our leftovers, found for once little to lament.
“He is not the most pleasant man, is he?” said Adrik when I complained passionately about my encounters with Malek.
“I’ve no idea how you put up with me when I first arrived.”
“You were not half so bad,” said Adrik with a pained grin.
“Liar,” I whispered with a smile.
We sat with berry-wine and tartlets in the well-used fireside chairs until the hour grew late and the shadows thick. From the kitchen came the soft tune of a harp plucking its own strings and even softer whispers. I caught a glimpse of Sai and Lorell at the kitchen table tucked into the farthest corner of the cottage, oblivious to the rest of us.
A quiet winter eve among friends.
I giggled madly when Zora burst into song and almost spit my drink from laughing when Yavor abandoned his notebook and began to dance wildly in the firelight. A drunken, reckless heat bloomed in me whenever I took a sip of wine or felt a burning gaze on me. It called to me relentlessly, that moss-green gaze, and the more I forbid myself from heeding its call, the less I could bear it. Whenever I glanced up, I found Adrik already looking at me. I felt sharply awake, aching with hopes that had blossomed without my notice, with desires better left unexplored.
We were doomed, all of us. The earth ached. The forest hungered. And the wind… The wind whispered of death at the door. I alone could save us. I alone would be to blame if the storm came. If Almira died.
“Allow me to assist in whatever murder you’re scheming,” said Zora as she flung herself beside me into the chair.
I scooched to make space and allowed her to press another chalice of elderberry wine into my hand. “It is not murdering I need help with. It is stopping a cursed storm from turning us all strange.”
Zora's snicker faded and she said sternly, “You are in your head again.”
“I never left it.”
“Liar,” she said with a meaningful tilt of the brow. “You were full of merriment earlier. Shall I get Adrik to tease you again?” I shushed her with a soft knock against the ribs, cheeks aflame, but this only fueled her. She whispered fiendishly, “I bet he’d be more than eager to assist in making you forget your troubles tonight.”
My gaze slipped, without warning, to where I’d last seen Adrik. He stood in conversation with Radan near the kitchen. As if I’d called him, his eyes snapped to mine—bright and a little wicked. A slow smile danced at the corners of his lips.
I swallowed a gasp. “Perhaps for a night,” I said quietly. “But in the morning, the troubles will return and I’ll have one more to add to the list.”
There was a heavy silence as Zora took my mangled hands and squeezed them gently. “That you carry this burden for us is more than we could have asked. That you are willing to go through this torment—” She drew a long, shivering breath. “That you aretryingis enough. You cannot fail, Evana.” I swallowed, my throat stinging sharply. Zora continued, with a glance at her father, at Adrik, “You must forgive us for clinging so desperately to this place. It has saved many of us. I did not return to Wildemire by choice. I fled Kresting after my masters attempted to peddle my magic to a faerie. This town… It has kept me safe since.”
A haven, these forgotten lands. A place where people like us could wield our magic and shape it into something wondrous. A refuge for the mad and the strange and the magical. It was about to disappear.
I slipped out the door, when I thought no one was looking, to catch my breath. The cold lashed viciously at me as I stepped beneath the ribbon-hung elm. I huddled against its trunk. My bones felt brittle, about to snap from the burden I carried.
“One should not brood when there is dance to be had.”
I smiled weakly at Adrik as he joined me beneath the elm. “I do not see you dancing either.”
“You took the warmth with you.”
I did not ask what he meant—I felt it, too. The cold that gathered in his absence in the gaps between my ribs. I glanced through the firelit window, framing Zora and the brothers as they danced and sang, like an alive painting depicting a lie.
“Is Emond feeling better?”
