I laughed, breathless and faint, before the world turned black.
I stirred awake still on the floor, blinking up into a pair of dark and worried eyes. Zora scolded me thoroughly, and she would not rest until I was tucked into bed with food and drink, and had sworn an oath not to run to the orchard that same night, as I had first planned.
A madness had taken me. It trickled through me like the static of a coming storm—I found no rest in the bed and none in the kitchen and so I snuck, without alerting Zora, out into the snow-swept streets.
The skies were clear and the stars burned brightly.
In the wind rang a call to make haste, to make to the fields, and to run as swiftly as I could. So, I did. I sat amid rotten, frostbit crops and—fingers closed around the still-warm pebble—I began to breathe life back into the harvest. I bestowed leaves upon peach trees, bright blossoms onto the wildberry bushes, and I let carrots sprout from the frozen earth.
I reached the burrow at sunrise, breathless and a little wild, hair wet from snow and dew and tears. The wind had urged me there. It had whispered of the wild witch who had come to the end of her strength.
“Tell me how to hold the storm,” I said as I came through the door. Almira was pale as a ghost. I knelt beside her, cradling her trembling hands. Her life was waning; I smelled death in the cold. I saw it in her white-lipped smile. “Tell me how I can free you of this burden.”
“You know,” she said in a paper-thin murmur. “You have heard the whisper of the wind. You have walked to the pond on the hill, have you not? You have seen the ancient oak. You have felt its anguish.” I clasped her hands tightly, terrified. I was not prepared for this task. It was too soon, too much. “You must go there. You must go to the heart of the pain, and you must embrace it. You cannot heal it. You can only contain it.”
“I will,” I promised, though I knew not how. I had not learned enough. I had not practiced. I needed more time, but time was feeling ungenerous and death lurked just a whisper away. I said, with resolve fueled by despair rather than hope, “Let the storm come, Almira. Let it come, and I will catch it. Do not die for it.”
She searched me for a breath, urgently. If she doubted me, she hid it well. Her gaze became firm as steel and soft as spring.
She closed her eyes and breathed out—
The wind hissed, screamed, shrieked. It crashed against doors and windows, lashing the glass with shards of ice.
“You must make haste, girl.”
I did not know where to go, but when I stepped outside the wind swept me forth. It drove me brutally toward the footbridge and further, shoving me up the snow-swept slope of the wildest hill. The path was steep and slick, the storm as sharp as a blade pressed to my throat.
From the crest I saw little of the town, none of the forest. The storm lashed snow across the vale, shrouding the streets in ghostly white. I caught only a glimpse of the churning mists—so near that it loomed like a mountain, a mirror-image of Mount Briarfell, over me.
It would reach the town before noon.
Come dusk, we would roam the streets half-dead.
I carved a thick, deep line into my mangled palm and I drank greedily from the cut. The blood sat harshly on the tip of my tongue and trickled with a hiss from my lips, poking crimson holes into the snow at my feet.
The magic pricked its ears.
A shiver traveled over my spine, drawing a gasp from my cold lips. I buried my fingers deep, deep, deep into the snow. Beneath the ice, the earth was weeping. Shivering roots sprawled like veins through the hill and into the forest.
Pain swept sharply through me, from the heart of the land into mine.
The wind stole a shriek from my lips. A gaping wound lay buried in the snow. An oozing thing from which darkness bled into the near and far reaches of the forest. It clouded, like black smoke, every nook of my mind. A horrible, violent thing that made me blind with guilt and sorrow and fear.
In my mind, I chased that darkness past rock and past stone and along the frozen riverbed. To a hillcrest where a pond hid amid frosted reeds and three thin-stemmed birches. To the ancient oak, its lichen-draped trunk as thick as a castle tower, gnarled like the face of a wise woman, its arms sweeping as if to embrace the world, its naked crown scraping at veiled skies.
Deep within its knotted roots lived the darkness.
I could not bear to look at it. Iknewthat darkness. I had lived that guilt, that sorrow, that fear. I was living it still.
No one understood. No one ever asked. No one could imagine—
Thisloneliness. This ache to be seen. This urge to tear my chest wide open just for someone to look at my heart and see the cracks, the scars—because I had no words for it, and I feared, above all else, to die quietly with my tale forever unheard.
I would be forgotten, dust returned to dust.
I was cold.
It was not the cold of winter, and not that of the snow. I knew it well. It was the cold of death.
