“I hope you’re happy. You’ve embarrassed us,” my father hissed, turning back to my mother.
Her jaw clenched. “Iembarrassed us?”
He took a step closer. “Our daughter disappears in the dead of night, gets dragged home by some backwoods halfwit in a bathrobe, and I’m the problem?”
He turned away before she could answer, storming across the room, his hands trembling as he poured himself a drink.
He always kept a bottle of ale on the side table by his chair. It was the first thing he reached for when his temper flared, but it always just made things worse.
“You’re always the problem,” my mother retorted. “Because you don’t listen. Not to me. Not to her.”
She scooped me up, and I threw my arms around her neck. Then she covered my ears, as she always did when they fought.
“I know you don’t want to hear it, Frida,” my father muttered, lifting the glass to his lips. She didn’t respond. She just started walking up the stairs to my room. But I still heard him.
“There’s something wrong with her.”
CHAPTER FOUR
KERA
Five months had passed since Licia found me, when I woke to a world gone white. A hushed stillness blanketed everything, and the snow piled so high it swallowed my boots whole.
I’d started school that fall. I’d begged my parents, said I wanted to learn to read and write, to know more about the world, and my parents finally agreed, but only if Einar went with me.
It was about a half-hour walk into the village. We followed the main road, then cut through the market, where the smells of fresh bread and dried fish tangled in the air. Einar walked me in every morning, and I talked the whole time. I told him everything—who sat where, what I was learning, which kids kept getting into fights, and about the boy who pushed me during playtime.
Einar stopped walking for a second. “Wait. Someone pushed you?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“If anyone messes with you again,” he said, his voice low and serious, “you tell me. Got it?”
I nodded. He was annoying most of the time, but at least he was paying attention. He always was.
After a while, my family even let me play with Licia alone again. I hadn’t thought they would, but I think they got tired of keeping such a close eye on me. Or maybe they just wanted me to have something that felt normal.
A childhood.
But I still felt it, they didn’t want me to leave. I felt it in their eyes, in the pause in my mother’s breath when I came home late. In Einar finding excuses to check in on me, and my father asking too many questions at dinner. Their fear was a leash. Thin and invisible, but tight.
It had beenfive months.
They wanted answers. Names. They wanted the monsters who took me caught and hanged in the clearing, but I didn’t remember their features. In all of my nightmares, they were always faceless.
I just remembered the cage. The dagger that pierced my heart. The cold, the blood and…dying.
I couldn’t give them what they wanted, and I think they always feared that whoever took me would come back.
Licia and I went to the lake that afternoon. The cold seeped through my gloves as I trudged through the snow. I’d never loved winter. But Licia did. She had been waiting all year for the lake to freeze over, and the moment the ice looked even halfway ready, she was there, tapping her knuckles against the ice, listening to it. Testing it. She started where the lake was shallow, where even if it cracked, she’d only fall knee-deep. And when she was satisfied, she laced up her ice skates and took off.
She moved like something from a fairytale, not like a clumsy troll wrapped in scarves, clomping through the snow like me. No, Licia glided, light and effortless, like a fairy, perhaps, or a princess. I told her I didn’t know how to skate, but the truth was that we couldn’t afford skates.
Licia must have known.
I was sipping hot cocoa on the morning of my birthday when I heard a knock at the door, and there she was, cheeks flushed pink from the cold winds, holding the most beautifully wrapped gift I had ever seen. The ribbon itself would have been more than enough.
“Open it,” she said, nudging the box toward me.
