She ambled with a benevolent sigh to the door. I watched guiltily as the storm swallowed her. As soon as I was well enough to work in the kitchen, I would prepare the most sumptuous supper she had ever eaten.
The storm days passed as swiftly and blurredly as the flurries in the window. The monster within me burrowed deep, deep down. It had never slept so restfully—at times I forgot it existed at all. I also forgot about the hounds, and about the half-dead, and about bargains and favors, and about the thaw.
Huddled in warm blankets with tea, none of it seemed quite as terrible, and my fear retreated for once into the far corners of my mind.
As the town sank deeper and deeper into snow, Adrik and I spent the mornings by the hearth while he told me stories. I stared from the parlor window as he talked: At the snow-blurred silhouette of Mount Briarfell, its fissured peak rising sharply from the snow. In its shade, just above the town, lay a steep cliff, and on that cliff perched a castle. I’d missed it at first, small as it was. Its pale stone walls blended perfectly with the snow, and only the richly adorned windows and the gilded roofs betrayed its hiding place.
I stared gloomily over the town and the hills. The more Adrik talked, the less I could bear the thought of braving the perils ofthe mountain pass, of leaving this warmth behind. Perhaps, if I succeeded in making the bargain with Adrik, I could remain for a season or two in this town before I set off to distant shores. Just to rest my weary soul and the legs tired from a decade of running. I could almost see it—
But I never allowed such hopes to take root.
Bahra had yet to hunt down the items for the spirit, though she assured me she was working tirelessly on it. She graced us often with her presence and brought without fail a slew of bad tidings. Her visits were always accompanied by word of another task that demanded Adrik’s prompt attention—a sheet of ice over Madina’s well, a lost dog, a wagon trapped beneath a fallen tree, the birth of a foal. He would return much later, wet and white with snow, riddled with weariness. He had peace only in the evening hours, when doors and shutters closed and families huddled in the smallest chamber of their homes to save firewood. Then, he would sit with me and Lorell by the hearth and tell us stories of the warmer seasons. I had a feeling that these tales fed his own spirit more than ours. I cherished them all the same.
“Is it not a burden, too?” I asked one night, as he carried me back to the chamber. “To remember the lives of so many? To carry the weight of their secrets?”
“It used to be.”
I knew morning had come only by the sound of Adrik’s shovel.
The storm had thickened overnight. I denied it at first—just a trick of my bleary eyes— but when I squinted from the frost-crusted window, I no longer saw the edge of Lorell’s garden.It had been snowing for five days.
A herd of red deer passed by like travellers, so close to the window I could have petted them. The promise of feeding hands had lured them close. The herd made, according to Adrik, for Almira’s burrow where the trees in the orchard still bent from the weight of apples.
“Is she alright out there?”
A shadow passed over Adrik’s face and vanished quickly behind a good-humored smile. "She is safe.”
I dared not press him further about it, reminded of the withered garden.
The world remained horribly quiet that day, for the snow devoured all sound and even the wind had lost its voice from screeching. Adrik had barely cut himself a path to the front door and shaken the snow from his locks before Bahra arrived to summon him back into the storm—Kalina’s yard needed shoveling and Marin’s boat required repairs and it seemed to me that no one in this town was capable of anything at all without Adrik.
I spent the morning looking fearfully into the storm. The trees groaned horribly under the weight of the snow and the thicket teemed with beasts desperate for food and warmth.
From the bramble emerged a shadow.
I shrieked, leaping to my feeble legs and landing with a crash amid a pile of books. The monster within me had not stirred in an age, and still—
A hound, spindly and covered in mottled fur, approached. I pinched the knotted scar. The hound remained, strange and misshapen as it stumbled on twisted legs to the house, to the window.
“Now, now,” grumbled Lorell, coming from the workshop.
“Go,” I cried. “Go back down and hide.”
To the kitchen. To the kitchen to find a knife.
The hound loomed in the pane. It lifted its gaze—
I shrieked, blood freezing in my veins. This beast… It was no hound. It was a wolf. A great wolf with oozing gashes on its chest and heaving flank. From the wounds trickled black blood and deep within… Deep within, between bones and sinew, sprouted delicate pink blossoms.
The eyes were bone-white.
Let me see you, screeched the wind.Let me taste you.
A flash of copper-red burst over the hillcrest. The fox flew more than it ran, colliding with a horrible screech with the creature of tar and bloom. The wolf, grotesquely beautiful with its blossoming insides, did not fight. It only blinked at me while the fox, twice its size, sank its fangs into the throat and ripped and ripped and ripped.
I could not look away. Its bone-white gaze snared me, coiling with anguish and with cold. I still stared as it slumped with a final yelp at the paws of the fox. Bright, luminous eyes met mine, stark with terror. We stood for a moment, the fox and I, face to face with just the window between us. Then it buried its fangs into the wolf’s side and hauled it toward the forest.
“Now, now,” grumbled Lorell again.
