The fox had vanished between the ice-shrouded trees, taking the horror with it. The storm was quick to bury the signs of the struggle. I stood guard by the window, the sole witness of a nightmare.
“A wolf came near,” I said voicelessly to Lorell. “It is gone now. I did not mean to startle you.”
I could not speak of it. How could I describe such horrors? Mad dreams. Mad delusions. I’d lived too vividly in my dreams again.
Let me see you, hissed the wind, whistling through the frame.Let me taste you. Let me show you what he did to us.
Lorell returned with a grumble to the workshop. Did he not hear it? Did he not feel the anguish in the wind? The death in the breeze?
Let me see you.
In the far distance, Adrik chased his stag over the nearest hill. The flares had died in the storm. I’d scarcely drawn a trembling breath before the flames burst ablaze on the first hill, then on the second. The wind became a whisper.
Let me taste you.
Then, it stilled.
Beasts emerged often from the forest as I stood watch by the window.
I stiffened whenever one roamed close to the house, but they were merely thin from the winter, not grotesquely wounded and half-dead. By nightfall, half of the forest had moved into town. A family of badgers huddled at the doorstep, an owl nested in the upper kitchen cabinet, and under the stairs slumbered a pair of squirrels.
Lorell had returned to the parlor around midday, grumbling passionately when I informed him that Adrik had not returned. I could not stand to see him so miserable, so I’d spent most of the horribly quiet hours reading spring poems to him. Adrik came late that eve, catching me mid-verse.
I would have best liked to sink beneath the snow, so mortified was I, but Adrik merely smiled, pulled a third chair to the hearth and said, as he began to embroider a pair of socks with daisies, “Do not let me disturb you.”
I cursed him silently and fumbled with the page. The words became unwieldy on my tongue, and as the evening passed I stumbled over them more often than I would have liked. By the time I came to the final page, Lorell was snoring. Adrik had long set his embroideries aside. He flinched when our eyes tangled, half-asleep in his chair. Firelight spilled over the side of his face, catching on a thin cut on his jaw.
“What happened?"
“Ah,” said Adrik, blinking sleepily. “I had a disagreement with the ice sheet on Madina’s well. It did not take kindly to my sword.”
A shadow fell over his face, or perhaps it had been there all night and I’d only noticed it now. He looked, despite his general flawlessness, exhausted.
“You are wearing yourself thin,” I said. “Can no one else in this town shovel snow and catch nightingales?”
“Not as well as I can,” he said with a tired grin. “I’m very nimble.”
“You are not half as nimble as you are vain,” I said gently. “And you do not look after yourself half as well as you do after everyone else.”
He softened, but he refused to look at me as he said, “It will be easier come spring.”
That was how I learned that half-faeries could lie.
When Adrik brought me to the chamber, we discovered a pair of snow hares asleep in my bed. I fed them a bunch of carrots and the three of us slept barely a wink for the screech of the winter storm. The night was bright as day from utter whiteness. Mount Briarfell poked like a needle from the snow, fragile and breakable. How much longer until the spire cracked and buried us alive?
For the first time since I was little, I feared the winter more than I feared the spring.
NINE
So, what are you hiding?
“Oh, but I bring wonderful tidings, girl.”
Sleep must have overcome me at some point, for I snapped awake from a loud purr and the sting of claws through the blanket. Bahra looked with a pleased expression down at me. She was sitting on my thighs, painfully.
“You must know that I spared myself no pain to fulfill your wishes. The rooster—,” she shuddered, “—oh, a vicious beast, that one, but I persevered and brought you its proudest feather. The moonstone caused me even more trouble and I promised the faeries not to say where I found it, but you had better know that the bargain cost me a full meal of cheese. Good Almira, though she suffers so, was generous to provide a flask of the spring water, and she sends it with her dearest wishes.”
“You areexceptional, Bahra,” I said with honest admiration as I beheld the treasures she’d placed in my lap. She lifted her paw graciously to my lips. I planted a loud smack on it.
