As I listened to Bahra’s tale of the battle of wits and claws she’d waged against the rooster, I became faint with dreams ofdistant shores and summer-sweet forests, and with an aching longing for a season of respite. A seed of hope had taken quietly root during the storm days, and try as I might, it refused to wither.
Bahra had just left me to hunt mice in Emond’s forge, when Almira swept inside.
“Spring will come soon,” said Almira. Indeed, the snowfall had thinned to sleet.“You should walk around the house a little. The boy will be glad to have help in the workshop. It’s time you put those young legs of yours to use, girl.”
She was pale as frost under her wide-brimmed hat, and she did not even seem to notice the withered garden as she led me to a washroom behind the kitchen. I dared not ask her to revive the flowers, remembering her weakness when she'd last wielded her magic. I still had time, while the snow remained, before I needed the belladonna flower. Inside the bath, the air was thick with steam, and it smelled sweetly of pine needles and almonds. The scent was achingly familiar—our bath in the Ravenwoods had smelled just like this, in my earliest winters. The steam would linger even in the absence of hot coals, as long as we left an offering of a pine twig and a piece of soap in the basin after we’d bathed.
I washed my face and scrubbed my body with a rich soap, and I tamed my curls and glossed them with an oil Almira had brought. When I looked into the misted mirror over the basin, I could not recount a time I’d looked as lovely. A week of rest and warm meals had restored some health to my hollow face.
“Zora sends these,” said Almira as she thrust a pile of clothes at me. “She has excellent taste.”
I glanced suspiciously at her hat and braced myself for the worst. I need not have worried. I emerged from the washroom in a fine blouse, embroidered at the cuffs with flowers, and in a skirt spun of wool and silk. I felt noble for a fleeting moment, until I almost stumbled down the stairs into the workshop. My muscles were withered and feeble and the wound throbbed like a second heartbeat.
Adrik, alerted by my undignified cry, hastened up the stairs. For a moment, as he came into view, he froze and swayed on the steps—as if I’d startled him. I felt frantically for my heated cheeks. I must have forgotten to rinse the soap or committed some other embarrassing blunder—
“You look well,” he grumbled.
“You are very tall,” I replied tersely. We came face to face though he stood two steps below me.
I’d seen the beauty of faeries only ever as a warning—something so startling, I knew in my bones not to trust it. The trouble with Adrik was that he possessed just enough humanness to lull these instincts. To make me forget that such beauty was designed only to numb the mind.He glowed softly in the gloam of the stairwell, as if the sun were so drawn to him that a sliver of its light followed him wherever he went.
He parted his lips as if to speak but said nothing. He only tilted his head, eyes bright as his lips curved into a slow smile. We stared at each other with a strange newness—as if we had not quite seen each other before. I might have remained frozen for another while, had Almira not, with a fiendish cackle, squeezed past me and slammed the front door.
“Shall we?” asked Adrik roughly.
I cautiously took the arm he offered. His skin blazed through the linen shirt, rolled up to reveal forearms veined with muscles.
A wall of herb-scented mist met us on the lowest step. I stepped through with a cough and into a vaulted, red-bricked cellar. It was dim down there, as if a sliver of dusk lingered between ebonwood shelves and potion cabinets. In the cobwebbed corners swayed stacks of ancient tomes, held upright with faerie magic. In the tight spaces between vials and cauldrons danced peculiar lights—like motes of dust adrift in the sun. This, too, was faerie magic. The wondrous kind.
Adrik ducked under well-used pots and ladles dangling from the ceiling beams, under bundles of dried flowers filling the air with aching sweetness. The scent reminded me of a meadow in the spring near the creek, a bed of wildflowers. I lay in my mother’s arms and listened with dread as she sang madly to the wind. She was not quite right in the head, never had been.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
A clatter tore me with a flinch from my memories. Adrik had gone to relieve a steaming cauldron of its lid. A thick, satin-red smoke crept over the pot’s ledge, shimmering as it sprawled through the cellar and over the arched ceiling. It smelled of sweet wood and, strangely, of midnight, scattering my pulse like the snap of a twig in the dark.
“Enough,” murmured Adrik, gaze locked with mine. The steam vanished with a hiss.
I sat in a cushioned chair while Adrik worked, plucking petals from dried roses as he'd instructed. He worked with deep intent and with a glint of passion that made me forget for a while about my troubles. I found, when I next looked to the side, a tome and a pencil on the workbench.
“I thought,” Adrik said, glancing up to brush aside the golden curl that often fell over his forehead, “that you might like to improve some of the sketches. You must be getting bored with me.”
I said without thinking, “I’m afraid I can never be bored with you.”
His gaze snapped to mine, bright and alert. “You should not flatter me like this, Evana.” The silkiness of his tone gave me a shiver. “You are treading dangerous ground.”
I dared neither to test nor to question this claim. A clatter came from upstairs, quieting his low, teasing laughter. A howl of pain—
“Stir gently for three minutes," Adrik said as he hurried to save Lorell, shoving a spoon at me.
The flower bundles rustled as he whisked past. I froze. A bunch of belladonna flowers dangled from the farthest beam.
I was swift, fuelled by a spark of wild hope and by the keen awareness that Adrik moved quietly and quickly. I did not know how I’d done it, given the feebleness of my legs, but I stood within a heartbeat on a rickety chair and plucked, with shaking fingers, a flower from the bundle.
I leaped back to the floor, biting the inside of my cheek to stifle a shriek of pain. I’d barely slipped the flower into the pocket of my skirt and begun to stir the brew, when Adrik came back down the stairs. He made a horrified sound.
“You are butchering the poor thing!” Indeed, the brew had begun to bubble as if under great duress. “I saidtenderly, Evana, notviciously.” He caught my hand mid-swirl, entwining his long fingers with mine to guide me. I tensed, heart stuttering from the shock of his skin against mine. His words stirred my curls as he asked, “Can you smell it?”
I shivered as tendrils of silvery smoke rose from the brew and grazed my jaw. “It smells like a forest.”
