He huffed. “The horses do, and that bother of a stag.”
I left him to grumble to himself. The encounter put me in bad spirits, and there was not much cheer to be found at Lorell’s house either. The cold was worsening still, and with the approach of the storm had come a whisper of fear. It reached us in the form of Bahra, who had ventured out into the cold to rid the tavern of mice and returned with frozen whiskers. She huddled miserably against Lorell’s hearth and allowed Adrik to feed her smoked sausage, for she was quite certain that she was close to death.
“Ada, the dear girl, did not dare to leave the house at all this morning. Good for her, I say. Littered with hazards, this town. Yavor—poor boy, as if he’s not suffered enough!—slipped on the doorstep at first light and had I not cushioned his fall he’d have broken his neck anddied. Quick, girl,” she hissed at me, “look from the window and tell me if the tavern still stands. I went this morning for a feast of mice and I still shudder to think of it. You should have seen it, boy! The roofbeams were cracking, I swear it, and I am blessed to have escaped with my life.” She licked her lips and let out a pitifulmeow, which prompted Adrik to fetch the last bits of bacon from the kitchen. Bahra purred.“But no one has it quite as bad as dear Ilvar, and Kalina has it even worse! Leaking again, that roof of hers, and she is all out of firewood. For days now she’s been miserably cold and no one has time at all to help her—”
Adrik had heard enough at this point and he set grimly out to find firewood for Kalina. “Spring will come soon,” he muttered as he left.
It sounded like a curse.
The moon waned, the storm waxed, and the days blurred into a swirl of blood and snow and dread.
I noted the passage of time only by the approach of the mist, looming just behind the near hills. One morning, when I came huddled in a blanket into the teahouse—I often helped Zora in the morning hours before Almira woke to snarl at me—I looked from the red-latticed window beside the hearth and spotted a wandering doe in the neighboring garden. The creatures of the wild had long made comfortable nests in garden sheds and kitchens, but there was a stiffness to its motions that made me peer closer.
It lifted its head to blink at me. To stare at me with bone-white eyes.
Let me see you. Let me taste you.
I shrieked, stumbling into the bony arms of the withered wisteria. Zora came flying with a clatter, alerting the doe. It pricked its wooden ears and moved closer. A sheen of glitter crept over its hind leg and face—like the frost-flowers adorning Emond’s arm.
Zora went rigid beside me. Her voice was hollow as she said, “This is what you and Adrik saw in the forest? This is what the mist will make of us?”
“What do we do?” I asked, breathless with terror.
Zora sucked a sharp breath through her teeth. A flame gathered in her open palm. Over her face fell a darkness, a bitterness. She flicked her wrist. The flame vanished with a hiss. At the doe’s hooves, the snow began to burn. The creature was ablaze within a heartbeat, wooden as it was.
“Come,” I said, pulling Zora gently away from the window.
In her haunted eyes still flickered an echo of the flame. I settled her into an armchair tucked into the farthest corner, away from the doe’s horrible cackling and thrashing. Her skin was hot as a stove. I wiped her brow with a wet rag until her skin cooled and she came with a shudder back to herself.
“It wears on me,” she whispered. “The magic. The death.”
I held her tightly against my aching heart while she cried. “I understand.”
The wind whistled furiously through the door.
Let me see you. Let me taste you.
Let me show you what he did to us.
I fought the urge to cover my ears just to drown out that anguish. Did Zora not hear it?
I watched from the window as Yavor and his two brothers chased their horses over the hills to relight the flares. Had the whispers alerted them? Had they heard it too, the pain in the wind? Or had they simply seen the fires dwindle?
Did no one else hear that anguish?
The flares remained feeble and wavered often. I could not stand to look at them, so I stared at the frozen treetops, shimmering in the morning sun. The pair of elms loomed like two ancient creatures with ragged beards of frost over the river. My gaze slipped between them into the forest.
A little fox slid through curtains of thick, thrashing ivy. It was going to the pond on the far hills. To the ancient oak.
The vines hissed like snakes as I brushed them aside, slithering smoothly through the snow. One coiled around my ankle, slowing me as I waded through waist-deep snow. I stumbled once, and another time. I sighed as the shifting forest tilted and I fell into a bed of squirming things.
Let me see you, hissed the vines. Let me taste you.
I cackled as the snakes wriggled over my bare feet and into the leg of my trousers. In my veins began a tingle, a prickle. My blood writhed and thrashed, my skin too tight to contain the life keen to sprout from me.
A vine burst from my elbow, another from my palm. A third tickled the back of my throat and broke loose between my lips. They grew long and thick and lush, twining around the branches of a near tree, weaving me to its trunk.
Oh, what an honor to nourish its shivering twigs.
