To let my blood seep into the ground and warm its cold, cold roots—
“Evana!”
A grip on my arm attempted to pull me from the tender embrace of the vines. My heart ached and yearned for their touch, and for the fox on the hill, and for the ancient oak, like a string tied to my rib, coaxing me forward.
“Evana!”
The string snapped. I tumbled backwards into the snow, but I did not fall softly. I fell with a crack against something hard and flat, knocking a soundless scream from my chest. I was not in the forest. I was in the teahouse, on the floor beside the window, blinking up into Zora’s frightened eyes.
“Evana,” she whispered.
I clenched my frozen hands to hide my scraped palms, desperate to conceal the evidence of my madness. How could I explain that I knew the forest paths though I'd never walked them? That I'd stood beside a frozen pond and sunk beneath it without ever leaving the town?
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
“This was one of the visions, no? The ones you told me about?”
“Someone is lost to the forest,” I croaked. “We must find them.”
Adrik had gone to the glade that morning to restock the woodpiles, alone—I’d pleaded with him to take help, but he’d sharply refused.
“I will go with the brothers," said Zora. "You must stay here, Evana. If the forest takes you, Wildemire is doomed.”
We raced to the forge and found all three of the brothers in the soot-blackened shop. Ilvar, the youngest, stood bent over the furnace, and Radan was hammering a sword into shape. Their cheeks were still red from the cold, from the strain of chasing over the hills to light the flares.
Yavor came to greet us. We had seen much of each other this past moon, the three brothers and I, for they often dined with us at Lorell’s house. Their grieving minds found no peace at the forge, where every soot-stain reminded them sharply of their father’s strangeness and where his mutterings still turned into shrieks come nightfall.
“Someone is headed to the pond,” I said quietly.
Yavor mustered me with the keen interest of a scholar. I’d learned about him, as we talked over flavorless stews, that he’d never quite known what to do with the hammer and much preferred the library over the forge. He had devoted his work to researching ancient smithing techniques and enchantments, and he carried—much like me—a notebook wherever he went.
“How do you know?” he asked.
I flinched, looking shamefully down at my hands as I said, “I saw it."
“A vision?" I awaited the derisive laugh that had haunted my mother's steps through the village, the gleam of scorn that had followed her like a shadow. But Yavor gave me only a sharp nod and said, “Good. Then we might still find them in time.”
Zora and the brothers rode out, veiled with torchlight and armed to the teeth, and I stumbled to the burrow where I watered the soil with my blood.
TWENTY-TWO
No one else must wear this burden.
The brothers and Zora returned late that eve, long after I’d gone to Lorell to spend the afternoon hours with my nose pressed to the kitchen window.
Just before the sun vanished behind the hill, a great white stag emerged from the forest, followed by four horses. I’d expected them to come to Lorell’s house, but they took the other path at the fork and crossed the footbridge to Adrik’s cottage. I tore the coat from the rack and slipped swiftly into the cold.
Yavor greeted me at Adrik's door. A touch of apprehension fell over him as he saw me. “Beware,” he murmured as we went to the parlor. “He is sulking.”
“You found no one?”
“We foundsomething,” he said with a horrible hollowness. “We had to leave it—her.”
Through the open kitchen window came the sound of wood splitting under an axe. Yavor glanced with a sigh to the kitchen door, behind which I reckoned Adrik was working off his ire. Heleft me with a kind clap on the shoulder to ride back into town with his brothers and Zora.
When Adrik came at last inside—worked to a sweat and covered in grime—he still wore a face of darkness. He froze when he saw me, glowered, and went without a word into the bath. I wondered, while night devoured the town, what I might have done to insult him.
“Adrik!” I called pathetically when he swept a while later from the bath.
