He plucked me like a wildflower off my feet, cradling me tightly against his chest as he strode downhill; so tightly I felt the thud of his heart against mine.
I must have fainted, for when I came back around we were at the castle. Adrik whisked into the reading room and placed me gently on a settee. I huddled beneath a blanket and stared unseeing into the distance. I was drawn tight like the string of a bow, but worse. As if something deep within me—something with claws and fangs—tore me slowly apart. I was not strong enough for this task. The storm would slip from me too soon.
“How did you know it was time?” asked Adrik, kneeling beside me.
“The wind…” I shook my head to clear the daze, a vain effort. “You must go, Adrik. Tell the people to gather. I do not know—” I coughed, breath thin with exertion. “I do not think I can hold it for long.”
“Almira can show you—”
I laughed bitterly. “Almira almost died, Adrik. She almost died from this burden, and she is much stronger than I.”
“She is old. You are not.”
My fingertips tingled with cold. I stared at the anguished, furious lines on his face and choked on a terrible realisation—that he’d thought I would change my mind. That he’d hoped I would choose to stay and to shoulder this terrible burden for the town rather than lead his people through the storm.
I could not… I could not…
This was just another cage in another place, trapped for my magic, used and abused for my powers. I would be a tool again. A tool, and never something more. Neverfree.
“We cannot remain in these cursed lands,” I hissed. “You knew—”
“I knew that you were afraid. I knew you did not yet see the beauty and the power of your magic.” Adrik rose, looming like a thunder cloud. I leaped to my feet, anger filling me with new strength. “How can you wish to leave and let all this come to ruin now that you know you possess the power to save it? We will figure out how to break this curse, but until then—”
“You would ask me to bear this burden? For however long it takes, you would make me suffer like this? What if we never figure it out? Would you demand that I shoulder the storm until I fade from it, too?” A veil shrouded my thoughts, thick as a churning wall of mist. I could not think past it—I could not think past the anguish. He wanted touseme. Towieldme. I was just a tool, just a power for him to command. He was half of a faerie, after all. “You would sit by and watch me die for it like you did with Almira?”
I’d gone too far. I knew it as it spilled from me, this horrible accusation. Adrik reeled as if struck, face for a moment slack from the impact of my despicable words. I could not even claim it had been a mistake. I’d shaped the words carefully into a knife and aimed it thoroughly at his weakest spot.
He left me alone in the cold. His steps echoed from the moonstone, ringing sharply in my ears long after the door hadslammed behind him. His hurt lingered, thick and haunting. I stood for a long time as if one with the marble—cold and stone-hearted.
This was who I was. A wild creature, something venom-tongued and sharp-clawed. I was not used to being around others and I never should be—
I stilled, blinking as if torn from a nightmare.A convenient excuse, Adrik had called it once, and it was nothing but the bitter truth.
If the town thought me mad for chasing half-crazed with regret through the snow, I did not care. I did not feel their stares and I did not feel the cold—I felt only the breeze at my back, like a guiding hand as I ran to the riverbank.
I caught a glimpse of him before he dipped behind a cluster of birch trees, down where the river coiled around a rock. I chased after him, steps like whispers in the snow. If he heard me approach, he did not let on. He stood there, in the shadow of the rock, staring with such gloom and despair at the blue ice that the words froze for a moment in my throat.
“Forgive me,” I breathed, heart and voice cracking.
He did not turn. I stumbled down the ice-clad slope and touched his shoulder before I’d thought better of it. He tensed, but he did not recoil.
“I have lived much of my life in a cage. I’ve had to hide and I’ve had to run and I’ve always had to bow to the will of others. I am terrified of stepping from one cage into the next, Adrik. I am terrified that I will never be more than a tool.”
My own words cut me deep. Perhaps the part of me that longed most to be understood, was the part most afraid to be seen. But Adrik—he understood. He lived with the same fear; that he possessed no worth other than serving the greater good.
Adrik closed the space between us, breathing warmth over me, and he stood so close that he might have heard the stutter of my aching heart.
“A convenient excuse, I reckon,” he said, a sharp echo of a quarrel long past. “To pretend that you cannot see how utterly adored you are just for you. You know what I think? I think it is easier to act like nothing but duty ties you to this town than to admit that you are scared to call it a home.”
He brushed a stray curl from my face, gently and furiously. There cracked something in me, another wall worn thin by his tender persistence.
“I have not had a home since I was seventeen, and not much of one before that either. This—“ I gestured around me, “—is all I ever told myself I did not need, just to survive the loneliness.” I shivered as I said out loud the thought that was splitting me apart. “I ache for the girl who needed this town and never found it. That is the untold side of your tale—this town might have a curious habit of finding the right people at the right time, but what of all the others? Not all of them find it, Adrik. I did not find it.”
“You found itnow. You arehere, and you are about to walk away because you think it is easier to leave than to risk losing it.”
“Iknowit is.”
His hands came to cradle my face—to brush my tear-streaked cheeks. His heated gaze twined with mine, stealing my breath. I remembered, faintly, that he was mad at me and I a little mad at him, and I remembered from when I’d recklessly kissed his cheek that he tasted of all the things I held dear. He smelled of them, too. Of the wild and of the cold, and faintly of peachesand honey. I remembered that I liked his softness, and now that there was no trace of it, I found that I liked that too—the harsh lines of his jaw, the greed in his flame-lit gaze, the slight roughness of his hands against my skin.
