THIRTY-THREE
Just a mad woman with mad visions.
Islid, cursing and screeching, over root and stone.
Down, down, down the frozen slope I tumbled, to the fir tree shrouding the foot of the hill in shadow. I screeched Adrik’s name and I sobbed it, thrashing wildly to regain my footing. I would kill him for this. I would tear him apart.
Toshoveme. Tosacrificehimself for me. Howdarehe?
The forest blurred; spinning into glaring white with patches of green. How dare he leave me alone in this world when I’d only just found him?
A scream came from the crest.
No, not a scream.
A wail, long and anguished.
Faint from the fall, I crawled on bruised hands and knees over biting ice. Toward the blurred outline of the hilltop. Toward the tall figure shrouded in thick, white mist. I did not feel the cold, nor the pain—only the aching pull toward that hillcrest, toward Adrik. He would not die. I would not allow it.
I howled in fury as the mists churned, sharpening his screams into something feral. His wails poured like an avalanche down the hill, knocking me back, drowning me with his anguish. I saw nothing but him—at the top of the hill, his striking face contorted into something bizarre, his limbs stiff with tension but twitching as the mist danced around him.
Our eyes tangled one last time, like a kiss farewell.
The mists swallowed him.
I screamed for him until my throat bled. I screeched, nails breaking as I clawed at ice and roots and earth, pulling up just to stumble and fall, again and again. As if the forest itself was determined to stop me from chasing Adrik.
The mist billowed on the crest, but it no longer crept closer. It had taken what it desired. It had taken him from me.
A roar of fury ripped from me, like a knife through the throat.
He was alive. The earth still echoed with his heartbeat, quick and aching. I tightened his cloak around my shoulders, breathing in his scent, and I searched, with numb fingers, for the still-warm pebble as I had done a hundred times before. There was only cold in that pocket. No echo of his voice, his laugh. None of the warmth that seemed to pour from the stone whenever I held it.
As if a sliver of him lived within.
I flinched, stung by my own thought.
A pebble, imbued with an echo of Adrik’s warmth. A drop of his magic, alive in the calming tea he brewed, in the meals he conjured, in the potions that worked wonders. A sliver of his kindness, channeled through his magic into the world around him. I’d felt it that morning when I first wielded my powers at the mountain spring: His warmth sweeping over me like sunlit waves, infusing me with courage. He had channelled his magic into me.
I trembled as I thought of the tale of Wildemire’s first house. Had Adrik not said that the girl possessed a touch of the same magic? An echo of her kindness and her welcome still lived in this town. It had a knack for finding the right people at the right timebecause of her.
Heart pounding, I looked to the mist.
What if those who communed with the spirits could not just coax memories and emotions from them, but imbued the spirits in turn with slivers of magic? Magic was, after all, a river and it carried into the world whatever we fed it.
What if Adrik had done just that when he’d come to rest at the base of the eldest tree—the gnarled, knotted oak from which darkness spread into the veins of the forest. The tidekissed warrior, broken and jaded from the war and from the hunt. Had he not told me that he’d prepared to die there?
What if his magic, like mine, had manifested as a curse born of fear and guilt and sorrow?
An echo of his pain, alive in the eternal winter over Wildemire.
I had to find him. I had to tell him it was not too late to change the course of our tale. He had inspired me to rewrite mine. I’d help him do the same. It did not have to end like this. Not with cold and loss.
Not with fear.
I collected a drop of blood from the slice above my heart, brushed it to my lips and into the snow.
There was no still-warm pebble in my palm, but I did not need it. I remembered warmth. It lived in flower-tiled hearths and in soot-covered stoves. It lived in the pockets of fur-lined coats and beneath quilted blankets. It lived in the old alchemist who grumbled more than he spoke, and in the soldier who was a baker at heart, and in his child who breathed life into the mundane. It lived in the king who never wished to be king butloved his people too fiercely to refuse them a thing. It was almost too much to bear; the joy of it all.
