I let it free.
A summer tide surged within me, and it trickled warmly through my veins: A magic most curious. I cradled it like golden light in my palms, letting it spill into the earth. The roots and the trees sighed in delight.
In a small circle around my feet, the snow melted; feathery grass shivered in the breeze, and when I stepped forth, wildflowers blossomed beneath my feet. Tender leaves popped from the branches I brushed carelessly aside. The air was sweet with the scent of damp, living earth.
On the crest, I reached out to brush a finger against the wall of mist. It bit me, a short, sharp prick like a thorn. I spun golden threads into its churning depths until it moved aside with a sullen growl.
I stepped into its cold, wet embrace. I gasped, drawing air into my lungs. It turned into steam, leaving me choked for breath. I was trapped. Trapped in a ravine of stark white walls. Trapped amid clouds intent to strangle me. The path narrowed as I pushed breathlessly forth, slick tendrils brushing against me, pricking me. There was no sound at all, nothing to betray wherever the mists had taken Adrik.
And yet—
I knew.
I’d stumbled there on naked feet—an old miller, an alchemist, a blacksmith. I’d seen in my mind the gnarled oak beyond the pond. I carried the burden of its anguish and its fury and I knew—
I knew that I had to go to that oak.
That I would find Adrik there.
I stumbled through the bramble, screeching as I came across gold-tinted snow and the reek of rot. I hurried past, retchingand hoping not to catch a glimpse of tar-black claws, a striking face, dead and shredded. I slipped at the edge of the pond, barely catching myself before I tumbled through the human-shaped hole in the ice. The mist grew thicker still, despite my magic. It was stronger here, so close to the heart of the pain. I coughed into the hem of the cloak. I could scarcely see my own outstretched hand. The mist writhed, brushing my cheeks with wraith-like fingers. Tendrils curled up my nose, into my mouth, my mind—
My thoughts ran slow as mud and came in fragments. I began to inspect one idea and ended with another, over and over. A moment later, I had no recollection of it at all. I was cold. I had to go home. Adrik was lost. I had to find him. I was cold. I had to go home.
Again and again.
I hissed as a thorned branch kissed my cheek. Its sting bloomed on my skin, the pain clearing my thoughts for just a moment. I’d gone in circles around the pond, flattening the snow beneath errant steps. While I looked in terror at the evidence of my madness, I felt it tug at me once more. The veil of mist snuck up my nose and into my mouth, turning my thoughts into clouds.
I clenched my teeth and I buried my nails into the knotted scar on my palm. The pain anchored me. It was enough to buy me a minute or two. I shivered violently, panic rising as the mist pressed in.
Had the spirits forsaken me? Had I angered them in some way, or—
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
A madness, my mother’s murmurs deep in the night, and the incense she fed to the hearth to please the spirit, and the twigs she buried at the house-corners. She never dared to go into theforest without asking its spirits for permission, and she took a talisman with her, woven of nettle and pine-needles.
And I remembered... I remembered not just that the wind roared and my mother made us stand foolishly in an unshapely circle of birch twigs. No, I remembered that the storm gentled as we huddled together, that it brushed blossom-sweet kisses to the crowns of our hair and allowed us soon to carry on in fairer weather. I’d beg her, whenever we walked into the village, to wear her clothes as normal people did and to put her shoes back on, but she’d claim that the villagers were madder than her for refusing to heed her.
With numb, trembling fingers I unfastened my bootlaces. I hissed at the sting of cold as I stood in just my embroidered socks in the snow. I hung the cloak over a branch and slipped out of my blouse, cursing as the wind lashed my bare skin. I trapped a scream between my teeth as I rid myself of my trousers. With shaking hands I grasped its seams and turned it inside out, then slipped back into it. I did the same with my blouse and with the cloak.
My mother had taught me this: If I wished to find the path back home to go barefooted, and if I wished to find the path ahead to put the shoes on the wrong foot. That is what I did with a pained groan. It made my feet ache.
I scraped my hands raw as I tore twigs from the birches and stuffed them into the folds of the cloak. I noticed only when I sat near the pond, bleeding fingers twisting the nettle I’d grown with magic into a misshapen talisman, that I was laughing.
I was mad.
It was not the madness of the mist.
It was the beautiful, breathtaking madness of allowing myself to honor the ways my mother had taught me. Of realizing that she had, after all, possessed more sense than those who had called her senseless.
My mind was my own even though the mist remained thick. My thoughts were still frenzied, but they no longer slipped from my grasp. I drew breath, clasped the talisman between white-knuckled fingers, and pressed forth across the meadow. Beyond the pond, the thrashing roots had left the brushwood in ruins. Spindly twigs and cracked branches littered the mud-brown snow and slowed my step. I climbed over them, numb to the pain of bruised knees and torn skin.
I was a wild thing in a wild place, where I belonged.
I paused for breath at the treeline. The ancient oak, the heart of the forest, rose like a mountain into the skies—with branches as wide as the earth, a crown as tall as the clouds, a moss-draped trunk like a tower.
I found Adrik amid its gnarled roots.
I screamed as I saw him, and as I reached him, I fell to my knees. His face was neither dead nor alive, but a horrid veined shade of grey and green. I brushed a finger over his cheek. It scraped my skin, coarse like bark.
