Followed by Fros(18)

The air to my left darkened and took shape. Sadriel stood beside me, though I did not look at him. I only stared at the frozen man, still rigid in his desperate form.

“I had to,” I whispered between chattering teeth, my heart folding around itself. How very cold I felt. The blood from the bite wound had already frozen to my skin in forking trails, stopping just above my heel. “I-I had to.”

Sadriel walked around the man, inspecting him like he were an entry to the town fair. “He’s not dead,” he said, tapping his fingers against his lips, “just dying.” He grinned and looked at me. “See? You already have a taste for me.”

Crouching down, Sadriel touched the man’s forehead and then lifted his hand, tan and cerulean smoke following his fingertips. I recalled the day I first met Death in the Hutcheses’ home, when Sadriel had done the same to Bennion. Even with the hunter truly dead, his body remained unchanged. Still frozen, still screaming, still gaping. His frosted eyes peered into the world of Death and feared what they beheld.

He looked like me.

A tear ran down my cheek, freezing before it reached my chin. “I called for you!” I shouted, rising to my feet. My leg throbbed and the mountain teetered, but I ignored both. “They wanted to kill me! I called for you, but you didn’t . . . you didn’t . . .”

I shook my head, wiping away a second tear that froze to the side of my hand.

“You handled it well enough, hmm?” Sadriel said with a grin. “And I warned you, didn’t I?”

I didn’t answer, only continued to shake my head as I limped past the corpse and into the clearing. By the time I found my lost shoe and jerked it from the mud, Sadriel had, once again, disappeared.

I did not look back at the hunter. I did not need to, for his pained face had carved itself into my memory. I have never forgotten it, though my dreams of him have subsided, thankfully. My fear of dogs, however, lingers with me to this day.

I had to keep moving, and I had to stay far away from any village, far enough that I could not so much as see one, for I deeply feared a repeat of that day. If stories of the “ice witch” had reached this far, I did not think I could be safe anywhere. I could not settle down, and I dared not stay in any single place more than one night. I didn’t even dare steal from another town again, even when true winter hid my presence.

I had never been a good hunter—my father had never taught me because I was a girl—but I learned to catch frogs by freezing their ponds and chipping them from the ice. The ice did not melt in my hands, and as long as I kept it away from my infrequent fires, the meat stayed fresh. I built several caches for myself for the following winter, places I could return to when I grew desperate for food. Nuts, apples, tubers, and any eggs I could find, whether robin or snake. I focused on survival, and my early preparations pulled me through the next year relatively unscathed.

But my third year in the wilderness, the third year of my unrelenting curse, would bring one of the darkest times of my life. I would stand on the very brink of death, wanting only to be welcomed into the black abyss beyond.





CHAPTER 7





In late spring I traveled east, away from the mountains and closer to the coast. I had no specific destination in mind; I only knew that I had to keep moving. If I lingered in one place too long, I feared the storm that followed me would form a pillar of snow towering to the heavens themselves, with me crushed into its foundation. The mountain crests of inland Iyoden often hid my storm. They also gave me a wide view of my surroundings, so abandoning them invoked anxiety in me, but I trekked east anyway, hoping to outrun the rumors that had sprung up along my trail. Hoping to stumble upon some sort of technology or magic that could relieve my curse. I had once pondered on traveling this way once I became an established playwright—but such fancies had long been buried.

In my journey I passed very close, uncomfortably close, to Heaven’s Tear Lake, but Euwan resided on its southwest side and I passed over its north. The lake is large enough that even the best eyes would not be able to see my crawling storm as I passed by. I took comfort in that, even though my heart ached for home.

Other than Sadriel’s infrequent visits, I continued to travel alone, which gave me a great deal of time to spend with my thoughts. Mordan still weighed heavily on my mind, but I began to think beyond the moment he’d wrapped his fingers around my neck and used his last magic to thrust me into an eternal winter. I realized I had never truly known him. Yes, he had cursed me, and I hated him for it, but perhaps he was not entirely evil. Everyone in Euwan had seemed to like him, my father especially. I imagined myself in his stockings, as the saying goes, a lone stranger hoping for a fresh start in a small village where no one knew him, trying to break away from the horrors he had witnessed at the gate to magicked territory. It must have been hard for him. I realized I might have misjudged him. Admitting that to myself helped eased the weight of hatred in my heart.

Unfortunately, my journey did not remain entirely in its solitude, for as the warmer months settled in Iyoden, the reach of my cold alerted new men, and though I distanced myself, I was a cursed being, an “ice witch,” and a party far larger than the two men with dogs began to pursue me. Whether in anger or perhaps in sport, I do not know, for I dared not linger long enough to ask. But they came for me, and I turned back for the mountains, running when my body could run, crawling when it could not. I wore through the soles of my shoes and had to discard them. But even with bleeding feet, I could not stop moving.