Followed by Fros(42)

He smelled like sandalwood and cardamom.

I stifled a wince as he turned my hand over and tied a firm knot just below my knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“I chose today to come because it is especially hot in the city,” he said, removing his gloves. “I appreciate the cold.”

I laughed. It wasn’t funny, not really, but I laughed anyway. It relieved some of the pressure in my chest.

Holding his gloves in his hands, he met my eyes. “How do you live, so cold?”

I rolled my lips together. Moved the pitcher from the fireplace before it got too hot. “One day at a time.”

“You’ve grown accustomed to it?”

I shook my head, stray bits of hair falling from my braid. “In almost four years, I never have. I feel as cold now as the day winter fell upon me.” Swallowing, I lifted up my bandaged hand. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Then, moving his fingers, he signed, I am not angry.

Lo returned to the table—I noticed he had cleaned up my mess—and finished reading off the titles of the books he’d brought as though nothing had happened, then showed me the new signals his men had created over the past few weeks, including inappropriate ones I could not help but laugh at.

How wonderful it felt to have friends after so long. How much I wished I could see Ashlen again and embrace her, for I had not realized how good a friend she had been to me. Hers made one more debt on the list of those I could never repay.

Lo stayed for about an hour before placing my books on the shelf. It was no craftsman’s piece. It stood plain, a little crooked, and scratched in the back from where I had missed my nail, but he smiled at it, and in that moment, I desperately wished I could touch him, this man who had ridden me down atop a horse of deepest ebony, who wore a helmet of ibex horns, and who spoke to me not as a person with an unfortunate curse but as a woman who loved literature and old tongues, who feared domesticated dogs and wove uneven rows of yarn and spilled pitchers of water over fine rugs. A man willing to forgo superstition to bring me a book, merely because he wanted to hear my thoughts on it.

I held my bandaged hand to my heart as he left.





CHAPTER 18





Nights later, I dreamed of dogs.

In my dream, I lived in my mountains again. The beasts were tracking me over muddy fields and rocky inclines, and I ran from them without looking back, my tattered dress blowing around me. I grabbed tree branches to pull myself up steep slopes, each touch sending frost skittering across the wood. The dogs howled in the distance.

I scrambled up a shelf, loose rocks cutting my hands and feet. A bank of snow suddenly appeared before me, slick and wet, and I tumbled into it. I didn’t remember falling, only pushing myself back up and running across endless blankets of snow, desperately looking for a tree with branches low enough to climb.

When I finally turned to look, two bassets and a saluki sight hound—the tall dog portrayed on my drapery—were chasing me, teeth bared. A tree root snagged my foot, and I tumbled to the earth. I willed myself to rise, but the cold had frozen me in place.

I saw footprints in the snow and followed them with my eyes. Suddenly Lo was there, standing between me and the dogs. He drew his sword, and the dogs stopped, eyeing him and then me, as if trying to decide if I were worth the fight.

The dogs vanished. Turning to me, Lo offered his hand, but when I clasped it, his entire body turned to ice—

I gasped and sat up in my bed, my cavern illuminated only by a dying fire and the softest glow of my oil lamp. My shoulders and thighs ached with a strange tautness, as though someone had taken a wrench to me and tightened my muscles until they could stretch no more. My skin tingled with the cold and my toes burned with it, as though I had stubbed each one before crawling into bed. Teeth chattering, I rubbed icy fingers into my icy shoulders and spied two shining amber eyes near the table.

Flinging back my blankets, I hurried to my lamp and cranked it to full light.

“Such an animated sleeper,” Sadriel said, though his voice was mirthless, his smile nowhere to be seen. “I thought it was the forest that made it so, but even here, in your new ‘home,’ you fret more than a babe in the night.”

Trembling, I grabbed my pitcher and set it by the coals to melt the water inside. “How long have you been here?”

“Does it matter?” he asked, running his fingers along the chain of his ruby amulet. “You were much more receptive to me before you came to this wasteland. Don’t tell me it doesn’t still hurt, Smitha. I see the curse inside you; I know how it devours you. How much more pain will you bear before you give in? Is it so much better to waste away in this realm than to be my companion?”

I peered at the door, the faint glows of early dawn. I busied myself with the fire, coaxing it to life.

Within moments, he appeared to my left. He seized my injured hand and pulled it back from the hearth, squeezing it until I grit my teeth against the pain. He glowered at me, a dark and twisted expression only Death could wear. “Doesn’t it hurt you, Smitha? Stop playing games with me! I know mortals, and I know you. Will you wait until it crushes you? Come with me.”

I stared into the embers. “I thought you could wait more than a few years for men to fall to you,” I whispered.

They were the wrong words. What Sadriel did next, I had not seen coming.