Followed by Fros(5)

“Surely a toad could hold my interest longer, and be more pleasant to look at!” My cheeks burned. “We live on different levels of life, Mordan Alteraz, mine far higher than yours. The sooner you realize that, the better off you will be. I do not care one ounce for you, and I never will. That is why I didn’t go to the dock, and why no sensible woman ever would!”

I found myself oddly breathless. Mordan had gone to stone before me, and I admit that a twinge of fear vibrated through me rather than the sense of sweet victory I had expected. Never had someone looked at me so grimly.

He laughed—no, growled. The noise that escaped his lips sounded more animal than human. He stepped forward, and I stepped back, my back hitting the trunk of a green-needle pine.

“And to think I felt anything for a woman like you,” he whispered, his face contorting into a snarl. “How blind I have been. Your heart is ice.”

I opened my mouth for a retort, but his hand came down hard on the trunk beside my head. I winced. He leaned in close, a malicious smile on his face.

“If only you knew who I was,” he said, even quieter now. Gooseflesh rose on my arms unbidden. “Now I can see the soul that lies hidden behind your beauty. You are a horrid, selfish woman, Smitha.”

I slapped him hard across his cheek, putting my full weight into the blow. It turned his head, but his hand did not budge from its place on the tree beside me.

He licked his lips, smearing blood along the corner of his mouth. Straightening, he studied me up and down, his expression covered in shadow.

“I came here to get away from it, to leave it all behind,” he growled. “But I have enough left for you.”

“Enough what?” I asked, but his other hand came down on my throat, cutting off my last word. I clung to his wrist and dug my nails into his skin, but he didn’t so much as flinch. He stared hard into my eyes, and my fear ignited so abruptly I felt I would turn to ash in his hold.

“Vladanium curso, en nadia tren’al,” he murmured. “I curse you, Smitha Ronson, to be as cold as your heart.”

His fingers turned to ice around my neck, and I shivered as the cold traced its way down my skin and beneath my clothes, branching out to my arms and legs, my fingers, and the tips of each toe. It rushed up my neck and over my head. The chill gushed into my mouth and nostrils, washed down my throat, and crept into my stomach and bowels. It opened my insides like a newly sharpened knife, cutting down to my very bones.

“May winter follow you wherever you go,” he said, “and with the cold, death.”

Mordan did not move, but some force punched me, and my entire body caved in on itself. The breath left my lungs, and a chill colder than any I had ever experienced filled my core and shot through my veins. My arms and legs went rigid, and every hair on my body stood on end. My very heart slowed. The sun vanished from my face, hidden by a thick, white sheet of clouds. A bitter wind blew over me, tousling my hair.

Mordan released me with a sneer and vanished, the air behind him opening its mouth and swallowing him whole.





CHAPTER 2





I stood there in the willow-wacks for several moments, staring at the place where Mordan had just stood, the only sign of his presence the flattened grass where he had stood. I shivered, a trembling that engulfed my whole body. The gooseflesh that had spread across every inch of my skin could not be soothed. A frozen vise clamped down on my chest, making it hard to breathe. My eyes felt like packed snow, my tongue wet leather.

I dropped to the earth and hugged myself and rubbed my arms, but it did nothing to alleviate the chill. I blew into my hands, my knuckles stiff, but my breath was a cold wind that did nothing to warm them. I gaped at the sight of my hands—the skin had turned near white, my fingernails violet. They ached with cold. All of me ached. Frost even crusted my clothes. It was as if I had jumped into the depths of Heaven’s Tear midwinter and had only just been pulled from the ice.

My mind folded over itself like bread dough with too much flour as I tried to sort my scattered thoughts. Mordan, here. His hard eyes. His hand around my neck. Cursing me. Cursing me?

“They can be a dangerous sort. Tales often fantasize them, for better or for worse.”

I gasped, the air shuddering as it passed through my frozen throat. Surely Mordan didn’t know the craft. Surely he couldn’t—

All strength left me, and I bowled over, hunching over my knees. My ears rang.

But I had heard his words, the strange language he had uttered, a tongue even I didn’t recognize. He had come to Euwan to get away . . . from what? Magic?

“I curse you, Smitha Ronson, to be as cold as your heart.” Those were his words, and I had felt them pierce me, my body a flimsy, unraveling cloth beneath their power. I had seen him disappear before my eyes, into the very wind itself.

A faint pattern of frost ebbed out over the soil beneath my knees. I watched it wide-eyed as it crept slowly outwards, a web woven by an unseen spider. I reached a trembling hand forward and touched it, and the ice bloomed beneath my fingertips, thickening and spreading like a ripple in water.

I screamed through chattering teeth.

I yanked my hand back and forced myself to stand on shaky legs. Though spring had settled in its fullness in Euwan, tiny snowflakes began to fall from the sky. They started as dust, but when I peered up at the sky, I saw the clouds above me expand rapidly, devouring the blue. The snowflakes grew larger and larger, until I stood at the heart of a full cascade of winter. The icy crystals landed on my hair, shoulders, and hands. I waited for them to melt, but they held their frosty designs against my flesh. As though I were no more than ice itself. I jerked back from them but could not escape the swarm.