Followed by Fros(8)

I followed Antrid down the hallway and into her bedroom, where Bennion lay in the middle of her large bed, blankets pulled up to his chin. His cheeks were flushed and his breaths strained with each small heave of his chest. Sweat beaded against his temples.

Antrid took a rag from atop his forehead and turned it over, then frowned. Ignoring me for the moment, she hurried from the room, perhaps for water.

I stared at Bennion’s tiny body and listened to his labored breaths. Sick from the cold. Sick because of me, though I blamed Mordan for it. Mordan had made this child ill. Mordan had killed the crops in Euwan. Mordan had frozen me through, causing me such unrelenting pain that even sleep was nearly unachievable.

Mordan had caused this twisting guilt in my chest.

Suddenly a man stooped over Bennion. I blinked, certain it was a phantom, but he was still there, and my sluggish heartbeat quickened. The man looked ethereal at first, but he appeared more and more solid the longer I stared. And stared I did, for I had never seen this man before, and there were only two ways into the bedroom: through the door beside me or through the window, locked and curtained. That, and I had watched him materialize, a ghost turned flesh. Though I had not thought it possible, an even colder chill ran through my body.

The man was tall. Very tall. He had pale, white skin lined with bold, violet veins. A soft, wide-brimmed black hat rested on his head, from which fell a cascade of dark auburn hair, spilling over his shoulders like thick forest smoke. He wore fine clothing: a maroon coat, black velvet cloak, and high black boots with large gold buckles. A gold necklace hung from his neck, and a ruby the size of a duck egg shone from the amulet at its end.

My bones grew all the colder at the sight of this strange, richly dressed apparition. I wondered if I had finally lost my wits.

As if feeling my gaze, he turned his head and looked at me with bright amber eyes. My back hit the wall; I had not realized until then that I was retreating. He reached up with a veiny hand and tipped his hat to me just as Antrid shuffled through the door with a freshly moistened rag and bowl of broth.

She gave me a hard stare before sitting on the mattress beside her son, completely oblivious to the towering, shadowed man across from her. I realized she could not see him. This man was not an ordinary person, but he did not seem like one of the craft.

“His time has come,” the dark figure said, and I realized he spoke Angrean, a dead language recorded in only the most scholarly works, the language that had first inspired my fascination with old tongues. I had heard it spoken only once, by a scholar passing through Euwan two summers ago, but this creature’s tongue uttered it in a darkly musical way that no human could ever hope to imitate. Had my mind not been so warped with fear, I would have been shocked by my ability to understand the language’s nuances. I held my middle tightly as though ready to sick up, and clenched my jaw tightly to keep my teeth from chattering.

He placed his hand on Bennion’s forehead, over the new cloth Antrid had set upon it, and lifted it skyward. Ethereal smoke rose from the small boy, swirling in tan and cerulean flames. It vanished just as quickly.

The man turned from the bed and smiled at me. “Until we meet again, Smitha.”

He left the same way he came—not suddenly, as Mordan had, but by slowly fading: flesh, to ghost, to gone.

I gasped, cold air flooding my lungs, for I knew then that I had seen Death himself, that he had spoken to me, and that he knew my name. Death, a being so reviled that few dared speak of him, even in fairy tales. A force that could only be named by the finality of his purpose. No sooner had he disappeared than Antrid wailed, a horrid sound that echoed between the wooden walls.

“No! No, Bennion!” she cried, throwing herself over the boy’s body. “God in heaven, don’t take him!”

I shook my head, my own cold forgotten for the moment, and darted from the bedroom and out the front door. I stumbled through the willow-wacks and collapsed outside my barn. I retched, spilling the few contents of my stomach into the snow, then retched again, droplets of acid freezing to my lips.

Had I known Death then as I do now, I would have pleaded with him over the Hutcheses’ boy. Bartered with him, perhaps even attempted to reason with him. But I had not, and so he had come, taking the soul of little Bennion in his wake.

The death of the Hutcheses’ only son was “the last water in the well,” as Imad would later say. For the following morning, I could not convince even my own father to keep me.





CHAPTER 3





“She must go.”

The words echoed between my ears. I looked away from the villagers who had gathered around the hearth in my own house and locked my cold eyes on to the window, where the gap between the curtains provided yet another reminder of my suffering. The dawn sun peered over the mountains to the east, in the one sliver of sky untouched by my snow cloud. It cast a reddish glow on the storm that ravaged Euwan, almost making the snowflakes look like raining blood. I sat on the kitchen floor, massaging frozen fingers with frozen fingers, wincing as cramps tore at my muscles. It took all of my strength not to curl in on myself and disappear into a single, frozen knot, but I would not cower before these people who believed they had the right to decide my fate. People who, I believed, would have proclaimed to love me only days earlier. Ice crystals veined the floor around me, stretching as far as the fire’s heat would allow. And now these men—Toren Hutches, my neighbor and Bennion’s father; Jacks Wineer, Ashlen’s father; Cuper Tode, who ran the mercantile; and even my own father stood discussing my fate in front of me as though I were a pestilence. As though I weren’t sitting right there, hearing everything from their mouths.