Snow Like Ashes (Snow Like Ashes, #1)(74)

Fingers find mine, but they’re not Conall’s. This hand is delicate, cold, like a porcelain doll come to life. Nessa leads me to the side of the tunnel and presses my hand flat on the rock, jagged edges of dirt and thick boulders protruding in awkward bumps. Should I—

I stop. There’s something on the wall, uneven ruts filling almost every smooth space.

“What is it?” I put both hands to the rock and follow the carvings. They’re everywhere, twisting down and up, shooting over the low ceiling and darting across the floor.

Nessa fumbles with something beside me and a quick scraping noise brings a flicker of fire to life. She lifts the candle, her pale face glowing yellow in the light.

Conall watches us from the perimeter of the candle’s light, his disapproving glower a heavy weight. “We don’t have time.”

“Hush,” Nessa tells him. “She needs to see it. And it’s good for us to see it too.”

That makes him quiet, and his eyes dart to the walls around us, his expression relaxing ever so slightly. I exhale, my own tense muscles unwinding.

“They’re memories,” Nessa continues, her eyes on the ceiling. “Memories of Winter.”

Thousands of words curl around this narrow hall, filling the rocks with jagged sentences, stretching all the way down to a door at the end.

One paragraph has been etched in black stone, the words worn with age.

My daughter’s name was Jemmia. She wanted to go to Yakim to attend Lord Aldred University. She was nineteen.

Another is carved into the rock itself.

On the first day of proper winter, every Winterian would gather for a festival in their town’s market. We would eat frozen strawberries and ground ice flavored with wine to celebrate winter’s birth the world over.

More and more:

Havena Green worked at the Tadil Mine in the Klaryn Mountains.

My father died a soldier, fighting on the front lines when Spring attacked. His name was Trevor Longsfield and his wife was Georgia Longsfield.

All Winterians are cradled in bowls of snow on the fifth day after their birth. I’ve never seen a Winterian baby cry during this ritual—in fact, they seem to enjoy it.

Winterian wedding ceremonies are held during the first morning snow. The bride and groom drink from a cup of water, and the water that remains is frozen in a perfect circle to represent unity. The circle is buried underneath the ceremony site.

A duchess of Ventralli visited once and complained that Jannuari’s frigid air made our kingdom unbearable. Her butler promptly responded, “My lady, Spring has been trying to change Winter’s chill for centuries. I doubt you can do it faster than them.”

My eyes swim with words carved into the wall, words curved around impenetrable boulders and faded with age. All of them soaking into me, spiraling around in the flickering candlelight. I’ve heard some of these traditions before in Sir’s lectures—frozen berries and celebrating the first day of proper winter. But the rest, babies in bowls of snow, each individual history . . .

I wish I had known this. I wish I had had these words with me every moment of my life.

“When Angra attacked, he burned everything, archives and histories and books. So we decided to record our history in the tunnels.” Nessa cradles the candle in her palm, the light casting an ethereal glow around her body.

“Tunnels?” I look at her, my forehead pinching.

“When they made the Abril work camp,” she says, “they did so on an existing slum in the center of the city. Winterians built it, though—Spring soldiers just supervised. Lots of the original buildings had basements, cellars that we left intact. They became tunnels for us, a secret world the Spring soldiers didn’t know about. All the tunnels lead—”

“Out?”

As soon as I ask it, I hear my own mistake. If the tunnels lead out, no one would be here at all. I look away from Nessa and Conall before either can respond.

Nessa steps up beside me, her fingers going to an etching where she traces the first letter. “These tunnels offer their own type of escape. Conall and Garrigan taught me to read by these carvings. It’s important to remember them,” she tells me, and Conall, who looks a little less annoyed. “Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?” I ask, but I already know.

When Nessa speaks again, her voice is sad. “Just in case no one who remembers survives.”

I turn away so she can’t see the tears brimming my eyes. Because when a sixteen-year-old boy becomes Winter’s king, and there are no records to show him Winter’s history, we will have to rely on our people’s fading memories to show us what to do.

Those seem like trivial problems, though. Problems we would be grateful to have, normal issues about the competency of rulers and the succession of traditions. Not like whether our people will even survive to have traditions.

I run my hand along one line, wishing I knew which person had written what, and that I could memorize these words so I could tell Mather. Were he and I placed in bowls of snow when we were five days old?

One last etching catches me, the letters coated in dust.

Someday we will be more than words in the dark.

It’s hard to walk under all of this, but Nessa takes my hand and pulls me forward. Clearly this isn’t our destination. How can something be more important than this? I want to stay down here, memorize every single word until I can’t think or feel or breathe anything else—