Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars 0.5)(3)

Funeral pyres. Sorrow made a lump rise in my throat. Through the winter I had occasionally smelled smoke, and I had seen one or two pyres on my other trips down to the vista. A few funerals was a normal number for a village of Amalska’s size, but with fog hovering in the valley most mornings, I hadn’t been able to see how many there were until now. What made it worse was that more probably lingered under the most recent dusting of snow.

“There are so many,” I said, my voice nearly breaking. Those were people whose care had been entrusted to me. Unknowingly, I had failed them.

“We lost half the village to fever in the last two moons,” Ina said softly. The strained expression on her face gave away how keenly she felt the deaths.

“No!” That had to be as many as a hundred people. She must have lost friends. Maybe even relatives. A wave of guilt followed. “Is your family all right?”

“For now. They’ve been helping tend the sick, though, so who knows how much longer their luck will hold. We ran out of your tinctures almost eight weeks ago. And of course it’s been impossible to get up here until now. We tried, but one climber broke his leg and another fell to his death near the ice falls. We gave up after that.” Ina’s shoulders sagged.

“Eight weeks?” I was horrified. Even in the case of disease, the villagers should have had plenty of medicines to last the winter. Miriel and I had never left them undersupplied, even in years of weak harvest when they had little to offer in trade.

Guilt tasted bitter in my mouth. I should have moved to the valley last summer, but memories of Miriel’s warnings had held me back. When her time to meet the shadow god had drawn near, I’d pleaded with Miriel to give her blessing for me to join the villagers. If I moved there, I could help deliver babies born out of season, or get access to herbs that bloomed earlier down there than on our mountain. She refused to hear of it, reminding me that the gods had ordained my place in the world and that I needed to be wary of mortals. They would discover my gifts, she said. They would hurt me to help themselves.

But now all I knew was that my obedience had led to the death of half the village.

Ina nodded. “As if that wasn’t bad enough, half a moon ago we received a messenger pigeon from farther south with a report of bandits. Raiders barely waited for the ground to thaw before they attacked one of the villages north of Kartasha.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. Bandits were a summer problem. They traveled when the roads were clear and produce or livestock was easy to steal, not when the snow had barely melted and the nanny goats hadn’t even birthed their kids.

“My parents released a pigeon to the king in hopes of getting some support to fend them off if they come north. His reply said, ‘The crown does not currently have enough resources to support communities not in immediate danger.’” Her expression darkened. “I suppose the fact that our village is on a trade route only open in summer makes us less important. Or worse, dispensable.”

I squeezed her arm gently. “All communities matter. No one is dispensable.”

“You may believe that, but apparently the king doesn’t. The crown has done very little to quell banditry in the south these last few years. It’s gotten bad enough that I’ve been working on my own plans to do something about it if I’m elected elder.”

Her words worried me. Last year’s harvest had been a good one. Oversupplied with food and short on fighting bodies, a village decimated by fever would make a tempting target. If Ina’s parents had told him the whole story, why hadn’t he sent help?

“I can at least give you some potions for any who are still ill. Come home with me?” I extended my arm.

“Of course,” she said. She fell into step beside me, took my hand and gave it a squeeze, but then she let go.

Last summer, she’d hardly let go of me at all. But then again, it had taken time for us to grow close, and perhaps we needed time again. Ina had never been afraid of me as so many of the other villagers were, but she had been visiting the mountain daily for almost a moon before her curiosity about me shifted into something else. I would never forget that night.

We’d been sitting by the bank of a creek that murmured its soft music to us in the dark. I had been telling her the names of all the constellations I knew, from the huntress and her arrow guiding travelers north to the war steed in the west galloping his way across the sky with the seasons. Our conversation had eventually turned to more personal things, and she told me her deepest fear—that she would fail to take the place of her parents as an elder—and I revealed to her my secret—that I wasn’t mortal. After my admission, her fingertips brushed my cheek. I turned to her, surprised, and her mouth found mine—as gentle and inevitable as the way twilight shifts into darkness, her lips still sweet from the plums we’d eaten after dinner.

That had been the first night she stayed with me. I still trembled to think of it, the newness, the way she’d touched me and I her, the awkwardness that quickly fell away as we figured out how our bodies fitted against each other. We’d kissed until we couldn’t keep our eyes open, and in the morning I laughed watching her try to find everything she needed to make a meal to break our fast, stubbornly refusing to let me help. Her passion and determination were as addictive to me now as they had been then.

“Will you stay awhile?” I couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving yet, not with the heaviness of the news she’d brought with her.