Frost (10 page)

I nodded. The Watchers never left the Frost.

Gabe continued, “One of the soldiers detached from the rest and wandered over to smoke at the edge of the forest, close to where I was chained. She pretended to drop her smokes and then she drew this shape in the ground.” He picked up a stick from the edge of the fireplace and dragged the burned end across the stones, one long line and then a short one branching off it, like a warped Y. “She whispered that she was part of a group called the Thorns and that she was going to help me escape.”

He leaned forward and smudged out the mark with his fingers before flinging the stick into the fire. “She unlocked my chains and told me to flee as soon as everyone was distracted. Then she went back to the others and began arguing with one of them. They started a fist fight, and I slipped into the darkness.”

Ivy and I leaned forward, hanging on every word. “I was supposed to meet my contact outside your village, in the forest, but I never got that far. The soldiers realized I’d escaped and pursued me. I was shot, but it began to snow and they lost me in the blizzard. Night was falling, and they were afraid of the monsters, so they fell back. I heard them saying that I would be eaten, that they wouldn’t bother pursuing across the river. I managed to drag myself as far as where you found me before I collapsed.”

I shuddered to remember how close we’d come to leaving him there. “What about this gate Ivy said you mentioned?” I asked. “What is that?”

His expression shifted into something hopeful. “You’ve heard of it?”

“No.”

“The Thorn agent said it was the only place I’ll truly be safe from them, that it was imperative that I reach it. She said the Thorn contact here in the Frost would take me.”

I’d never heard so much as a mention of this gate in my life, but if it was a Thorn place then I supposed that made sense. “Is that all you know?”

His forehead wrinkled as he thought. “She said only that it was an ancient thing, part of a ruin found deep in the Frost. She called it Echo.”

My mind buzzed. I thought of the map I’d seen on the Mayor’s desk. I’d gotten only a glimpse, but it had been enough. Every inch of my skin prickled.

Echo
.

“What is it?” Gabe asked, seeing my expression.

I shook my head. I had to puzzle this out first. I had to think.

Could there really be such a thing, this gate, located at that place I’d seen inscribed on the map? Did the Mayor know of it? Did that mean he knew of the Thorns?

Gabe sighed and looked at the fire. “Is there anyone in the village that you believe might be working with the Thorns?”

“No,” I said. I couldn’t imagine any of our neighbors secretly smuggling runaways north. The people of the village cared for their own safety.

But I was beginning to wonder if that was really true—and more, if it should be true. How could we bury our heads in the snow and ignore the injustice that was happening around us?

Gabe nodded at my words. He couldn’t quite keep the disappointment off his face “I see.”

“What do you plan to do once you’re healed?” I asked.

“I have to try to find this gate the Thorns told me about,” he said. “It’s my way out, my escape.” He looked at me. “Can you help me?”

I bit my lip. “I don’t know yet.” It was the most honest thing I could tell him. “I’ll have to think about it.”

I had so many things to think about. His story, whether or not I believed him, and what I would do about it if I did.

IVY AND I were in the kitchen, making supper. The grim details of his story still clung to my memory, though I did my best to think of anything and everything else.

“Why is he working on the quota?” I asked, remembering the yarn in his lap.

“Jonn had to lie down because he wasn’t feeling well, and I was falling behind,” Ivy explained. “He’s not too bad, either, for someone who’s never done a bit of work in their life.”

“Why do you say that?” I frowned at her.

Ivy glanced over her shoulder and then lowered her voice. “Have you seen his hands? They’re as smooth as a baby’s cheek. He’s never done a second of farm labor before, I’d bet a week’s quota on it.”

“He said he lived in Aeralis’ capital city, Astralux.” The words felt strange on my tongue.
Astralux
.
City
. I’d never been to such a place, although I’d heard about cities in school. I knew they were like villages, only much bigger and much more crowded. I’d even seen photographs that belonged to a merchant from the south, but they had been dark and smudged.

“Perhaps his father was a sort of mayor?” Ivy suggested.

I peeked around the corner at him. Come to think of it, he did have a noble bearing, the kind that all the Elder families had. That kind of dignity had to be bred into a person. “Maybe,” I said. But I was distracted by the way his hair fell into his eyes, and the way the firelight played across his nose and mouth and made shadows on them.

Gabe sensed me watching and looked up. Our eyes met. I turned and went back into the kitchen, where I rattled the plates and banged the pots to settle my jumping stomach.

“What are we going to do about him?” Ivy asked, still whispering.

“I don’t know,” I said, irritable. Everyone was expecting me to have it all figured out, but I didn’t.

I filled the kettle and took it out to the main room to put over the fire. We had a stove, of course, but it was fickle and we could barely use the top for anything. The fireplace was better. It had an iron spit, and I hung the kettle on it. I could feel Gabe’s eyes on my back as I stoked the flames.

“You were going to tell your Mayor about me today, weren’t you?” he asked.

I was silent. I poked at the coals with the fire iron.

“What made you change your mind?”

I thought about hearing my parents’ names, about the crawling feeling between my shoulder blades when the Mayor smiled at me, how Gabe screamed when he’d been sick. I thought about how the Mayor described Gabe as dangerous even though he’d been weak and helpless in the barn, and how he’d been kind to my sister and how he’d thanked me when I saved his life. All these things ran through my head in a waterfall of images and feelings, and I didn’t have any words to describe them.

“It didn’t feel right,” I said, but as soon as I spoke the words they seemed ridiculous.
It didn’t feel right
? What was right, though?
Right
was telling the Mayor and leaving it in his hands.
Right
was avoiding contact with the Farthers.

Wasn’t it?

Feeling unsettled, I got up and went to check on Jonn.

He was lying asleep on the bed that had previously belonged to our parents. I put a quilt over him so he’d stay warm before returning to the fire.

“How’s your brother?” Gabe asked. His eyebrows drew together as he peered at me.

“He’s fine.” I picked up the yarn that he’d finished twisting and began rolling it into a ball, my fingers working automatically. “He’s just sleeping.”

“He’s sick, isn’t he? What happened to him?”

I looked up. Gabe’s expression was free of pity, disgust, or condemnation, all things I was used to seeing in the villagers’ eyes. He looked merely curious.

“The farm is dangerous. Equipment fails, things fall, people make mistakes.” I hesitated, sifting through the words in my head, choosing them carefully. “There was an accident involving an overturned wagon. Jonn’s leg was crushed, along with part of his midsection and some of his skull. It is a miracle that his intestines didn’t rupture, they say. He was five years old.”

I checked his reaction. Gabe was silent, listening.

Drawing in a breath, I continued, “The leg never healed right, and his health never recovered. He is prone to seizures sometimes, and he does not walk without assistance. Now he is essentially an invalid, living here with me instead of starting his own family with their own quota. He’s old enough to marry, but who would want to marry a cripple?”

There was more to the story, but I didn’t tell him all the details, like how my parents had to fight for the doctor to operate on Jonn to save his life. How they had to work extra hard to keep up with the work load since he was too weak to help but our expected output hadn’t changed. How we’d all picked up the slack Jonn left.

Gabe gazed at the fire a moment without speaking. “And you had no doctors to repair the leg, no medicine to heal his seizures?” he asked finally.

“Just the village physician, and his knowledge is limited. There was nothing else that could be done. We’re lucky he survived at all.”

We worked silently a few moments while Gabe considered this. And it was strange, I thought, because it felt almost good to tell our sad story to this strange Farther boy who’d never heard it. It was like I’d been holding my breath for years, and now I was finally allowed to let it out.

“In Aeralis, the doctors could have fixed him,” he said.

“I know.” My hands slowed as I looked at him. “But didn’t you know that the people of the Frost have nothing to do with the Farthers?”

We shared a sad smile at the irony of my words.

“I don’t understand why, though,” he said after another moment.

“Why what?”

“Watchers, snowstorms, hard life on the farm... Why do you live here in the Frost if life is so dangerous?”

I laughed. “Where else are we supposed to live? It’s our home. We’ve been living here as long as anyone can remember.”

Gabe shook his head stubbornly. “What I mean was, why settle here in the first place?”

It was a fair question, so I considered it. “There is a bird here in the Frost called the bluewing. It’s a tiny bird, small enough to sit in the palm of my hand. Nearly every hawk and eagle preys upon it. But this bird does a funny thing. It makes its home in a poisonous thorny bush called stingweed, where one prick from the thorns would knock it dead.”

“Dead? Then why...?”

“Why does it live in a place that could kill it?” I shrugged. “None of the predatory birds will attack it there, because they are too large—they’d be poisoned by the branches for sure, where the smaller bird is just the right size to slip in and out safely, and it has learned the tricks. It’s a perilous dance of survival for the bluewing, flying in and out of that bush every day without getting stung, but the bird is just small enough and just nimble enough to navigate most of the time. And in the bush, he is protected from his greatest threat.”

Gabe hesitated. “And what does the Frost protect your people from?” he asked.

I didn’t mince my words. “Farthers.”

He nodded, looking at his hands. “I guess my people have always been a threat to yours, haven’t they?”

“My parents used to say that our place here has kept us from being absorbed and enslaved by your Empire. We once valued our freedom enough to risk everything for it, but perhaps, if I’m being honest, we just don’t know anything else but this place anymore. Life isn’t perfect here, Gabe. It’s a perilous dance every day just like with the bluewing, and sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. Our every action is wrapped up in preserving our safety. We’re so sheltered here. What kind of a life is that?”

Gabe didn’t say anything.

I laughed under my breath, and it sounded bitter. “Listen to me. What am I talking about,
worth it
? Is any experience or bit of beauty worth the cost of my life? I know nothing but safety and self-preservation at all costs.”

“And yet,” he said softly, “you’re risking everything to help me.”

I nodded, looking at the fire. Silence wrapped around us like a blanket, and it was surprisingly soothing to sit without speaking in his presence.

“What about you?” he asked after a long pause. “Do you have any plans for the future?”

“Me?”

“You said earlier that your brother couldn’t marry. Do you plan to marry?”

I could hear Ivy still banging pots in the kitchen. I wanted to brush off his question, but I’d done so much talking already that the words poured out of me like water, good idea or not. “Well, it’s expected of me. A family is the best way to strengthen the village and make it safe, and that is our greatest value.”

“Strength?”

“Safety,” I said. And in that moment I realized that I’d always equated the two in my head, but they weren’t the same thing. Sometimes people were strongest at their most vulnerable, dangerous moments.

Gabe interrupted my musings with another question. “You don’t want to marry?”

“It’s not that, exactly.” How could I explain? “We are orphans. My parents died a few months ago in an accident much like Jonn’s, and I am now the head of the household. If I marry, I will be expected to leave them and move in with my new husband. None of the men in this village would want to provide for my siblings, too. I don’t know what will become of them. Ivy will probably be taken in by a more established family until she is grown, and Jonn...”

I didn’t know what would happen to my twin. His best qualities, quiet calmness and level-headedness and a sense of humor despite all obstacles, were not high in demand when it came to quota-meeting. He could not walk or run, and that made him lesser somehow in the eyes of the villagers.

“I worry,” I whispered, “that I won’t be able to look after them anymore.”

Gabe nodded, and the moment was suddenly too personal, too intimate. Our eyes met. My chest felt hollow and full at the same time, and I recognized it for what it was—desire. I found him attractive. Flustered, I picked up my work and went to the loom.

“What is that?” Gabe asked, looking at the loom. Thankfully, it didn’t seem as though he’d sensed my discomfort.

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

I ran my fingers over the loom. “A loom. It spins the wool into thread,” I said. “But Ivy and I are the only ones who can use it, obviously, and I’m much better at it than Ivy. The yarn we twist by hand, and we have to deliver both to make quota.” I considered his question again. “Do you
really
mean to say that you’ve never seen a loom before?”

Gabe shrugged. “I really haven’t.”