Frost (3 page)

Rocks, trees, and Watchers.

I didn’t realize I'd been holding my breath until I crested the hill and caught a glimpse of the yellow light streaming through the windows of the farmhouse. My head cleared and I sighed as if I’d just broken the surface of a deep lake. An unexpected flare of emotion squeezed my chest and prickled at the corners of my eyes. Blinking hard against it, I checked the sky again and then went to the barn to see to the animals. I rarely cried, because what good did crying do? Yet seeing Adam Brewer in the village had dredged up a whirl of emotions in me.

There was no time to stew on it, though. I brought the horses in from their paddock and fed and watered them. I checked the hens to be sure they were warm and settled in their coop at the back of the barn. I rubbed my fingers over the bridge of the cow’s nose and down her side before dumping the bucket of dried turnips into her feed trough. They didn’t have names, any of them, because I saw no sense in naming the food. The cow and the chickens would be slaughtered for meat when they were too old, and the horses were not really ours. They belonged to the village, but we stabled them. They were a matched pair, small and shaggy and fleet-footed.

Satisfied that the animals were settled for the night, I returned to the yard. Little shards of ice stabbed my skin and prickled against my cheeks. On the porch, the Watcher Ward over the door clattered and turned in the wind, the blue ribbons and carved wooden snow blossom symbols making a tinkle of ominous music above my head. I opened the door to the house and went in.

The house was too hot after the freezing wind, and the air smelled like warm milk and baked apples. The fire on the hearth blazed high. I tossed my cloak across the hook by the entrance and put the bag of supplies in the kitchen. “Jonn? Ivy?”

My brother Jonn raised his head from the yarn in his lap at my entrance. He looked just like me—lanky limbs, a narrow, shrewd face framed by pale, red-blond hair, a stubborn sweep of freckles across his nose and cheeks like speckles on a bird’s egg. We were twins, and we looked it.

“Where’s Ivy?” I swept my gaze across the main room of the house. Dried laundry draped across my great-grandmother’s furniture, laundry my little sister had been supposed to fold and put away before I got home. A curl of anger kindled in the pit of my stomach—we were barely making quota, the winter storms were upon us, and she wasn’t even keeping up with the basic chores I gave her. She was almost fourteen—she was old enough to do her share of the work.

Jonn raised his eyebrows. “I haven’t seen her all afternoon. I thought she was with you.”

A little piece of my insides froze at his words. Our eyes met and held, and a million wordless things passed between us. I went back to the door and opened it.

Darkness was falling along with the snow. I hadn’t seen my sister in the village, and she hadn’t been in the barn. It was a small farm—just a round clearing in the woods, really. There was no sign of her in the yard. I shouted her name, but the wind snatched the word from my lips and flung it away. The Watcher Ward rattled above me, and the sound was like bones shaking.

My heart beat fast. My lungs were suddenly empty. I took a shaky breath and then exhaled slowly before turning to my brother.

“I’m going out to find her.”

Jonn looked at the fire. I knew he wouldn’t argue with me—he wasn’t the type to voice disagreements, especially not with me—but his whole face tightened and his lips turned white. “The Watchers...”

“It’s too early for Watchers to be out,” I said. “There’s still light left. Besides, nobody’s seen one in months.”

That was a half-lie, as their tracks were spotted almost every week crisscrossing the paths or wandering around the edges of the village where the border of snow blossoms was planted to keep them out. But it was a half-truth, too. We hadn’t seen them recently.

But Jonn and I knew better than anybody that there was still a risk.

“I’m going,” I said.

He didn’t reply, but I could tell by his expression that he was furious that he couldn’t go. He wasn’t mad at me. It was just the way things were. There was no point in wasting time talking about it, so we didn’t.

I pulled on my cloak again and struggled into my heavy boots with the snowshoes for walking on top of the snow. Opening the front door, I threw one final look over my shoulder at Jonn before ducking back out into the wintery evening.

It had grown colder since I’d been inside, or maybe that was just the wind stealing the warmth from my body. I padded through the dusting of snow that covered everything, cupping my hands over my mouth to call her again. “Ivy!”

Most of the time fear was just like a rat in my belly, gnawing and gnawing a hole in the same place day after day whenever I’d let it. But now the rat had turned into a lion, and it was tearing me apart from the inside out. I reached the edge of the yard, where the trees formed a wall of brown and green, and I stopped. The wind shivered through my hair.

“Ivy!” I screamed again.

She was always wandering the farm with a dream in her eyes and a song in her mouth. She had a head full of thoughts about things that didn’t matter and never would, and she didn’t have an ounce of sense when it came to our survival. I wrapped both arms tight around my middle to hold in the fear, and I sucked in another breath to call again when I heard it, lost against the wind. My name.

“Lia...?”

Her voice was faint, almost imperceptible, but my ears were fine-tuned with terror and I heard it. I surged forward into the woods, kicking up snow. “Ivy?”

She appeared out of the shadows suddenly. Her cheeks were bitten red with cold and her long dark hair was wet with melting ice. She stumbled, grabbed my hands. Her mittens were missing. “Hurry,” she breathed, tugging at me. “Quickly.”

“Ivy Augusta Weaver,” I hissed, torn between joyful relief and flickering anger. “It’s almost night time. There is a storm coming. What were you thinking? Where have you been?”

“There is a boy,” she panted, ignoring my scolding. “In the woods.”

“What?”

But she was already plunging deeper into the forest, and I had no choice but to follow her, a new worry filling my mind and replacing the short-lived relief I’d felt. A boy in the woods? Who had gotten himself lost in the woods at a time like this? One of the farmers’ sons, perhaps?

We were the last farm in the Frost. There was nothing beyond us to the north but the Empty, and to the south there was only the Farther World. What was anybody doing at the edge of that?

Ivy and I continued into the forest. We ducked around branches and scrambled over icy roots. The shadows were thick, and they painted our cloaks a deep indigo.

Ivy reached a giant rock at the mouth of a clearing and stopped. “There,” she said, pointing with a trembling hand.

I could just make out the crumpled form. In my anxiety, I saw only isolated details. A thin, wet shirt, a pair of shoulders, a face almost hidden by the snow. I took a step forward, trying to place the face...and then I saw the sharp features, the dark hair, the slightly tanned tone of the skin. I halted as my blood turned stone-cold. Time became protracted and dense, like swimming underwater. Sound was muffled. My chest felt tight.

You must be strong, Lia.
My mother’s voice rang in my head. I remembered her wind-weathered face, her chapped hands gripping mine, her earnest eyes as they scoured my face for weakness. There could be no weakness here in the Frost, where we clung to life between the mountains as desperately as a drowning man clings to a stone.

“He’s not one of ours,” I said, turning to her with sudden fierceness. “Ivy...”

“He’s hurt,” she said.

“Don’t you understand?”

She just looked at me. I drew in a deep breath.

“
That
is a Farther.”

IVY’S EYES WIDENED a fraction at my harsh words. The wind blew between us, spraying ice against our faces. She blinked. I didn’t.

“A...a Farther?”

Of course she knew what that was—every person in our village knew who the Farthers were, even those who’d never caught a glimpse of them across the river. We barely ever spoke of them, but they inhabited everyone’s nightmares all the same.

I nodded curtly.

Ivy struggled to understand what I was implying. “But he’s hurt,” she managed, as if that was the only concern. “And it’s getting dark.”

“We must protect ourselves,” I said.

Ivy swallowed hard.

I glared at her. “No.”

She looked back at the figure lying in the snow. I glanced at the sky again, trying to calculate how much time we had left before the sun sunk completely behind the trees, and we were no longer safe from the things that prowled in the darkness. The Watchers never moved across our yards or around the town perimeter during the sunlight hours, but some had reported seeing them during the narrow span of twilight that joined the day and the night, and it was rumored that they wandered freely in the deep of the forests even during the day.

The wind howled through the trees and tugged at my cloak. Snow fell sideways.

“But he’s hurt,” Ivy whispered again, breaking into my thoughts.

I closed my eyes briefly. My sister was the kind of person who brought home baby birds who’d fallen from their nests and raccoons with thorns in their paws. But we couldn’t simply take a Farther and bandage him up like a lost puppy. “The Elders say—”

“I know they’re dangerous. I know what the Elders say.” Ivy’s voice was as brittle as ice. “But are you telling me you’re going to leave him out here to die? After what happened to Ma and Da?”

I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. Ivy looked at me with her big brown eyes and the fear in my gut snarled. What would the villagers say?
This is dangerous,
my mind screamed at me.
This will endanger the family
!

The figure in the snow stirred. “Please,” he whispered, his voice just a hiss.

I stepped to his side, crouching down to touch his face. His eyes opened a crack, and then...

He looked at me.

I felt hollowed out and filled up again as our gazes collided—mine and this Farther from beyond the edge of my world—and then his eyes shut as he passed out again, and I was released from the spell of them. I stepped back quickly, but the damage was already done. There was already an ache in my chest from the knowledge of what we were about to do.

“Lia?” My sister looked from the Farther’s still form to my face.

“All right,” I said, angry at my own weakness. “Fine. But we have to hurry. It’s almost dark.”

She dragged in a quick, relieved breath.

“Help me carry him,” I said. And there was a dull ringing in my head that was telling me I’d gone mad, because the Farthers were almost as dangerous as the Watchers and almost as dangerous as the condemnation of the village Elders. But I could not stand here and tell my sister that we were going to leave the stranger, this Farther, in the snow to die the same way our parents had died, gutted by some Watcher and left to freeze.

Ivy squatted down in the snow and grabbed his legs. I took hold of his arms. One of his sleeves was slick, and I realized that the snow was dark with blood, not mud.

“He is bleeding,” I hissed, and Ivy just nodded. She already knew. Our eyes met over the motionless body, and I counted out loud. “One, two, three—”

We heaved him up, but he was too heavy. “Down, then,” I said, panting. “We’ll drag him.”

The snow had begun to harden, and ice formed a thick shell over the rocks and roots of the forest floor. I hoisted him halfway up so that his legs were dragging, then slipped my cloak off and wrapped it around his chest. I began to pull. He slipped across the top of the snow crust with little resistance as we slogged toward home.

“I didn’t mean to go into the woods,” Ivy began. She grabbed a corner of my cloak to help me. “But I heard moaning, and I was worried that someone was hurt...”

“Don’t talk,” I gasped, my words coming out terse because of the exertion. “Save your breath. Just pull.”

She shook the hair out of her eyes and didn’t say anything else. The Farther’s head lolled against his shoulder as we lifted him over a rock and back into the snow. He moaned once but didn’t wake. He was so cold beneath my hands that I was astonished he was still alive. His body felt stiff and hard as a corpse.

Together we struggled to drag him across the snow. The storm was worsening, and the gray-blue light played tricks on my eyes. I spotted a flicker of movement in the shadows, the rustle of a pine branch. Something slipped through the trees in the distance—a Watcher? But when I looked again, there was only the gathering darkness and the falling snow.

We broke through the trees and into the yard. I gasped in relief at the sight of the farm, solid and square and spilling light from the windows. Behind it the woods formed a grim, dark line, reminding me that we had to hurry.

“Not the house,” I said when my sister started toward it.

It wouldn’t be safe. I clung to that single thought blindly, stupidly…as if there were any sort of
safe
in what we were doing by taking in this Farther.

Ivy didn’t argue. Together, we tugged him to the barn.

The barn was warm and dark and smelled like grass after the sharp assault of icy wind. Ivy shut the door while I struggled to move the Farther to the back of the room, behind the horses’ stalls where we kept the hay. I threw my cloak back over my shoulders and slipped both arms under his, half-carrying, half-dragging him. The horses nickered at us as I muscled him past them, all the way to the farthest corner that backed up to the rugged side of the mountain—the farthest corner from me and the farthest from the village too. I put him down on a nest of hay and rubbed my aching arms. As a farm girl, I was stronger than most girls my age. But still, it wasn’t easy dragging one hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight.

The light that filtered in was soft and blue, the dimmest illumination of that moment before the sun slipped away completely and the moon rose. It touched his unconscious face and made him look like an angel fallen from the sky.