Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (27 page)

“A fire?” asked Mother. “It’s too early in the year for that. Did they have a dry winter?”

“Rumor says it was the craft.”

That interested me. “Wizards? Really?”

“Chard, Smitha, I’ll not take that talk in here,” Mother said.

Let me take a moment to say that wizards were unseen in these parts, and supposedly rare even in the Unclaimed Lands far north, where they trained in magics beyond even my imagination, and none of them for good. A traveling bard once whispered that they have an academy there, though to this day I’m not sure where. I certainly never thought I’d one day search for it myself.

Mordan’s eyes left me to meet my father’s. “What’s the rumor?”

“Some political war or some such, which led to two of them fighting one another. Perhaps even a chase. I have a hard time believing any man could throw fire, but that’s what Magler claimed. He heard it from a foods merchant passing by this morning.”

Marrine, mouth half-full of cornbread, said, “I’d like to meet a wizard.”

Mordan smiled. “They can be a dangerous sort. Tales often fantasize them, for better or for worse.”

“So long as they don’t come down here,” Mother said, roughly heaping a second helping of potatoes onto her plate, spoon clinking against the china. I hoped she wouldn’t butter them. Mother gained weight in the most unsightly of places. “Mordan, how is your sister? I recall you mentioning her a little while ago.”

Mordan’s blue eyes glanced back to me, as they had already done several times during the meal, smiling even when his mouth was not. I did not smile back. Returning his focus to Mother, he described a sister of his who lived somewhere in the west, but I paid little attention to what he said. Instead I wolfed down my food and excused myself to my room. If either parent disapproved, they did not voice it in front of a guest.

Inside my little sanctuary, I stretched out on my bed and selected one of three books I had borrowed from Mrs. Thornes, my teacher, which she had borrowed from a scholar in a neighboring village. To me old tongues seemed like secrets—secrets very few people in the world knew, let alone knew well. The book in my hands was written in Hraric, the language of Zareed and the Southlands, where I believed the sun never set, men built their homes on heaps of golden sand, and children ran about naked to escape the heat—with their parents hardly clothed more than that. I had studied some Hraric two years earlier. I didn’t consider myself fluent, but as I browsed through this particular book of plays, I could understand the main points of the stories. Southlander tales were far darker and more grotesque than the ones we studied in school, and I soon found myself so absorbed that I hardly heard the scooting of chairs in the kitchen and Mordan’s good-byes as he went to complete his deliveries. I did, however, take special note of the time, and as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky, casting violet and carmine light over Euwan, I smiled smartly to myself, imagining Mordan standing alone on that dock long into the night, his only company the proposal I would never allow him to utter.

While I wish I could say otherwise, my conscience did not bother me that night, and I had no trouble sleeping. Had I known the consequence of my actions, I would never have closed my eyes. I slept late, as there were no requests upon my responsibility on sixth days. I woke to bright morning sun, dressed, and brushed one hundred strokes into my hair before deciding I ought to have a bath. Spying Marrine in the front room, I asked her to fill the tub for me.

She looked up from her sketch paper and frowned. “No!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to carry the water.”

“I’ll give you a taffy. Honey taffy, with cinnamon.”

She considered this for a moment but ultimately shook her head and returned to refining her mediocre talents as an artist. With a sigh I stepped outside into the warming spring air and trudged to the barn to retrieve the washbasin myself. There was an empty stall on the far end of the barn where we took our baths, which was mostly free of horse smell. Despite my best efforts, I could not convince my father to let me bathe in my room, so it was an inconvenience I had learned to endure.

I set the tub in the stall and retrieved the pail for carrying water. As I turned to exit the barn, I shrieked and dropped the bucket, my heart lodging into the base of my throat. Mordan stood in the open doorway, a vision of a ghost, his eyes trained on me. I had hoped his shame would keep him at bay for at least a month. Why couldn’t he bow in his tail like any other dog and leave me be?

“Mordan!” I exclaimed, seizing the pail from the hay-littered floor. I gritted my teeth to still my face. “What are you doing here? And with me about to bathe!”

“I apologize,” he said, somewhat genuinely, but there was an unusual hardness to his eyes and his voice. “I need to speak with you.”

“I’m a little—”

“Please,” he said, firm.

I let out a loud sigh for his benefit, letting him know my displeasure at his interruption, but I hung up the pail and followed him out into the yard. I folded my arms tightly to show my disapproval of his actions, all while hiding my surprise that he had come to see me so soon after my blatant disregard for him and his intentions. He had not been the first man I had left waiting for me—I suppose it gave me a sense of power, even amusement, to push would-be lovers about as though they were nothing more than checkers on a board. But Mordan
was
the first who had dared confront me afterward. Still, his backbone shocked me.

He didn’t stop in the yard but rather led me across a back road and into the sparse willow-wacks behind my house, on the other side of which sat the Hutcheses’ home. He stopped somewhere in the center, where there were enough trees that I couldn’t quite see my house or the Hutcheses’.

He eyed me sternly, though a glint of hope still lingered in his gaze. “I waited for you at the dock until midnight, Smitha,” he said. “What happened?”

I kept my arms firmly folded. I preferred subtlety when breaking people, but if this was what it took to sever whatever obligation Mordan thought I had to him, then so be it. “Nothing happened,” I said. “I didn’t want to go.”

He jerked back, a wounded animal, but then his expression darkened. “Then why agree? I don’t understand. I had—”

“You’re dense as unbaked bread, Mordan!” I exclaimed, flinging my hands into the air. “Do you think me stupid enough not to read your intentions? Not to notice that pathetic way you look at me when you think my back is turned?”

His eyes widened, and his face flushed, though from anger or embarrassment, I couldn’t be sure.

“I don’t know if my father has given you the wrong impression,” I continued, the words spilling from my lips, “but I do not give you the slightest thought.”

Mordan turned from red to white, and his eyebrows shifted in such a way that he resembled a starving hound. I should have left it at that, but my knack for the dramatic and my fury at the situation fueled me.

“Surely a toad could hold my interest longer, and be more pleasant to look at!” My cheeks burned. “We live on different levels of life, Mordan Alteraz, mine far higher than yours. The sooner you realize that, the better off you will be. I do not care one ounce for you, and I never will.
That
is why I didn’t go to the dock, and why no sensible woman ever would!”

I found myself oddly breathless. Mordan had gone to stone before me, and I admit that a twinge of fear vibrated through me rather than the sense of sweet victory I had expected. Never had someone looked at me so grimly.

He laughed—no, growled. The noise that escaped his lips sounded more animal than human. He stepped forward, and I stepped back, my back hitting the trunk of a green-needle pine.

“And to think I felt anything for a woman like you,” he whispered, his face contorting into a snarl. “How blind I have been. Your heart is ice.”

I opened my mouth for a retort, but his hand came down hard on the trunk beside my head. I winced. He leaned in close, a malicious smile on his face.

“If only you knew who I was,” he said, even quieter now. Gooseflesh rose on my arms unbidden. “Now I can see the soul that lies hidden behind your beauty. You are a horrid, selfish woman, Smitha.”

I slapped him hard across his cheek, putting my full weight into the blow. It turned his head, but his hand did not budge from its place on the tree beside me.

He licked his lips, smearing blood along the corner of his mouth. Straightening, he studied me up and down, his expression covered in shadow.

“I came here to get away from it, to leave it all behind,” he growled. “But I have enough left for you.”

“Enough
what
?” I asked, but his other hand came down on my throat, cutting off my last word. I clung to his wrist and dug my nails into his skin, but he didn’t so much as flinch. He stared hard into my eyes, and my fear ignited so abruptly I felt I would turn to ash in his hold.

“
Vladanium curso, en nadia tren’al
,” he murmured. “I curse you, Smitha Ronson, to be as cold as your heart.”

His fingers turned to ice around my neck, and I shivered as the cold traced its way down my skin and beneath my clothes, branching out to my arms and legs, my fingers, and the tips of each toe. It rushed up my neck and over my head. The chill gushed into my mouth and nostrils, washed down my throat, and crept into my stomach and bowels. It opened my insides like a newly sharpened knife, cutting down to my very bones.

“May winter follow you wherever you go,” he said, “and with the cold, death.”

Mordan did not move, but some force punched me, and my entire body caved in on itself. The breath left my lungs, and a chill colder than any I had ever experienced filled my core and shot through my veins. My arms and legs went rigid, and every hair on my body stood on end. My very heart slowed. The sun vanished from my face, hidden by a thick, white sheet of clouds. A bitter wind blew over me, tousling my hair.

Mordan released me with a sneer and vanished, the air behind him opening its mouth and swallowing him whole.

Charlie N. Holmberg’s
Followed by Frost
is available from 47North.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Salt Lake City, Charlie N. Holmberg was raised a Trekkie alongside three sisters who also have boy names. She graduated from BYU, plays the ukulele, owns too many pairs of glasses, and hopes to one day own a dog.