Snow Like Ashes (30 page)

I pull out of her hands. “How do you know that?”

The woman smiles. “I know everyone who escaped Angra that night. The last ones who came here told us about all of you.”

Crystalla and Gregg. I back up as if I can get away from the pang of memory. The woman’s face is serene, calm. She still hopes for rescue too.

The Winterians around her are not so certain. Most look like Conall, dark and angry, curious about this new visitor but not wasting energy on any hope of escape.

The woman pushes forward. “There were originally twenty-five of you, yes? Last we heard, the number was ten.”

She waits, and I know she wants news of the outside world, of the survivors and how many are left to lead the charge against Spring.
Eight,
I almost say. But no, it’s seven now. And who knows how many others died in the battle for Bithai? Dendera, maybe. Finn. Greer or Henn. Maybe Spring reached the city and even Alysson is—

My chin falls. “Seven. Maybe fewer.”

Quiet muttering ripples through the crowd. The number makes their frowns deepen, and I can feel their blame flare higher. How we let them down.

The woman lifts my chin, smiling like nothing’s changed. “The king?”

A bolt of agony hits me. Mather. I’ve managed not to think about him too much since I got here. His final, parting scream echoes through my mind, desperate and petrified, as he was dragged back into Bithai while Herod stood over me. . . .

“Alive,” I whisper. “Running for his life, but alive.”

The woman nods. She hooks her arm through mine and turns me toward the crowd, my back to Nessa and a grumbling Conall.

“I’m Deborah,” she says, leading me to the center of the room. We’re surrounded by Winterians on all sides, a sea of white hair, blue eyes, and wariness mixed with some small spurts of hope. “I was the city master of Jannuari. Of the Abril Winterians left, I’m the highest ranking.” Deborah pauses like she’s waiting for me to respond.

I adjust my arm still hooked in hers, fingers stretching through the air. It’s warm down here, too warm, and I can feel all those eyes watching me. So I ask the only question I can. “What do you expect me to do?”

Tell me how to save you. I don’t know what to do.

Deborah is quiet for a moment, her face distant like she’s working through a plan in her head. She looks away from me, toward the crowd, and squeezes my hand.

“This is Meira,” she announces. “She is one of the twenty-five who escaped Angra the night Winter fell. Living proof that his evil is not as absolute as he would have us believe.”

I stifle a moan. It’s exactly what Sir told us. That our lives matter simply because we exist—living, breathing evidence that Winter survived. Sir would love to see this cave they built and know they created some small freedom in Angra’s prison. He’d find a way to turn their hatred into adoration and, better still, find a way to get them out of here.

He should be with them. Him or Mather. Not me.

“She has come to us as a beacon, like the others who passed through Abril—”

Gregg and Crystalla probably stood in this exact spot, probably toiled at the wall. And they died. No one here knows more than that they left—that Angra took them from the camp and they never came back.

“—a light to shine hope into our misery,” Deborah continues. “Her presence signifies an awakening, a reminder we so desperately need that we are more than Angra’s slaves!”

The crowd murmurs to themselves. Those who look at me with hope start to smile, start to nod, but the rest simply shrug off Deborah’s speech like they’ve heard it all before. Like her words are this room, a hollow and forgotten thing. Just another trembling sword raised against the greater might of Spring.

Deborah lifts my hand into the air, her old face ten years younger in her joy. I can feel her words coming, bubbling up with her hope, Nessa’s hope, all those fragile faces waiting for her outburst.

“We are Winter!” Deborah shouts.

The same phrase Conall said moments ago. Its meaning stokes the hopeful ones into cheers, a handful of voices against the doubtful scorn of the others. Deborah has to see them, the ones who glower and whisper while their countrymen cheer. She has to know the danger of false hope by now. It’s cruel of her to give them this; it’s cruel of her to tell me I will meet any other fate than death here.

I yank my hand down and Deborah faces me. “No.” My response is instant, thoughtless, urged by something cowering in a corner of my soul. “No. I’m just—I’m only one girl. What do you even think I can
do
? It isn’t fair of you to let them—”

Deborah cocks an eyebrow. “
Fair
would be none of this ever happening to begin with.
Fair
would be you living out a carefree existence in Jannuari, with a warm bed and a loving family. Nothing is fair, Meira.”

I step back. All of this reminds me so much of Sir that my chest aches. I don’t want that life as much as I should. I want . . .

But nothing comes. None of my usual certainty about what I want, who I want to be, and the only thing I think, feel, know at all is:
It doesn’t matter what I want.
My desires don’t matter here. They never did. While I took merciless advantage of the fact that I never had to deal with growing up in slavery, they were here.
Here.

It’s just me now, like Hannah said. Sir should be here, it’s true. Mather should be here. But they
aren’t
. And since it is just me, I owe it to them to do everything I can to free our people. Even if I die here, I will die mattering, and that’s what I’ve wanted all along, isn’t it? And I will, just not within my own set parameters—I will matter in ways beyond my comprehension of the word, because I will matter in whatever way my kingdom needs me most. That, I think, is a truer mark of belonging somewhere—being willing to do anything,
everything
, that needs to be done, regardless of what I want.

As soon as those thoughts fill my mind, a dam breaks and need floods me, cooling my cheeks, tingling my limbs. I fought so long and so hard to be
me
, to be Meira in all of this, to help Winter in my own unique way. But this isn’t about what
I
want, it’s about what Winter needs. It’s always been about what Winter needs.

As Deborah stares down at me, as the Winterians cheer in soft, quiet groups again, I realize that they make me more
me
, more present than I have ever felt in my life. Like I’ve been waiting all along to understand how much bigger, better, more invigorating this is than anything I could be on my own.

Deborah puts her hand on my arm, one gentle squeeze. “Your presence is proof that there is life outside of Angra’s walls.” She smiles at the crowd. “Even the strongest blizzard starts with a single snowflake.”

Eventually the excited chatter dissipates into expectant silence. We can’t stay down here too long—this cavern was made so a few people could have a reprieve every so often, not so everyone could be here at once. The only reason they risked it today is because of me. The thought makes panic flare through me, and I hurry after Nessa without prodding.

She and Conall lead me back through the tunnel. Two knocks on a wooden door above us and Garrigan pulls it open, reaching down to help out first Nessa, then me. Conall pulls himself up and closes the door, shuffling dirt and rocks back over it before arranging himself by the barred opening, Garrigan on the other side. One look in their eyes, at the way they survey the road beyond our prison, tells me they’re keeping watch over us. Not that they could do much to protect us from soldiers, but it’s a small comfort knowing they’re here.

Nessa sits next to me and wraps her arms around her knees. It’s only slightly lighter here than in the tunnel, the sky still caught in those last fleeting moments where the sun hovers behind the horizon, just waiting for its moment to break through the shadows and flood the world with radiance.

Nessa looks at me, her eyes flashing. “Conall will come around. Everyone else too. They just don’t trust themselves to hope.”

I keep my eyes fixed on her in the dimness. “Why do you?”

She looks away, picking at a spot on her dress. It’s a two-sizes-too-big declaration of her time here, stained and worn through. “When I saw you in the palace grounds,” she starts, her words a hum against the silence of the camp. Every other cage is quiet, forced into a terrified muteness by the threat of monsters in the dark. “I
felt
you when the soldier whipped me to the ground. I’ve never been able to get through that without screaming, but when I saw you watching us . . . I don’t know. I had the strength not to scream.”

I pull my arms around myself and stare at my boots. “You’re so much braver than I could ever be, living here all these years. I don’t believe that I did anything to help you.”

Nessa settles in closer to me, her head dropping onto my shoulder with a yawn. “I do. And soon everyone else will believe too.”

“Gregg and Crystalla,” I whisper, “did you believe the same of them?”
Because they failed.
But something keeps me from adding that, something that doesn’t want to remind Nessa of how hopeless we are.

She shrugs. “I wanted to.”

I wait for her to explain, but her gentle snores are all that come. It is nearly morning. Who knows what horrors today will bring? I need every bit of strength I can get.

As I slump into the wall, careful not to disturb Nessa, my eyes travel to Conall. From his crouch next to the bars he watches me, dark-blue eyes flickering in the night. He looks to Nessa and back again, something in his expression unwinding.

Mather has the same eyes. The same unreadable, endless sapphire eyes. My heart spasms, but before I can drown in memories of us or the past, I slam the door on thoughts of him.

I nod at Conall and hold my breath. After one heartbeat, two, he nods back.

CHAPTER 24

WEEKS PASS. EVERY
morning I spend a few horrific minutes wondering if today is the day Angra will send for me, but he doesn’t, and the soldiers lump me with the workers bound for the wall. I work without water until sundown, gulp down cold stew, and collapse in the cage. And every day, through the working, through the waiting, I ask myself the same question, over and over.

What can I do to help us?

I keep this question to myself, tucked carefully in the back of my mind so no one else can get punished for plotting an escape. But every answer I come up with is flimsy and weak. Take down one of the guards—to what end? Shove a few of the soldiers on the ramps to their deaths—and get pulled down myself? There has to be
something
.

My muscles never get used to the up and down of the ramps, and my legs convulse each night until I pass into restless fits of dreams, dark and scattered flashes that make no sense. Sir and Noam arguing in the Rania Plains, golden prairie grass lashing around them as storm clouds roil above. Mather standing over a dead Spring soldier, eyes on the locket as he holds it out like he wants to drop it into the earth. And Theron caught in a place as black as night, tearing with bloody fingers at shadowy beasts.

Will I ever know what happened to them? Will I ever get to pay my respects to Sir, to stand over his grave and say a final good-bye?

My other dreams, the ones Hannah showed me, are the ones I cling to. The history of magic, the true reason for making the Royal Conduits. Even the flash I saw when I touched Angra, of him meeting Hannah in Winter’s fields, whispering of a deal being struck. There’s something in all this, some solution Hannah was trying to get me to piece together, but all I can come up with are more unanswerable questions.

She said the Decay used people as its conduit. Dark magic
chose
its host. If dark magic could choose its host—then what about our magic? Where did Winter’s magic go when Angra broke our locket? Did it choose to go somewhere else? Those are questions no one dared asked for sixteen years, because it hurt to consider any alternative—or to think that the magic was gone. So we just plastered on fake smiles and assured each other that it was waiting for us to reunite our conduit’s halves, waiting for us to reconstruct its host.

But what if it went somewhere else? Found another host?

Or what if it’s really gone?

Those questions are too long-term for me, though. I need something to help me
now
—so I carry the dreams around with me, poking at them from every angle as I traipse up and down the ramps. It all has to fit together.

But I have no idea how.

At night, Nessa tells me about her life. She’s my age, sixteen. Her father was a cobbler who made the best shoes in Jannuari, and her mother was one of Hannah’s seamstresses. So fierce was her parents’ dedication to Winter that when Angra attacked, they ordered Conall, seventeen at the time, to protect Garrigan, twelve, and newborn Nessa while they went to help the fight. They died that night, and both Conall and Garrigan have spent the past sixteen years fighting to stay alive for her.

Nessa talks about these memories as if they’re hers, the same way I would repeat stories to myself until I was positive I had been in Hannah’s court too, and could remember a kingdom locked in snow.

“How do you know all this?” I ask Nessa one night when I can’t take it anymore. When staring at her becomes too unbearable, like looking in a mirror of what my life should have been. Raised in a work camp, forced to build Abril as soon as she was old enough to stand. Surrounded by the remains of a family and the even more scattered pieces of a kingdom, every shattered soul clinging to memories that aren’t Nessa’s or mine.

“My brothers, and the memory cave,” she tells me simply. Like it’s enough to hear passed-down stories and read about our history from hastily scribbled lines on walls of rock. Like those minuscule bits of information are enough for her, just to have something.

Nessa dives back into her story, about a gown her mother made. It had been intended to be a simple state gown, but the stitching was so intricate that Hannah had opted to wear it for her wedding to Duncan, Mather’s father. Nessa lays the words out before me in a carefully woven tapestry of a past that doesn’t belong to either of us. That will someday.