Frost (7 page)

He was covered so thoroughly that I couldn’t even see him. He must be getting cold. Outside, the wind howled as if to punctuate my thoughts. I set down the bucket and the food and stepped forward—

He came out of nowhere, hitting me hard from one side and knocking me over. We rolled together across the floor and he came out on top, his hands on either side of my head, holding my wrists down against the stones. His burning eyes bored into mine.

I couldn’t seem to find my breath. The whole world slowed down, and I realized with perfect clarity that he might kill me.

“Don’t scream,” he hissed.

I shook my head.

“How far is the village?” He whispered it, the words harsh and raspy in the air between us. I could see his mind working behind his eyes—was he calculating how long it would take him to try to struggle away on his own, how long before they found my lifeless body?

I was neither brave nor stupid. I told him what he wanted to know. “The village is less than a mile.”

He grimaced, and I realized he must be half-mad with the pain. Maybe if I moved suddenly, I could throw him off and get to the door...

He must have sensed my plan, for he pressed down harder on my wrists, keeping me pinned. “And the gate?”

“What gate? You mean the village gate?”

He didn’t explain. “The mountains, then.”

“The farm sits in its shadow,” I gasped. His hands were cutting off my circulation. “But killing me does nothing to help you. You are too weak to get far, and the Watchers fill the woods.”

His eyebrows drew together sharply, and he coughed. He was weakening—I could see it. “Kill you?”

His grip on my wrists slackened. I saw my chance, and I took advantage of it.

I slammed my elbow into his face. The Farther cried out, falling sideways like a puppet with its strings cut. I scrambled up for the door and yanked it open.

“Stop—wait—”

I turned. He was crumpled on the ground, his limbs shaking. I could see that he had no strength left.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” he gasped. “I just needed answers.”

I lingered, not running but not relaxing, either. “You would kill me for information, then?”

He pressed a hand against his side and wheezed a bewildered laugh. “I’m not a murderer of farm girls. Not even those who plan to harm me.”

“Harm you?” My words were sharp. “I’m sticking my neck out for you. I’m putting my family in danger for you. I’m sheltering and feeding you—and for what? It’s you who just tried to harm me.”

“I just needed information about my location,” he said, wincing at my words. He struggled up into a kneeling position and raised his dazzling blue eyes to mine. Blood colored his lip red. “I won’t try anything again, I promise, even though I know you want me dead.”

It was my turn to laugh, breathlessly. “You make no sense.” I grabbed the herbs from my pocket and brandished them at him. “I came to bring you these for your wound. I’m not going to kill you. I just want you gone before you can cause any more trouble.”

His expression turned inside out—the planes of his face softened in surprise, and his eyes widened slightly. But then they slitted shut, and I could tell he didn’t believe me. “You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie?” I snapped. “If I wanted to kill you, I’d have done it by now. I could have simply left you in the snow, or refused to clean your wounds, or refused to feed you.”

He was silent, considering this. Some of the wild terror on his face eased at the logic of what I’d said. “Why haven’t you? Left me to die, I mean?”

I didn’t answer that, because I didn’t know how to put my reasons into words. I didn’t even quite know what the reasons were.

But he was waiting for an answer.

“We had a dog, once,” I said slowly.

The Farther licked his lower lip where it was bleeding from my assault. He was listening.

“It was a pitiful little thing with half a tail and button-black eyes. It chased the chickens and made a nuisance of itself, and once it got lost in the forest and we couldn’t find it. Eventually it came back with one leg dragging. It was shivering and sick. We don’t have time to take care of sick pets, you know, but…my mother nursed that little thing back from the brink of death. I asked her why, and she said life was precious. She said we couldn’t forget that.”

“Did it live?” he asked, softly.

“She,” I muttered. “I remember—it was a female. Snowball. And she lived. She died of old age last winter.”

Fresh blood was blooming across his shoulder beneath the bandage. I stepped forward and found the bucket again. “Take off your shirt.”

He lifted his eyes to mine, startled.

“I’ve just told you—I’m not letting you die. You’re weak with fever, and I need to tend to that wound. Take off your shirt.”

He slid it over his head without a word, bracing himself in a half-kneeling position while I examined the wound. It looked bad. The skin was puffy and inflamed, and blood and puss had seeped into the bandages. But I could fix this.

I mixed the herbs with the hot water and then dipped the rags into them. “This will help,” I said, pressing them against his back a little too hard because I was mad at him for trying to attack me. I put one hand against his shoulder as I worked, and it was hot with fever. When I’d finished, his arms were trembling with the effort of staying upright. I picked up the rags and tossed his shirt over him, and he collapsed against the straw.

“There’s food in the basket for you,” I told him. “I’ll bring you more in the morning. Stew, if we have it.”

I’d gathered up the dirty rags and was turning to go when his voice stopped me.

“I’m sorry. For—for jumping you like that. I thought you wanted to hurt me.”

I didn’t turn around, but I didn’t leave, either. Silence filled the barn.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

It was such a quiet question, spoken so hesitantly. I looked down at my shoes, damp from the snow that had fallen off my cloak and begun to melt on the straw. “Lia.”

“Lia,” he said, like he was testing it out on his tongue. “My family called me Gabe.”

I didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t want that kind of contraband information in my head. But there it—and he—was.

I left, the rags clenched in my hand, and I locked the door behind me.

~

I didn’t tell Jonn and Ivy about the incident in the barn, or what the Farther had said. I plunked myself by the fire and worked the spinning wheel with vicious energy, my lips pressed together tightly. My siblings took one look at my expression and wisely refrained from speaking to me. And so the afternoon passed into golden evening, and the evening into darkness, all in silence. We worked steadily at the spinning and binding, and even Ivy was quiet.

My thoughts kept churning, turning the conversation with Gabe over and over in an effort to see every nook and cranny of his words and their meaning. I kept seeing his face when I’d chosen to change his bandage instead of leave—the surprise, then the softness. And a softness lingered in me, too, and I didn’t know how to define it.

I thought about the Assembly, and what they’d said about the Watchers. Whenever I thought about the tracks I’d seen in the snow, my throat felt tight and my fingers grew damp. Maybe I should go back into town tomorrow and report the Watcher tracks. It might be relevant for some reason—perhaps there was a pattern to their movements, a predictability that could save someone’s life. Maybe someone else wouldn’t have to be orphaned the way we were.

Another thought occurred to me suddenly, like a door thrown open. Ann’s father. The Farther. If I went to him personally, told him what had happened...

He would understand, wouldn’t he? The Elders might be stern and strict, but Ann was my best friend, and I’d known her family since I was a little girl. I would simply go to him and explain everything. Surely he couldn’t be too angry with us for trying to help someone in trouble. I knew it might look bad, since Gabe was a Farther, but surely he could figure something out.

It was settled, then. I would go tomorrow and speak to the Mayor.

The hope in my chest was tentative, but it was there, and it warmed me.

Darkness came. The snow fell in a whispering deluge outside the shutters. I wrapped myself in one of my grandmother’s star quilts and huddled by the fire, a bundle of yarn to twist up neat in my lap. I listened to the wet silence of the snow—like feathers piling upon feathers, muffling out all the sound, wrapping the house in a hushed and fearful silence. My ears were straining for the scrape of Watcher claws on the step, or the creak of the door, but I heard nothing.

Ivy heaved a sigh from her place beside me. “My eyes are stinging and we’ve made loads of yarn already. Can we stop now?”

“Are we finished?” I asked, sounding exactly like my mother. But what could I do? She’d been right all those years when she’d pushed our noses against the grindstone.

My sister thrust her lip out in a pout. “I don’t think it’s fair that you get to go into the village all the time and flirt with Cole while I’m stuck here working.”

My hands, stretched out to hand my finished yarn to Jonn, froze in midair. I swiveled to look at her. “What did you say?”

She squeezed her fingers around the yarn in her lap, defiant. “
Flirting
. With
Cole
.”

“What a despicable accusation,” I said, feeling my eyes narrow. “I detest Cole.”

“He’s your friend, isn’t he?”

It was a good point. He was a member of my social circle, although I decided then and there that the word
friend
had become a little too diluted if it could truthfully be applied to our uneasy and tension-filled relationship.

“Well, I detest the idea of flirting with him!” I snapped.

But Ivy sensed victory from my defensiveness and pressed on. “I heard Everiss Dyer’s mother saying that you’d better marry him quick before he discovers what a sour temper you have. Otherwise you’ll just be a dried up husk without a husband for the rest of—”

I made a noise like an angry bear that had been awakened from hibernation and taunted by ugly children. I tossed aside the rest of the yarn and grabbed my sister by both shoulders, shaking her. The air in the room turned hot, Jonn looked like he might be struggling not to laugh, and Ivy faced me like she was being condemned to burn at the stake for something extremely noble—which made her gossip-reporting all the more infuriating.

“I do not have a sour temper—”

“Let go—”

“Don’t you think you’re proving her point?” Jonn suggested.

We both paused to look at him, panting.

And then, dimly in the distance, we heard screaming.

It was faint at first, like a waking dream, but as I dropped Ivy’s arms and went to the window, it grew louder.

It was coming from the barn.

This wasn’t a Watcher’s cry. This scream was lower, throatier. Human.

The Farther
.

The argument was forgotten as terror glowed white-hot in my veins. I fumbled for my cloak and the branch of dried snow blossoms that I kept by the stoop. I ripped the door open and stepped out into the breath-stealing cold.

Ivy followed, whimpering. “What are you going to do, Lia?”

The barnyard was an empty expanse of white. I could see the barn through the falling snow—no footsteps, claw marks or otherwise, led to the door. Then I heard Gabe’s scream again, muffled but still distinct in the silence of the night.

He must be delirious with fever.

“Fever?” Ivy repeated, and I realized I’d spoken aloud.

That thought was followed immediately by another realization, a worse one.

What if the Watchers heard him?

I didn’t know if snow blossoms and blue ribbons would keep them out, not if they wanted to get inside. They stayed away from the village, but we couldn’t tempt them, not out here so close to the forest. He needed to be quiet during the night. We all did.

“What should we do?” my sister whispered.

“Stay here.” I was already going, before I got too frightened and changed my mind.

The barn was only a few dozen yards from the farmhouse, but the journey seemed to take a lifetime. My breathing was loud and harsh in my ears, the air was cold as death in my lungs, and my heart pounded against my chest like a fist. I reached the door and slid it open. Gabe was sitting up, his face flushed and his eyes glassy. He panted, looking at me without seeing me.

“You need to be quiet,” I hissed, reaching him. “It’s not safe. The Watchers will hear you.”

He whimpered like a child, delirious. He was babbling nonsense. “They’ve come for me, Lakin,” he said to me, desperation coloring his voice. “They’ve taken me, it’s all over now—”

“Shhhh.” I put my cold hands against his face, and he melted against them, his eyes fluttering shut with relief. I made a quick, heart-twisting decision. “I’m bringing you into the house.”

As soon as I said it I knew it had to happen. He would not continue to survive in the barn, not in this freezing cold while running a fever and crying out from delirious dreams in the night.

“They’ll kill me,” he gasped. “Lakin, I’m sorry. I know I promised you, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t do nothing.”

“Shhhh,” I tried again.

“No,” he insisted. “I’m trying to tell you—”

“Gabe,” I said, speaking his name firmly, and he quieted at the sound of my voice. As I struggled to lift him into a standing position, I wondered who Lakin was. A friend? A sweetheart? A family member?

He sagged against me, his arm around my shoulders and his nose pressed into my hair. “Lakin,” he murmured against my neck, and a shiver slipped down my spine. Sweetheart, then. I helped him toward the door.

At least we would leave no suspicious footprints. The snow was falling so steadily that it would fill the holes we left in a matter of minutes. I looked at Gabe, and he seemed lucid now that the icy air was fanning his face. He squinted at the house and then at me.

“Lia?” He sounded confused, pained. Grateful. Something in my stomach twisted painfully. It might have been pity for him. It might have just been nervousness about the Watchers.