by Sara Raasch
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 as empty as this room, some hollow and forgotten place buried in the earth. Just another trembling sword raised against the greater might of Spring.
Deborah lifts my hand into the air, her old face ten years younger just 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 to come.
“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 the 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.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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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 jagged 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.
I lean against the wall, knees to my chest. I can’t help but think she’s right—any small bit of information is enough. But we deserve more than that.
And I’m tired of waiting for someday.
Someday we will be more than words in the dark.
That night stays with me through the next few days as I trek up and down the ramps. The swirling memory cave, the words etched in stone, and Nessa’s hopeful sigh.
“These tunnels offer their own type of escape.”
And I realize through all these flickers of desire, these pulses of what could be, that what the Winterians need above all is just what that cave offers, but on a grander scale: hope. Hope to make their lives brighter; hope to help them endure. I have to believe that Mather is still out there, rallying support and preparing an army to march on Spring, and that someday, he’ll tear down Abril’s walls. But whether or not I live to see that day, I will go down in a vicious swirl that will make Angra rue the moment he let Herod put me in here—and that will prove to the Winterians that hope still exists.
Excitement fills me up, makes me jittery and ready to put a plan, any plan, into action. I regret that I let myself wallow so long before I actually tried to do anything. I spent far too long being selfish.
And, one day, a plan forms in my mind. A plan to bring down more than just one or two soldiers—a plan to bring down enough of them that the Winterians have to take notice, have to feel the weight lift. Not freedom, but the first step in a longer journey. A boost in morale.
The city runs with the efficiency and order of a carefully controlled machine—every soldier in his place, every door tightly bolted. This means that schedules are the norm, and weeks of the same routine embed the soldiers’ routines into my mind as well. When they get us every morning; when they dismiss us every night; when they change shifts. The repetition makes them efficient, yes, but it also gives them a huge weakness: it makes them predictable.
I can predict, for instance, that the soldiers stationed on the ramps will change shift every day at noon and that the ramps will clear of Winterians, who gather around the children and their jars of water. For the briefest moment, not only are the ramps clear of Winterians, they’re also packed with double the number of Spring soldiers—those leaving and those taking up their new posts.
And though Herod stripped me of weapons long before we reached Abril, I still have the smallest piece of metal on me—the buckle holding my belt around my pants. So after another endless day working at the wall, I crawl into the cage with Nessa, Conall, and Garrigan, wait for the soldiers to lock us up, and carefully work the buckle out of the leather strap.
Nessa and her brothers eye me as I hunch in the corner, wiggling apart the buckle and using one piece to whittle the other. Scraping metal on metal, so focused I don’t know if Nessa tries to say anything to me before she falls asleep, and by morning, I have a beautiful little knife in my palm. As long as my index finger, one edge worn into a blade. I squeeze it so tightly that the edge bites into my skin as I join the rest bound for the wall.
The routine at the wall is unchanged. Holsters, rocks on our backs, trekking up and down, up and down the creaking wood. Before I head up the ramps, I eye the structure, a quick glance that goes unnoticed. The first plank of wood slopes up from the right side of the structure, connected to the ramps above with posts of wood at every corner. But if the other posts were weakened and the bottom one were to snap as the Spring soldiers changed their shift midday …
If it brings even the smallest blip of hope to the Winterians, it will be worth it.
I twist the makeshift blade in my hand, keeping it poised between my fingers, and with every back and forth, back and forth repetition up the wood planks, I reach out and slide the blade against the posts that hold us in the air. The posts are as thin as my wrist, the wood already warped and brittle under the sun, and it doesn’t take much effort to make small nicks. But only on all the right-side posts, and only enough to slowly, imperceptibly, break it down over the next few days.
Back and forth. Chip.
Back and forth. Chip.
Three days of this, and I’m making progress. I can see thin lines developing on the posts, inconspicuous enough that everyone else brushes right by, mistaking them for the wood’s natural wear. And as the sun stretches higher in the sky that third day, scooting closer and closer to noon, my heart thumps harder and harder in my chest. It’s nearly ready, nearly brittle enough. But what if I miscalculated, and the whole thing comes down too soon? What if I send dozens of Winterians tumbling to their deaths? I don’t have time to answer my own worries. I didn’t miscalculate. I won’t kill anyone but Spring soldiers, and the Winterians will see that fighting back is still possible.
This will work.
Noon comes with the creaking of the gate. Its echoes over the yard, a screeching wail that makes adrenaline burst within me. I take a deep breath and slow my pace on the ramps, falling to the back of the line of Winterians heading down for their noon water break.
I exhale, dragging my feet, watching the last Winterian trudge into the dirt.
Now.
Spring soldiers file past me, stomping up the ramp to their posts. I count them, adding their numbers to the ones already above me. Twenty-four.
Now.
I swipe the knife
through the final post one last time, deepening the gouge I’ve been making for the past three days.
NOW.
With a sharp bump, my shoulder connects to the post, snapping the weak thing in half. I keep walking, my eyes on the people ahead of me, the Winterians sipping water out of clay ladles. Not on the ramps, the other right-side posts breaking, one after another, all the way up.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Everything holds for one moment, the intake of breath before the agonizing wail of terror. Then, as if they all realized what was happening at the same time, every Spring soldier shouts, the planks disintegrating under their feet in one great crack of splintering wood.
The Winterians gape at the collapsing structure. Other Spring soldiers dash forward like they might be able to help, like they might be able to stop it. And I swing around on my heels to watch it fall, to watch it all crumble, unable to get rid of the wicked grin on my face.
I hope you feel them die, Angra, I think, my nose flaring in a growl. I hope you feel their bodies break.
“You!”
In the chaos of the structure falling, in the cloud of dust that explodes up around the shattered wood, a soldier looks at me. His face scrunches in a livid rage, one hand pointing toward me.
“You did this!” he snarls.
I don’t know how he knows. Maybe he saw me bump the post; maybe he saw my smile. However he knows, I confirm it by grinning and holding up the wonderful little knife. I don’t care anymore. I showed the Winterians that fighting back is still possible. I don’t need to look behind me to see what emotion cloaks them—wonder or relief or fear. Whatever it is, it’ll eventually turn to hope. It will eventually start their blizzard.
And I would have been able to go numb in that thought, to let whatever fate descend upon me like a deluge of rain, if not for the sudden cry that pierces the air.
“Don’t hurt her!”
The little boy. The one who got scolded for offering me water that first day, the one who has watched me every day since, his round blue eyes apologetic and curious and determined all at once. Every day he looks at me, his fingers tight on his ladle of water. And every day he twitches toward me half a step, like he wants to break the rules, wants to help me, but always gives in to his fear before he gets farther.
