The Ruin of Snow

by Lacy Sheridan

  Wesley gazed at the nearest lantern. “I stole a book, that’s all.”

  “A book? You’re cursed over a stolen book?”

  “The book was the first step of it,” Idris said. “A child’s book an old friend from the guard paid us more than we could have dreamed of for.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we were starving and he had gold to give,” he replied.

  Wesley muttered, “Because we’re idiots.”

  “Well, at least one of you understands that. How was a child’s book so valuable?”

  Wesley looked at me. “I’m a thief. Somebody pays me that much to steal a book, I’m going to take note of what I’m stealing, because it’s probably more valuable than the gold. But I’ve stolen treasures from nobles and that book was nothing special. It was one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever done. Until—”

  When he broke off, Idris tensing, I prodded. “Until?”

  “Until I woke up as a damn raccoon,” he finished.

  I didn’t get a chance to demand more detail. A yowl sounded, the echo on the walls sending a chill through me, and we turned toward it. There was a moment of stillness before the sounds of scuffling, pounding feet registered, and then I couldn’t be sure which of us moved first. We raced through the tunnels and pulled up short near the entrance. I watched the tangle of the others until I saw the wildcat in the center of them.

  Tamsin was in a panic.

  The shadows had lengthened. The sun wasn’t gone, but none of it lit the tunnels. Tamsin was well inside, yards from the opening where he should have shifted to human, but nothing had changed. He braced himself on the dirt floor, fur bristling, tail lashing. A low feline growl rose from his throat but was directed at himself more than anybody else. His eyes were wide and glazed.

  The true animal wasn’t here, but there was less Tamsin than there should have been. He wasn’t changing back, even as the comfortable dimness of the caves covered him.

  “Tam, it’s going to be alright. It’s just taking longer,” Rayick was saying, his deep voice a smooth, calming constant. It didn’t seem to be doing much.

  The others parted as I hurried to the pair and knelt on the ground. I felt every eye on me but didn’t let myself look at anybody but Tamsin. Into his green-gold eyes, the pupils nothing more than paper-thin slits. I couldn’t tell if he was seeing anything at all.

  “Tamsin.” No reaction. “Tamsin.” A tiny shudder in his stone-stiff posture. “Curses work off fear as much as they do the magic that created them. The more you fear this, the sooner it will happen. You are still here. Hold onto that. Breathe. I’m going to change you back.”

  That set him off, as I’d known it would. He bolted, paws skidding on the ground. Rayick grabbed him before he could go far. Tamsin yowled and hissed, thrashing, clawing, and the pain—not pain from the claws—shone in Rayick’s eyes. He didn’t let go. The others shuffled closer, torn on whether to help me or stop me.

  “Keep him still, as much as you can,” I said, letting my jars spill from my bag in front of me. “I’ll work as quick as possible.”

  “You know he’s terrified of magic,” Wesley accused. My answer came out swift and sharp.

  “He can deal with the magic or stay like that.” I yanked jars open, pouring dried leaves and roots by eye into a little pile. Nobody protested again. Bloodroot. Willow bark. I shoved a sliver of ginger towards Rayick. “Have him eat it.”

  Tamsin thrashed harder at the comment, flanks heaving, eyes wild. I forced his eyes to meet mine. “Tamsin, listen to me. I have done nothing to this, I swear on the Lady. It’s just ginger. It will direct the magic from you for a few minutes. Weaken it. Do you understand?”

  A heavy moment, and then a quick jerk of his head. I held the sliver out again and he snatched it. I returned to the other plants. I scooped them up and pressed them between my palms, closing my eyes and letting my magic take over. Mine colliding with what lurked in the plants, my intent driving it. It wouldn’t break the curse, and if it was going to come down on Tamsin in its entirety now, I could do nothing about it. But if it was simply a sign of it worsening—and I suspected it was—it would stabilize things. The power swirled between my hands, its familiar taste in my mouth, and I opened my eyes and hands, blowing a breath of the irregular dust at Tamsin.

  It settled in his fur and he closed his eyes. For a few seconds nothing happened, but then he jerked and his fur rippled. Rayick shot out of the way.

  Tamsin was lying on the ground, fully human, coughing as he shoved himself upright. He was paler than normal, unsteady. A terrible shadow hung in his eyes, the lingering terror. I could hear the collective relief from the others, but I focused on Tamsin.

  He leaned on the wall of the cave, watching me. “Thank you,” he murmured. I nodded and gathered my supplies.

  They watched me go back the way I’d come. I passed Kye, hovering in the nearest opening, and their honey eyes followed me until I was almost out of sight, when their feet followed as well.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” they said as they fell into step next to me.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “And you didn’t have to speak to him like that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  A beat of silence. “You’re better than you insist you are, Neyva. Kinder.”

  I looked at them, truly looked. They hid their worry well, but it was there, in the stiffness of their shoulders, the faint, almost imperceptible tremor in their fingers. This had shaken them. A reminder of what was waiting for them all. And maybe Kye was right, some of the time. I met their eyes, looking even with shadow like they had trapped the sunlight they missed so much.

  “I have work to do, Kye. I’ll see you tonight. With minimal feathers.”

  Their lips twitched, and the graze of their knuckles across my hand set my veins on fire. I refused to let it show. Then they turned the other way.

  Twenty

  “Where did you learn to hunt so well?” I asked Aurynn as I sliced meat into neat cubes. If my luxurious upbringing had a drawback—and it had many, I was discovering—it was that it had given me nothing in non-combat-based survival skills. I knew the very basics of cooking and cleaning game, and all my knowledge of hunting beyond common sense came from Aurynn. Luckily Enaelle, raised with a modest merchant of a father, knew plenty, and I was good at copying what I saw.

  Aurynn shrugged and peeled a section of skin from her hare. “We didn’t have much when I was growing up. Most days, not enough to get something to eat. So I learned to catch my own food.”

  “You taught yourself?”

  “My father was a hunter. He taught me some things before he died.” She said it so flatly I knew it was not a topic to be discussed, and I changed the subject.

  “How did the daughter of a poor hunter end up here?”

  I knew how. She’d said her mother was a witch—that she’d killed her. If hers was anything like mine, no doubt her father’s death had been anything but accidental, however it had happened. Aurynn was older than I was, but I couldn’t place her older than twenty-one; if she’d been with the others for as long as their stories indicated, she’d been young when she’d killed her mother.

  Enaelle glanced from where she stirred the thin broth over the fire, picking bones out, but didn’t speak. Aurynn’s shoulders tensed. “I was fourteen when my mother died. I had nowhere to go, no way to survive. I stole my way to Acalta on wagons, hoping it would get me a better chance at a life. I found myself given the choice between the streets and a pleasure house. Idris stopped me before I could choose.”

  I turned to Enaelle. “I know you followed Wesley.”

  Pink tinted her cheeks. “I did not follow Wesley. I made a choice, like we all did.”

  Aurynn scoffed, but some of the light returned to her eyes. “Yes, made a stupid choice to leave your cushy life for this palace of luxury.”

  “I never liked Fraida. Father did, and it was why he moved us from Awhari. He thought he�
��d find his fortune.”

  “Well, from what I saw, you had a roof, a bed, and three meals a day. Not so rough.”

  “It wasn’t rough,” she agreed. “But I didn’t have a future there. Father understood.”

  “What about you, princess?” Aurynn asked, moving her fierce blue gaze on me. Half a smile played at her lips, a smile that came a little more every time we spoke. “What made you run from the noble squares and send your sisters on a literal witch hunt?”

  My stomach pitched and lurched, and I worked to keep my posture relaxed. “I’m not a princess, just noble,” I muttered. “And being noble is not what you might dream it is.”

  “Too many servants to obey your every whim?”

  “Oh, Aurynn, don’t be mean.” Enaelle flashed me a smile. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  “No, it’s alright.” But I was quiet as I carried the meat to her, choosing my words. I couldn’t tell them the extent of it, but I could tell them the essence. “I don’t…agree with my mother and sisters on what magic should be. How it should be used. What it means. And in witching families, that’s as good as betrayal. We don’t take betrayal lightly.”

  Aurynn watched me like she was trying to decipher what I meant, and Enaelle frowned. “I’m sorry you had to leave them behind.”

  I snagged a cranberry from the cup piled with them—picked by Enaelle and I yesterday, me picking and following snake trails through the snow while she sought out the best bushes. “Don’t be. I’d rather not have them hunt me down, but we were never close.”

  “And you’re…you’re sure it’ll be alright, if you…” She trailed off, brows furrowing in worry.

  “Kill them?” I finished. “Kye and I?” She flinched but nodded. “It was Idris’s idea, but I agree with him that it’s the best option. They won’t stop until I’m dead. Wherever I go, they’ll find me. And my family is…” I paused and forced a shrug. “They’re not people you want around.”

  “We’re talking about killing the whole of a noble line,” Aurynn interjected. “Won’t it cause problems?”

  It might, but it would solve more. How many people in the noble squares were targets of my family? “I’m not planning to go back to Acalta. I don’t care if it does.”

  “The guard will want to know what happened.”

  I gave her the deadly Morningspell smile. “I can handle the guard.”

  “Be careful, please,” Enaelle murmured, returning to her broth. “I don’t want either of you to get hurt.”

  She was busy, so I made sure Aurynn was looking at me when I answered. “We’ll both be fine.” And because the game didn’t end with their kindness and concern, I added, “Both of you be careful, too, please.”

  “Why?” Aurynn asked.

  “Because I’m beginning to think this curse means business and I don’t want you hurt, either.”

  Aurynn rolled her eyes, but a faint smile tugged at a corner of her lips. “We’ll be alright, princess. Just get on breaking it.”

  “I’m trying. I worked with Wesley and I got a feel for the magic, but it’s not enough yet. It’ll take time.”

  “You worked with Wesley?” Enaelle asked. “What did he tell you?”

  I wasn’t about to announce that I’d used an enchanted mirror to peek into his past, “That he stole a child’s book. That’s all.”

  Aurynn paled and her eyes went wide before she sawed at the last of the rabbit’s pelt. “That was no child’s book.”

  “You know what it was?”

  She hesitated. “I saw it for a moment. But that’s all it took to know I didn’t want to go anywhere near it again.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was a child’s book,” Enaelle said. “A storybook about your Selliiran gods. I can’t imagine why Wesley was hired to steal it.”

  I blinked. “About the gods? Which ones?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We didn’t get to read it,” Aurynn said. “Wesley did his job, he got ahold of it, and he handed it over. What happened after is the fault of whoever ended up with it, not us.”

  I leaned on the makeshift table. “What did happen after?”

  Her knife moved quick and harsh. She didn’t look up, and her voice was so quiet I almost didn’t hear her answer. “The beasts came. And I hunted them down.”

  “What beasts?” I asked.

  Aurynn set her jaw. “Beasts made out of shadow and claws.”

  “How did you hunt them?”

  “The same way I hunt everything else. An arrow in the right place, at the right time, and they fell. I was paid to shoot the arrows and gather the claws that were left behind.”

  Beasts of shadow that left their claws when they died. I rubbed my chest, where the monster my sister had summoned tried to dig out my heart. “What did you do with the claws?” My voice was thinner than I intended.

  Aurynn shook her head. “I didn’t do anything with them.”

  Enaelle sighed. “None of us wanted anything to do with the claws. It was a job.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “I gave them to the man who hired us,” Aurynn snapped. “That’s all. It was easy work and he paid well. Here, cut that one up, too,” she dropped the skinned hare in front of me. “I’m going to see if Idris wants to dry any.” She stalked away, leaving a ringing silence.

  Neither Enaelle or I spoke as we continued our work, the quiet heavy and pressing. Claws gathered from beasts surely summoned by magic—some lurking beings I didn’t understand. I’d heard of them in my teachings, mindless living shadows who could be called on with the right spell, but it was high-level work. Tricky to pull off, and dangerous to attempt. But if they had a physical form, no doubt a piece of it would be useful.

  I glanced at Enaelle. “You’re Wesley’s best friend,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “He told me he stole something more valuable than money or jewels. That he’d never try to steal something like it again. He also said he had no idea why that book was worth so much.”

  She sighed again. “Are you thinking he told me something he didn’t tell you?”

  “It was a thought,” I admitted. “He didn’t want to do the job. Idris talked him into agreeing. What was so different about it?”

  “Wesley spent his childhood with nothing,” she said. “Hungry. Alone. Scared. He wasn’t to slip in and slip out unseen. He was hired to make himself known. Not to be caught, but to scare that child. To make them understand they were not safe in their own home.” Her coffee eyes met mine. “You tell me why he didn’t want to do it.”

  “You know you don’t have to do things because Idris wants you to, don’t you? I have nothing against him, but he isn’t your king.”

  She shrugged a little. “We trust Idris.”

  “Why did he want this job so badly?”

  “I’ve asked him that more than once in the last year. All he’s said is that he made a mistake.”

  “At least he can admit that,” I pulled the skinned hare to me.

  “It was a terrible situation, but we all make mistakes.”

  I drove my knife into the hare’s flank, watching its blood seep between my already-stained fingers. “Yes, we do.”

  Idris found me at sunset, staring at the spread of magic supplies on the floor of my cave. He didn’t cross the delicate line of charred leaves: Kye was the only one who had. I wondered if everyone thought they’d end up on the wrong end of a second curse if they did too. “Are you training with Kye tonight?” he asked.

  “Every night.” I remained focused on my supplies. There were a million ways to combine what I had—but if I added something else to them? The leather of an old book binding? Or pages that held something valuable? What could happen then?

  “If your magic can’t be trusted to save your life, is it enough to break the curse?”

  I turned a hare’s bone over in my hands, studying it. Some of the most powerful and dangerous magic was worked with f
lesh and blood and bone, sometimes human, sometimes not. What kind of magic could the claws of a shadow beast have? “It will be if I get enough information.”

  “Didn’t you get enough today?”

  “Enough?” I looked at him, lifting an eyebrow. “I got next to nothing today, Idris. I’ve gotten next to nothing this entire time. What was this job, exactly? Why were you so insistent on it?”

  He caught a flinch, but I saw it. “We were hired to protect a village. We protected them.”

  “And got yourselves cursed in the process.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you protect them from?”

  “To this day, Neyva, I’m not sure I know.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He fiddled with the ring pierced through his lower lip. “I saw a lot of things serving the guard. Acalta isn’t as tame as the nobles like to believe.”

  I snorted. “I know.”

  “But some of the things I saw in that village—they were worse. And stranger. I caught one witch in Acalta, and I thought it would prepare me to deal with another when we met the one who cursed us. I was wrong. I made a bad call, and we paid for it.”

  “That’s it? You made a bad call? Care to tell me what that call was and why it was so bad?”

  “Does it change what the curse is?”

  “It changes where it came from, and that changes how I approach it.”

  Idris sighed and fixed me with that no-nonsense look he was so good at. “I didn’t know what was going to happen when I went after the job. It paid well and it seemed simple. We did what we were asked, and I don’t have an explanation for what happened. We were out of our depth and people got hurt. No, I don’t believe we deserved to be cursed for it, and if I could deal with the witch myself, I would. But it went bad, and the fact that we’re killing to protect you and asking you to break it should tell you enough. So can you do it or not?”

  He was right; it told me plenty. It told me they were desperate, and willing to do what needed done, and they were good at heart. But it didn’t tell me how to break their curse, and I wouldn’t get anything more from Idris. I shook my head, stood, brushed dirt from my pants, and stepped past him. “I have to go meet Kye.”