by Bree Barton
Sometimes, when Mia held the ruby wren to her cheek, she thought she could hear her mother calling her home. My red raven. My little swan.
Every time Mia thought about her sister, a nameless fear gnawed at her chest. The Kaer was not a safe place, not with King Ronan, not with Tristan.
Perhaps the fear was not so nameless after all.
Quin kept pace by her side. He no longer sat sulking while she did all the work; he dug fire pits and lashed branches together. They each found ways to relieve themselves without drawing attention to it, little coded expressions they came to understand: “I’m going to forage for berries.” “Look, a stoat.”
But the less they ate, the less they needed to relieve themselves. They saw ermine and cwningen and majestic white stag, beautiful animals, probably very tasty. But every time Mia reached for her knife, her fingers were thick, her hands heavy.
As dusk fell on their fourth, possibly fifth night in the forest, Quin asked a question.
“If you could eat anything right now,” he said, teeth clacking against the cold, “what would it be?”
Was he a sadist? Mia’s stomach creaked and grumbled, an empty ship on a stormy sea.
“I’ll go first,” he said. “Black truffles. Succulent black truffles in crempog sauce with a little shaved friedhelm on top.”
Mia said, “A potato cake.”
“One potato cake?”
A memory came unbidden: a meal she’d shared with her family before her mother died. They’d gathered at their simple square table, laughing and swapping stories, tearing off chunks of warm potato cake and dipping them into a puckered tin of sweet brown mustard. Her mother had kissed her father that night, really kissed him. When Mia and Angelyne heckled her for it, she’d raised her pint of stonemalt and made a toast:
“To my kind and clever birdlings: may you both find the sort of love your father and I are lucky to have found ourselves.”
Mia shook her head to clear it. “I stand by my potato cake. With sweet mustard for dunking.”
“I see your potato cake and raise you a rabbit stew. And a piping hot mug of butterfel. And honey cake with caramel sauce and raspberry jam. And—”
The prince stopped short.
They’d come to a small dell where the rocks leveled out and the pale trees wreathed themselves into a circle of ghostly nymphs.
In the center of the glade, arranged neatly on the unblemished snow, was a hare.
A dead hare.
As if it had been left just for them.
Chapter 24
Dangerously Warm
A LINE OF SWEAT beaded on Mia’s forehead as Quin let out a war cry and pounced on the meat.
“It’s a fresh kill,” he said. “Some owl or wolf must have caught our scent and ran off. This is unbelievably lucky. I’ll make us a whole stew!”
The skin on her neck was prickling. “This doesn’t feel right, Quin.”
“Has the cold frozen your brain? This is the first real nourishment we’ve had in days. The hare doesn’t have much fat, as far as woodland creatures go, but it’s a million times better than all the purslane and tree nuts we’ve been eating.”
She took a closer look. “What killed it? I don’t see a wound.”
Exasperated, Quin picked the hare up by its ears, inspecting the length of it. “There.” He pointed to a mark on its neck, triumphant. “Something got it in the neck.”
“That’s a clean cut. It doesn’t look like the work of a predator.”
“You’re really going to quibble with how it died? It died! Now we can eat it. Knife, please.”
She drew the sheath knife from her boot, then hesitated before handing it over.
“I’m not sure we—”
“Four gods, Mia.” He plucked the knife out of her hand. “At least one of us should take an interest in keeping us alive.”
In the sun’s waning light, Quin was a flurry of activity. After days of creeping along at a glacial pace, he came alive: he found a piece of old rope in the satchel and cut off a swatch, stringing the hare up by its hind legs. With his sheath knife he cut around each ankle, slitting up the inside of first the left leg, then the right. With a flourish, he made a long cut from the vent up the abdomen. Mia watched him carefully peel back the skin.
“I didn’t take you for a butcher,” she said.
“Perhaps you could get a fire started? Make yourself useful?”
How the tables had turned. She would have found it amusing, if a sense of impending doom wasn’t playing her spinal column like a harp.
“I’ll make us a soup hole,” Quin murmured to himself. “Use the bones to get some nice broth simmering. Flavor it with wild leeks and a handful of chokecherries.”
She walked a few paces to scavenge for wood and stopped dead in her tracks.
“Firewood,” she said.
“Yes, well, I can’t do everything, can I? You’ll have to—”
“No, I mean, here’s a stack of firewood.”
Quin lowered his knife.
A bundle of logs sat at the edge of the clearing. They weren’t ax-hewn, exactly—they were mostly tree branches, swyn and spruce—but the timber was bone dry, clearly gathered and stacked by a creature with more agency than an owl or wolf.
Quin raked a hand through his curls. “Curious. Maybe someone lives in the forest? I still think this is a brilliant stroke of luck.”
But he no longer sounded quite so certain.
They worked in silence, Mia tense and on edge, Quin humming to himself, perhaps to cover the fact that he, too, was tense and on edge. But he didn’t seem it. She marveled at his abilities with a knife. He extracted the hare’s innards, trembly loops of pink and red, palming them as casually as if they were hair ribbons. He used his blade to free the hide from the body in the places where it became stuck, without puncturing any organs. He pulled out all manner of small fleshy parts—the liver, kidneys, and heart—and laid them out neatly on a rock.
“You’re alarmingly good at that.”
“I told you. I spent scads of time in the kitchens.”
“The cooks let the little prince eviscerate rabbits for supper?”
“The cooks were honored I took an interest in their work. My sister was always out on the hunt—she never set foot in the kitchens, but they were my favorite part of the castle.”
Thanks to the dryness of the mysterious wood, Mia had a fire crackling in no time. She followed Quin’s instructions and stacked three large stones over the flames, then used a stick to scoop a hole in the ground, lining it with fresh hide and packing it with melted snow. Once the stones were sizzling hot, she added them to the packed snow and watched it melt into broth.
“Heat a few more stones,” said the prince. “The broth has to be boiling hot to cook the meat.”
She nodded and set to work. Once the broth was heated to Quin’s satisfaction, he dropped in hunks of raw flesh and a smattering of small bones. He slit one large bone open, slurping out the liquid.
“Four hells, this is good.” He held it out to her. “Marrow. It’s rich in minerals. Very nourishing.”
She sucked out the rest of the marrow and licked her lips.
Mia was struck by the changes in the prince. In one short week, he’d gone from a sniveling brat to a competent woodsman, someone who could deftly carve up a hare for supper. She wouldn’t have thought watching a boy butcher meat would be attractive, but seeing Quin’s hands flick over the viscera, separating fat from bone, was, in a word, appealing.
Despite the cold, Quin was perspiring; he kept brushing the curls off his forehead with the back of his hand. The firelight bathed him in a ruddy orange glow. A flame of heat curled through Mia’s belly.
She sensed a quiet thumping in her chest, a feeling of all not being as it should be. Did someone leave the firewood for them? Had they arranged the hare so she and Quin would find it?
Her gut feeling told her something was wrong. But since when had she trusted her gut feelings
? Mia wasn’t the sort of person to make decisions based on what she felt; she based them on logic and hard evidence.
They were going to be fine. The meal would give them the fuel they needed to make it to their destination—an odd thing to say, perhaps, considering she didn’t know where their destination was. The path to safe haven will reveal itself to she who seeks it.
There wasn’t much page left for the map to spill onto. They had to be nearing the end.
They devoured the stew, slurping hot broth out of hollow stones. The meat was rich and mouthwatering; Mia didn’t think she’d ever had such good stew. When she said as much to Quin, he grinned.
“I can make the leftover meat last, too. I’ll smoke it, maybe dry a few strips in the sun tomorrow morning. Better for traveling that way. Excellent source of protein.”
The soup was warming her, dissolving the knot of tension between her shoulders. She was being paranoid. She had no good reason to be uneasy; beavers and other animals gathered driftwood, and a dead hare was no cause for alarm.
“I’m sorry I’ve been disagreeable,” Quin said, surprising her. “I know I can be odious when hungry, and I’ve been hungry for days.”
He reached out and touched her wrist. His fingers weren’t cold, not even a little.
“More marrow?”
She nodded. He let his fingertips linger on her skin a moment, and she felt her pulse trill to meet them before he retracted his hand.
Her heart was throbbing somewhere in her glottal region. She cast a sideways glance at Quin, but he was staring hard into the hare carcass. Either he enjoyed looking at intestines or he was avoiding her eyes.
Mia inhaled deeply to steady her breathing. The sour pinch of eggs filled her nostrils. She froze. Had someone lit a sulfyr stick?
Quin started to say something, then stopped.
“Is it just me, or do you smell—”
“Sulfyr.” She was on her feet, stepping forward, but she lost the scent. When she moved in the other direction, the smell grew stronger. The unease she’d felt earlier was back, a whole orchestra pounding on her vertebrae.
He started moving toward the odor.
“Quin? I don’t think we ought to—”
But he was already pushing out of the glade, his energy replenished from the stew. She had no choice but to follow. He was fleet, graceful on uneven terrain, while she felt dizzy and not at all sure-footed. The firelight quickly faded, and she found herself stumbling over swyn trunks. Her stomach had shrunk on their meager sylvan diet; it sloshed with undigested meat.
Quin was a ways ahead when he shouted, “Mia! Mia!”
Her blood congealed. She couldn’t read the emotion in his voice. Surprise? Terror?
She ran faster to close the gap between them. Seconds later she charged full tilt into a small clearing—and nearly knocked Quin into the hot spring bubbling at his feet.
“Look what I found.”
Before Mia could respond, he was peeling off his jacket and the shirt beneath it. She wondered if she should look away as he removed his trousers, but he’d discarded them before she had time to think. Her eyes tripped over his smooth golden body as he leapt into the water.
Her viscera were liquefying inside her body, bones dissolving into bonemeal. It was a familiar feeling, and dangerously warm.
Chapter 25
Undergarments
“YOU’RE COMING IN, AREN’T you?”
Quin patted the water beside him. Steam coiled off the surface. The spring was phosphorescent, spirals of sulfyric scurf mingling with starlight so green it shimmered.
“Come on, Mia. It’s insensible not to warm yourself.”
Mia wanted nothing more. The pool was perfect, a natural tub of hot water carved out of the mountainside, an indicator of subterranean volqanic activity. She would have happily jumped in, if not for one little problem.
Heat.
She was still hammering out her theory of magic and body temperatures—complicated by infinite unknown variables—but both times she had enthralled the prince, heat was a constant. As a Huntress, she’d come at it from the opposite angle, studying the symptoms of an enthrall. Elevated pulse, sweaty palms, dilated pupils: these were the signs of physical attraction. They were also the body’s natural response to warmth.
What if the only reason she hadn’t inadvertently enthralled Quin in the forest was because they were too cold?
And if that were the case, what would happen in a thermal spring?
Not unrelatedly, was he still wearing undergarments, or had he stripped those off, too? On a scale of one to ten, how naked was the prince under all those bubbles?
“I thought I was too dangerous,” she said. To her surprise, it came out sounding rather coy.
His eyebrows had a fine arch, especially when he raised one. “I’ve never been afraid of a girl in undergarments. Though I must admit I’ve had limited experience.”
In the game of being coy, Quin was winning.
He grew suddenly serious. “We’re teetering on the edge of frostbite, Mia. This could save your life.”
She sat on the edge. The snow crunched beneath her as she tugged the boots off her swollen feet. Cautiously she dipped one toe in the water. Paradise.
“If you stay on your side,” Quin reasoned, “we’ll manage just fine.”
Her toes felt delectable. Quin was right, she could control herself. If rage, love, and terror triggered magic, then she would make sure she didn’t feel rage, love, or terror. Easy enough. And in the event that she began feeling the sensations of an enthrall, she would simply climb out. Most important, she would not touch him, no matter how much she might want to.
Mia slipped the smock over her head, slithered out of her trousers, and eased herself over the ledge with barely a splash.
The water didn’t just feel good. It felt like cinnamon and chocolate, like someone had thrust a hand into her heart and made it beat again. She sank deeper, the warm water swirling in around her neck and shoulders, caressing her wind-roughed skin. Everything that had been frozen inside her was thawing, every dead part shivering back to life.
Quin let out a long, contented sigh. “Perfection, isn’t it?”
She submerged her head lower until only her eyes peeked above water.
“Careful of the meniscus,” he said. “There’s some kind of sulfyric film.”
She lifted her mouth. “The ‘meniscus of assent,’ was it?”
His face went blank for a moment. Had she offended him? Then his eyes sparked with the memory.
“Ah. That. I suppose I can be a bit pretentious.”
“A bit. But passably intelligent.”
“Passably.” A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
She dunked her whole head underwater and ran her fingers over her hair. The grime came off in clumps. She’d had no idea how dirty she was. The water felt inhumanly delicious as it licked off layers of filth. How had she ever been suspicious of heat? It was glorious.
She heard Quin’s garbled voice and bobbed back up.
“. . . cold is that I haven’t smelled my own sweat.” He took a whiff and grimaced. “Until now.”
“Hard to tell with all the sulfyr.”
“You can come a little closer,” he said. “If you want.”
“I’m just fine over here, thanks.”
She went under again and rubbed furiously at her face, wondering how much dirt was ground into her skin. The unease she’d felt over supper melted into the foam. The only unease she felt now was how good she felt, bubbly warm down to her core.
Bubbly was not good. Warm was not good, either.
The prince was speaking again. She only caught the end of it.
“. . . married?”
She sputtered. “What?”
“Are we married? In your humble opinion.”
“No,” she said.
“We said the sacred vows.”
“I didn’t. Not the last one.”
“You’re rig
ht. I promised-you-O-promised-you I would be yours. But you did not O-promise you would be mine.” He tilted his head, thoughtful. “And Tristan did not pronounce us man and wife.”
She burbled water. “I’ve always hated that part of the vows. Just once I’d like to hear ‘woman and husband.’”
“You probably won’t hear it from dear cousin Tristan. He’s rather old-fashioned that way. Just like my father.”
“Old-fashioned is one word for it.”
“You’d prefer odious?”
“I’m quite partial to vile.”
They shared a smile. Then Quin cleared his throat. “You should know I meant what I said about having limited experience with girls in undergarments. My father fills the Kaer with beautiful women, but it never felt right to—”
“You don’t have to say it,” she said hastily.
“You once told me my power had never been in dispute. You were right. Even if I had honest intentions, there was always an imbalance of power. I saw my father abuse that power daily . . . and I swore I would never be like him.”
Mia felt unreasonably happy. She had assumed the prince treated women the way his father did, but she’d been wrong.
“That’s quite lovely, Quin. And wise.”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m passably intelligent.”
Mia slid two clicks closer. Not close enough to touch—just to hear him better. She was in complete control, fully in command of her faculties. She was a Gwyrach, yes, but she was stronger now, smarter. Magic was not the reason she felt so tantalizingly warm. She was completely . . . almost . . . mostly certain.
“The water in a hot spring percolates through a reservoir of magma and rises through the Earth’s crust,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
“Is it a requirement for Huntresses to know an insufferable amount about everything?”
“You underestimate me. I know everything about an insufferable number of things.”
He flourished a bow. “The lady wins.”
She edged closer, still mostly submerged, combing through her ringlets underwater. She could feel her locks floating on the surface of the water, vermilion silk. Quin was still smiling.
