FrostFire

by Zoe Marriott

He won’t hurt me, I tried to reassure myself. He’ll make it quick, I know he will.

  Luca had a folded square of soft cloth in one hand now and was attacking the blood stains on his blade with it. “In fact, I feel as if I’ve learned a great deal about you today. For example, I know that you’re not the type to cut a man’s throat in his sleep. No matter how easy he makes it for you.”

  I gasped as I realized his meaning, outrage overcoming fright. “You were awake?”

  “What do you take me for – an imbecile? Of course I was awake.”

  “But – then – why?” I wailed, thinking about the way I had hovered over him, staring, muttering to myself.

  “I needed to know if you would try to gain your freedom by killing me,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. He didn’t take his eyes off his sword and kept rubbing away at the stubborn stain. “I also found out that you were willing to go against every instinct of self-preservation in order to help two women you’d never met. That you’re brave enough to face a man twice your size with nothing but a hunting knife, and fast enough to nearly kill him with it. That even when you were so afraid you couldn’t speak, you kept your promise not to run. That’s what I’ve learned about you today.”

  I couldn’t think straight. I shook my head, trying to tumble his words into an order that made sense. “What does any of that matter? You know what I am. I told you about the curse. You know about the Wolf.”

  “Frost.” He looked up from his sword at last, and I felt my own eyes widen as I met his. There was no trace of disgust or fear. Or even pity. Only kindness. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

  The priests had looked kind, I reminded myself. Compassion was not the same as mercy. There was no way he could let me go. “What are you going to do with me?” I asked.

  Sadness crossed his face, darkening the golden lights in his eyes, like a cloud passing over the sun. He slid his sword swiftly back into its sheath and slung it over his shoulder once more. Then he leaned down, opened his pack and drew out a large, lumpy parcel wrapped in sackcloth. He held the parcel out to me and waited patiently until I found the courage to take it. The weight pulled my arms down sharply as soon as he let go. The parcel was heavier than he had made it look.

  “Open it,” he said.

  As I fumbled with the hairy twine that held the wrappings in place, he stood and shouldered his pack again. The wind swept over the hillside and stirred the leaves behind him into a silvery-green cloud. Fine strands of pale hair drifted around his face.

  “I don’t know what you expected to happen next,” he said, “but it’s obvious it was nothing good. So listen to me now. I’m going to make you an offer that you are free to accept or refuse as you will.”

  My fingers stilled on the package. “What offer?”

  “Join us. Join me. Become a hill guard.”

  I felt my mouth drop open. “You – you can’t mean that. I’ve already attacked you once. I’m not safe to be around normal people. I’m cursed.”

  “I don’t believe in curses,” he told me, eyes fierce. “I don’t believe in magic, or demons. I believe in choice. Whatever you’ve been told, whoever has hurt you, whatever past haunts you, you can choose to leave it behind. I know it, Frost. I saw who you are today. Your bravery saved those women.”

  I began to shake my head, but he held up his hand, silencing me. “With some training I believe you could be a great warrior. I can teach you to channel this battle rage that affects you. I can teach you to fight your fear and overcome it. But it can’t happen until you take control of your own life. You have to choose to stop running. You have to choose to believe in me.” He smiled, and my breath caught in my throat. “I already believe in you.”

  “You don’t know me. You don’t know … what I’ve done.”

  “I don’t know you very well yet,” he corrected. “I saw enough today to know that you’re a remarkable woman. Decent, kind and brave. I don’t accept that you’ve done anything truly wrong. I don’t think you could.”

  I looked away, clenching my jaw. He had no idea how wrong he was. Yet it still meant so much to hear someone say they believed in me – in my goodness. My own mother would not have made such a claim on my behalf.

  I heard the rustle of cloth and the squeak of leather, and suddenly he was kneeling before me, showing me the golden brown and silver-blonde streaks on the top of his head as his long fingers brushed mine aside on the forgotten parcel. He swiftly unknotted the twine, peeling back a layer of sackcloth.

  I sucked in a shocked breath as I saw what lay neatly packed beneath it.

  My pack. My hunting knives. My snares. My waterskin and dried meat.

  My father’s axe.

  Everything I owned in the world. Everything I had thought lost forever.

  Trembling, I closed my fingers around the cold steel and smooth wood of the axe haft. “You found it.”

  “I’ve been wanting to return it to you. Other things kept coming up,” he said. I felt heat rising in my cheeks as I remembered my repeated escape attempts. “Now you know I mean what I say. You can go if you want and never see me or my men again. I won’t stop you. It’s up to you, Frost.”

  His hand closed around mine for the second time and our fingers entwined. It was so natural that I did not question it. I met his strange, dark eyes.

  Everything went still. My breath caught. The wind seemed to die as the late afternoon sunlight wrapped me up, trapping me in a veil of warmth. A songbird trilled, and the noise stretched out endlessly, rippling in the stillness. The blue-gold fire in Luca’s gaze shivered through my body, altering all it touched: every speck of dust and drop of blood. Forever.

  Then it was over. His hand released mine. He stood up and was towering over me again. I gazed down at my tingling, trembling fingers.

  “You know where to find us,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.”

  I strained to hear his footsteps move away, but there was only the voice of the wind. Still, I knew that he had gone.

  I sat there for a long time, alone among the gently stirring trees. Something stirred and shifted in my chest too, unfolding beneath my breastbone. It ached, but the pain was sweet. Pain meant life. Something I had no name for was coming alive inside me. Something like hope, or happiness, or belief – none of those things, or all of them. I had thought such a feeling lost forever, just like my father’s axe. And just like my father’s axe, it had been returned to me. By Luca.

  He didn’t believe in curses. He believed I could fight the Wolf. He had seen me go berserk and yet he still thought I was decent.

  It struck me for the first time then, a realization so obvious that I choked on a laugh.

  I was not in Uskaand any more.

  There were no priests of Askaan or priests of the Other here. There was no one to pronounce my fate and order the fires lit. No one who knew what I had done or who I had been. No one who even knew my real name. In Ruan I could be a new person. I could choose to leave the past behind. If I could bring myself to believe what Luca had said.

  Fight my fear. Channel my battle rage. Help people instead of hurting them. Find a place and keep it, instead of always running, always looking over my shoulder. I didn’t know anything about Luca or this country. I didn’t know if what he offered was really possible. But I had to choose, like he said. I had to choose whether I believed in him. Whether I believed in myself.

  When I held my hand up to my cheek, the skin Luca had touched was still warm.

  I stowed my things neatly in my pack, folded the sackcloth on top, and secured my father’s axe. Then I shrugged the straps over my shoulders and stood, nodding respectfully to the graves of Nicu and Abhay.

  The light deepened from honey to amber as I walked through the rustling leaves, and then faded to blue as the sun sank beyond the mountains. I stopped once to eat and drink. Stars began to bloom in the sky, and the wind turned frosty.

  I heard singing.

  I stepped ou
t of the trees. A sentry moved swiftly towards me, and I braced myself, lifting my hands to show I held no weapons. I could feel his eyes raking over me, although it was too dark to see his face. Then he nodded, pointing towards the centre of the camp. Towards the glow of firelight.

  A few torches flamed here and there, not enough to truly illuminate the camp. The stars seemed to hover just above the tents: constellations like handfuls of luminous silver sand scattered on a low ceiling of blue cloth. The same deep, beautiful voice I had heard the night I escaped beckoned me on, singing that same, haunting song. The melancholy wood flute rose up to join him.

  I came out from between two tents and found a group of people – twenty, twenty-five, maybe more – crowded around a sunken firepit. Some sat on long, stripped logs that gleamed white in the dark. Others sat in the grass. Their faces danced with flame colours; expressions masked. I didn’t recognize anyone. If Luca was there, I did not see him.

  Blue and orange sparks spiralled up into the sky like new suns being born. The people lifted up their faces as they sang, watching the sparks disappear. Even at this distance I could feel the heat of the fire radiating through the ranks of singers and warming my chilled cheeks and hands.

  “Goodbye, my love, remember well,

  My shadow on your door;

  I leave my heart, my love, farewell,

  And pray you cry no more…”

  I knelt down, unnoticed, at the edge of the gathering, and sang with them.

  I cannot feel my toes any more. I use my hands to drag me up the hill; nails splitting, skin breaking as I claw through the thin layer of snow to the stony ground beneath. My vision swims and blurs and my heart seems to choke me. I force myself on, heading for the rocks that jut up at the crest of the slope. If I can only reach them, maybe I can hide. Maybe I can escape.

  The wolves’ persuading voices have fallen silent now. Their paws crunch rhythmically through the snow behind me. Closer, closer, ever closer. Low, panting breaths. Sharp eager whines. The night is still, save for the sounds of their pursuit.

  They know when their prey is at its limit.

  Ten

  Word of what had happened in my old village spread across Uskaand like ice spreads across a well in the winter: swiftly and inexorably. For a time, everyone had a story to tell of the wild wolf-girl who roamed the land with sharp, hungry fangs and glinting silver eyes. Few gave credence to the tales, though children gasped and giggled over the idea of such a creature, wondering if she might be hiding in the dark forest, or on the bleak loneliness of the plains. But never, of course, in a village very much like their own.

  It was four years before the Wolf ascended again. Four years of running, of struggling to find work in tiny villages where the people could barely afford to pay Ma for her services. Of giving false names. Of staying quiet. Staying out of trouble. And never, ever fighting.

  Many of the people we met in that time assumed I was simple in the head; I spoke so little, and met no one’s eyes. And I was always “falling down”. So clumsy for such a strong, strapping girl.

  They gave mother their condolences in hushed whispers. What a shame the daughter of a healer should be enfeebled! An illness no healer could ease. But at least I was quiet and obedient. At least I wasn’t … violent.

  The ice around my mother’s heart grew colder each time we were forced to move on: fleeing in the night like criminals whenever the villagers grew friendly enough to ask questions about where we had come from, whenever my unusual eyes provoked curiosity, whenever people began to suspect I was not such a clumsy idiot, after all. We became experts at packing our worldly possessions at a moment’s notice and discarding anything that was not essential. I lived in fear that one day Ma would abandon me too and I would wake to find myself left behind in one of those nameless villages, cast off like a broken stool or a worn-out blanket, alone in the world forever.

  But no matter what she felt about me, no matter how she flinched whenever I came too near, or how often I heard her sobbing harshly in the night, she never tried to escape without me. She never even threatened to. She never let me go cold or hungry when she wasn’t colder or hungrier herself. She never beat me hard enough to kill me.

  Or to break the skin.

  My poor ma. Perhaps by the time I was twelve she had begun to believe that we were safe again. That the Wolf was gone. Perhaps she was just too tired to keep running through another winter. Either way, that year she made the decision to stay in a little village on the edge of the mountains until spring came. It was a decision we were both to regret.

  I clawed my way out of the familiar misery of the memory-dream, jackknifing into sitting position with a choked gasp. My hand fumbled for the reassuring lump of the wolf tooth resting over my heart as I looked around with sleep-blurred eyes.

  I was used to waking up in a different place every time I opened my eyes – especially lately – but this … this was something different.

  I was sitting on a thick pile of rugs. Layers of black, grey and white-spotted furs lined with bright silks were piled over me. They were as soft as the down on a baby chick and finer than anything I had seen in my life, let alone touched. A wooden screen, decorated with enamel panels that made a forest of gold and silver trees, curved around my sleeping place.

  Where am I, Father?

  I heard a muffled footfall, and the screen drew back to reveal a tall woman with untidy grey hair, a tattoo on her face and uncomfortably sharp eyes. Memories fell into place with an almost physical thud.

  Livia.

  “Are you all right?” Her voice was less brisk than I remembered it, almost hesitant. “You were … calling out.”

  “Calling out?”

  “For your mother.”

  My face flooded with heat. “Just dreaming. It was nothing.”

  I fidgeted under her look of barely concealed pity and peered past her at the rest of the space. The roof was peaked canvas and the wooden poles holding it up were hung with glass oil-lamps. The richly embroidered tapestries on the walls depicted mythical creatures – flying horses, fire-breathing lions, three-headed serpents – in faded shades that showed they must be very old. Underfoot, there were layers of rugs, just as fine as the wall-hangings. I saw a low table as long as I was tall, legs deeply carved with strange patterns. The surface was strewn with papers and books, quills and ink. There were chairs and even a proper wooden bed, neatly made with a deep blue coverlet. Only a very sharp eye could make out the tell-tale shapes of the hinges that allowed such luxurious items to be folded for travel. If this was a tent, it was fit for a prince.

  Or a nobleman sent into the wilds by his king.

  “This is Luca’s tent, isn’t it?”

  Livia nodded, draping her arm casually around the top of the screen. “He carried you here last night. You fell asleep, sitting up, at the gathering place. You must have been exhausted.” She paused for a second. “He was pleased to see you.”

  “Oh.” I looked down at the mottled grey fur that covered my knees. “Where is he?”

  “He had to go out on a patrol. He asked me to wait until you woke up and to then show you around; help you to settle in.”

  Something – panic, probably – must have shown in my face. She added, “He’ll be back by tonight.”

  I thought of smooth grey river stones, attempting to keep my expression blank. “I’m sorry to trouble you.”

  She smiled and pushed the screen back a little further, gesturing at the untidy table. “Not a bit of it. I was taking the opportunity to amend my records. When I try to do it in my own tent I get interrupted every two minutes. I can’t even eat without someone running to me needing attention. And speaking of food, Luca left you some breakfast. You must be starving.”

  I shuffled to the edge of the pile of rugs and disentangled myself from the fur wrapped around me. “I … you said Luca carried me here. I didn’t stir at all?”

  “Not a murmur,” Livia said, clearing off a space on the table and
moving a wooden tray onto it.

  I had been a light restless sleeper since I was a child. Habit and necessity would have made it so, even if my nights weren’t plagued with dreams of running and howling and sharp white fangs. But Luca had held me in his arms, and I had not woken. My cheeks burned.

  I hurried over to the table and sat down on one of the chairs, busying myself by taking the lids off all the covered bowls on the tray. There was a cup of milk, a bowl of round fluffy pastry things, some sort of egg dish and small stuffed flatbreads that looked crispy and golden, as if they had been fried. When I popped one in my mouth, the flatbread turned out to contain spiced roots and onions. The pastries were sweet: flavoured with nuts and honey. The eggs tasted of green leaves – like spinach, but stronger – and peas, and more onions. The food was very spicy, setting fire to my mouth, but very good. I tried to slow down, but I had only eaten one stingy, tasteless meal the day before and my belly would not let me. I was used to stuffing myself when I could, to make up for the times when meals were poor or even non-existent. Besides, if my mouth was full, I didn’t have to speak.

  Not that Livia seemed to expect me to. She was scribbling away at her papers, dripping ink everywhere, sneezing whenever she tapped her nose with her quill. Her relaxed posture and the concentration on her face were reassuring, as if there was nothing strange or awkward about sitting here with me. Yet, the last time she had seen me I had been locked up in a cell. Then I had escaped, and the hill-guard captain himself had gone after me. And now I had spent the night in the captain’s tent. What must she be thinking?

  As I washed down the last spicy crumbs with the last mouthful of milk, Livia put aside her quill and went to a chest at the end of the bed. She drew out a large, folded drying cloth and a bar of soap, and offered them to me. As I stood to take them, I noticed for the first time that Livia was taller than I was – by at least an inch. That was rare enough in men, back in Uskaand. The Sedorne seemed to be a long-legged people.