Followed by Frost

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  Mordan smiled. “They can be a dangerous sort. Tales often fantasize them, for better or for worse.”

  “So long as they don’t come down here,” Mother said, roughly heaping a second helping of potatoes onto her plate, spoon clinking against the china. I hoped she wouldn’t butter them. Mother gained weight in the most unsightly of places. “Mordan, how is your sister? I recall you mentioning her a little while ago.”

  Mordan’s blue eyes glanced back to me, as they had already done several times during the meal, smiling even when his mouth was not. I did not smile back. Returning his focus to Mother, he described a sister of his who lived somewhere in the west, but I paid little attention to what he said. Instead I wolfed down my food and excused myself to my room. If either parent disapproved, they did not voice it in front of a guest.

  Inside my little sanctuary, I stretched out on my bed and selected one of three books I had borrowed from Mrs. Thornes, my teacher, which she had borrowed from a scholar in a neighboring village. To me old tongues seemed like secrets—secrets very few people in the world knew, let alone knew well. The book in my hands was written in Hraric, the language of Zareed and the Southlands, where I believed the sun never set, men built their homes on heaps of golden sand, and children ran about naked to escape the heat—with their parents hardly clothed more than that. I had studied some Hraric two years earlier. I didn’t consider myself fluent, but as I browsed through this particular book of plays, I could understand the main points of the stories. Southlander tales were far darker and more grotesque than the ones we studied in school, and I soon found myself so absorbed that I hardly heard the scooting of chairs in the kitchen and Mordan’s good-byes as he went to complete his deliveries. I did, however, take special note of the time, and as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky, casting violet and carmine light over Euwan, I smiled smartly to myself, imagining Mordan standing alone on that dock long into the night, his only company the proposal I would never allow him to utter.

  While I wish I could say otherwise, my conscience did not bother me that night, and I had no trouble sleeping. Had I known the consequence of my actions, I would never have closed my eyes. I slept late, as there were no requests upon my responsibility on sixth days. I woke to bright morning sun, dressed, and brushed one hundred strokes into my hair before deciding I ought to have a bath. Spying Marrine in the front room, I asked her to fill the tub for me.

  She looked up from her sketch paper and frowned. “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to carry the water.”

  “I’ll give you a taffy. Honey taffy, with cinnamon.”

  She considered this for a moment but ultimately shook her head and returned to refining her mediocre talents as an artist. With a sigh I stepped outside into the warming spring air and trudged to the barn to retrieve the washbasin myself. There was an empty stall on the far end of the barn where we took our baths, which was mostly free of horse smell. Despite my best efforts, I could not convince my father to let me bathe in my room, so it was an inconvenience I had learned to endure.

  I set the tub in the stall and retrieved the pail for carrying water. As I turned to exit the barn, I shrieked and dropped the bucket, my heart lodging into the base of my throat. Mordan stood in the open doorway, a vision of a ghost, his eyes trained on me. I had hoped his shame would keep him at bay for at least a month. Why couldn’t he bow in his tail like any other dog and leave me be?

  “Mordan!” I exclaimed, seizing the pail from the hay-littered floor. I gritted my teeth to still my face. “What are you doing here? And with me about to bathe!”

  “I apologize,” he said, somewhat genuinely, but there was an unusual hardness to his eyes and his voice. “I need to speak with you.”

  “I’m a little—”

  “Please,” he said, firm.

  I let out a loud sigh for his benefit, letting him know my displeasure at his interruption, but I hung up the pail and followed him out into the yard. I folded my arms tightly to show my disapproval of his actions, all while hiding my surprise that he had come to see me so soon after my blatant disregard for him and his intentions. He had not been the first man I had left waiting for me—I suppose it gave me a sense of power, even amusement, to push would-be lovers about as though they were nothing more than checkers on a board. But Mordan was the first who had dared confront me afterward. Still, his backbone shocked me.

  He didn’t stop in the yard but rather led me across a back road and into the sparse willow-wacks behind my house, on the other side of which sat the Hutcheses’ home. He stopped somewhere in the center, where there were enough trees that I couldn’t quite see my house or the Hutcheses’.

  He eyed me sternly, though a glint of hope still lingered in his gaze. “I waited for you at the dock until midnight, Smitha,” he said. “What happened?”

  I kept my arms firmly folded. I preferred subtlety when breaking people, but if this was what it took to sever whatever obligation Mordan thought I had to him, then so be it. “Nothing happened,” I said. “I didn’t want to go.”

  He jerked back, a wounded animal, but then his expression darkened. “Then why agree? I don’t understand. I had—”

  “You’re dense as unbaked bread, Mordan!” I exclaimed, flinging my hands into the air. “Do you think me stupid enough not to read your intentions? Not to notice that pathetic way you look at me when you think my back is turned?”

  His eyes widened, and his face flushed, though from anger or embarrassment, I couldn’t be sure.

  “I don’t know if my father has given you the wrong impression,” I continued, the words spilling from my lips, “but I do not give you the slightest thought.”

  Mordan turned from red to white, and his eyebrows shifted in such a way that he resembled a starving hound. I should have left it at that, but my knack for the dramatic and my fury at the situation fueled me.

  “Surely a toad could hold my interest longer, and be more pleasant to look at!” My cheeks burned. “We live on different levels of life, Mordan Alteraz, mine far higher than yours. The sooner you realize that, the better off you will be. I do not care one ounce for you, and I never will. That is why I didn’t go to the dock, and why no sensible woman ever would!”

  I found myself oddly breathless. Mordan had gone to stone before me, and I admit that a twinge of fear vibrated through me rather than the sense of sweet victory I had expected. Never had someone looked at me so grimly.

  He laughed—no, growled. The noise that escaped his lips sounded more animal than human. He stepped forward, and I stepped back, my back hitting the trunk of a green-needle pine.

  “And to think I felt anything for a woman like you,” he whispered, his face contorting into a snarl. “How blind I have been. Your heart is ice.”

  I opened my mouth for a retort, but his hand came down hard on the trunk beside my head. I winced. He leaned in close, a malicious smile on his face.

  “If only you knew who I was,” he said, even quieter now. Gooseflesh rose on my arms unbidden. “Now I can see the soul that lies hidden behind your beauty. You are a horrid, selfish woman, Smitha.”

  I slapped him hard across his cheek, putting my full weight into the blow. It turned his head, but his hand did not budge from its place on the tree beside me.

  He licked his lips, smearing blood along the corner of his mouth. Straightening, he studied me up and down, his expression covered in shadow.

  “I came here to get away from it, to leave it all behind,” he growled. “But I have enough left for you.”

  “Enough what?” I asked, but his other hand came down on my throat, cutting off my last word. I clung to his wrist and dug my nails into his skin, but he didn’t so much as flinch. He stared hard into my eyes, and my fear ignited so abruptly I felt I would turn to ash in his hold.

  “Vladanium curso, en nadia tren’al,” he murmured. “I curse you, Smitha Ronson, to be as cold as your heart.”

  His fingers turne
d to ice around my neck, and I shivered as the cold traced its way down my skin and beneath my clothes, branching out to my arms and legs, my fingers, and the tips of each toe. It rushed up my neck and over my head. The chill gushed into my mouth and nostrils, washed down my throat, and crept into my stomach and bowels. It opened my insides like a newly sharpened knife, cutting down to my very bones.

  “May winter follow you wherever you go,” he said, “and with the cold, death.”

  Mordan did not move, but some force punched me, and my entire body caved in on itself. The breath left my lungs, and a chill colder than any I had ever experienced filled my core and shot through my veins. My arms and legs went rigid, and every hair on my body stood on end. My very heart slowed. The sun vanished from my face, hidden by a thick, white sheet of clouds. A bitter wind blew over me, tousling my hair.

  Mordan released me with a sneer and vanished, the air behind him opening its mouth and swallowing him whole.

  CHAPTER 2

  I stood there in the willow-wacks for several moments, staring at the place where Mordan had just stood, the only sign of his presence the flattened grass where he had stood. I shivered, a trembling that engulfed my whole body. The gooseflesh that had spread across every inch of my skin could not be soothed. A frozen vise clamped down on my chest, making it hard to breathe. My eyes felt like packed snow, my tongue wet leather.

  I dropped to the earth and hugged myself and rubbed my arms, but it did nothing to alleviate the chill. I blew into my hands, my knuckles stiff, but my breath was a cold wind that did nothing to warm them. I gaped at the sight of my hands—the skin had turned near white, my fingernails violet. They ached with cold. All of me ached. Frost even crusted my clothes. It was as if I had jumped into the depths of Heaven’s Tear midwinter and had only just been pulled from the ice.

  My mind folded over itself like bread dough with too much flour as I tried to sort my scattered thoughts. Mordan, here. His hard eyes. His hand around my neck. Cursing me. Cursing me?

  “They can be a dangerous sort. Tales often fantasize them, for better or for worse.”

  I gasped, the air shuddering as it passed through my frozen throat. Surely Mordan didn’t know the craft. Surely he couldn’t—

  All strength left me, and I bowled over, hunching over my knees. My ears rang.

  But I had heard his words, the strange language he had uttered, a tongue even I didn’t recognize. He had come to Euwan to get away . . . from what? Magic?

  “I curse you, Smitha Ronson, to be as cold as your heart.” Those were his words, and I had felt them pierce me, my body a flimsy, unraveling cloth beneath their power. I had seen him disappear before my eyes, into the very wind itself.

  A faint pattern of frost ebbed out over the soil beneath my knees. I watched it wide-eyed as it crept slowly outwards, a web woven by an unseen spider. I reached a trembling hand forward and touched it, and the ice bloomed beneath my fingertips, thickening and spreading like a ripple in water.

  I screamed through chattering teeth.

  I yanked my hand back and forced myself to stand on shaky legs. Though spring had settled in its fullness in Euwan, tiny snowflakes began to fall from the sky. They started as dust, but when I peered up at the sky, I saw the clouds above me expand rapidly, devouring the blue. The snowflakes grew larger and larger, until I stood at the heart of a full cascade of winter. The icy crystals landed on my hair, shoulders, and hands. I waited for them to melt, but they held their frosty designs against my flesh. As though I were no more than ice itself. I jerked back from them but could not escape the swarm.

  I pressed a hand to my mouth and sobbed. A single tear escaped the corner of my eye, but even that held no warmth. Trailing down my cheek, it slowed and hardened, becoming a droplet of salty ice. No. This wasn’t real. None of it was. A dream. A nightmare. I had to wake up.

  I ran.

  Forcing my rigid legs over tree roots, I ran through the willow-wacks and into my yard, where soft snow settled lazily on rooftop and road alike. My father and mother stood on the front porch, marveling at the swift storm, pointing to the rigid line in the sky where the snow clouds met clear blue—beyond the borders of Euwan but before the ground rose to meet the mountains.

  “Pa!” I shouted, running toward him. “Pa!”

  He turned and saw me with startled eyes. “Smitha! What on earth happened to you?”

  Mother ran out to meet me. She looked at me in blanched horror. “You look frozen half to death! What—”

  She reached forward to cradle my face, but her words cut off as soon as her skin made contact with mine. Her hand snapped back on reflex, her palm covered in frost. Both of us stared at it, gaping.

  Father ran out to join us. “What’s going on?” he asked, taking my mother’s hand. He reached for mine as well, but the moment our fingers touched, he hissed and jerked away, his fingertips frozen to the first knuckle.

  I pressed both my palms to my lips and sobbed, the chilling tears flowing freely now, turning hard on my cheeks and sticking to my eyelashes. Father sucked on his fingertips to warm them, his face flushed red.

  “What happened?” he demanded, snow melting in the curls of his dark hair.

  “Mordan!” I cried, shuddering, shivering. My voice came out in a cloud, too slow to dissipate. “He did this to me . . . He’s one of them! A wizard!”

  My father reeled back as though struck, his eyes wide and red-rimmed. Mother swayed on her feet, her slender fingers touching her parted lips.

  Shaking his head, my father muttered, “They’re . . . real? And . . . Mordan?”

  “God save us,” my mother whispered.

  Two slow heartbeats, and my father flew back into the house, throwing the door open as he went. It banged loudly against the wall behind it.

  My mother had paled significantly, and with stiff movements guided me into the house, careful not to touch me again. Marrine, who had been standing by the window, ogled me.

  I screamed again, clawing at my hair. Why was this happening to me? Why not Ashlen or some other girl in the town? I glared at my scrambling family and wailed. Why not them?

  Father returned to the front room with his shotgun.

  “Chard, no!” Mother cried.

  But Father said nothing, only shook his head and rushed outside, not bothering to close the door behind him.

  Mother’s lips pursed to a point. “Marrine, stoke the fire! Quickly!” Then, to me, “I’ll make you some tea, hmm? That will warm you right up.”

  Even I could hear the doubt in her voice, but she darted into the kitchen to busy herself.

  “You look dead,” Marrine whispered, rubbing her hands together. She shivered from the cold and quickly went to the hearth to build the fire. Or, perhaps, to get away from me.

  Sobbing, I ran to my room and slammed the door, the knob frosting beneath my touch. Grabbing either end of my dresser, I stared into the mirror and screamed once more, the sound ripping painfully through my frozen throat.

  My skin had gone pallid, and purple rings lined my eyes. My lips had turned nearly blue, and my hair, at the roots, had changed to a grandmotherly white. My sister was right; I looked like a corpse.

  Another icy tear dropped from my chin and shattered against the floorboards.

  My mother boiled water over the fire and made me a large cup of tea. I grasped it and drank deep, but the tea ran cold down my throat. I swallowed only twice before it froze within its cup. I sat by the fire, closer, closer, until I dared to thrust my frigid hands into the embers. Even with my hands among the flames, I could not feel the slightest sensation of warmth; the red-hot coals hissed from the chill. When I removed my hands, my skin remained pale and stiff and as glacial as it had been before.

  My mother began crying in the kitchen, as though the torment were hers and not mine. Marrine merely watched me the way one watches a circus performer, her lips parted, her gaze unblinking. I stayed by the hearth, watching the angry flames dance. This cold was potent enough
to have killed the strongest of men. An hour passed, and then two. I trembled with bitterness, my heart beating slow, lethargic beats within my wintry chest. Marrine stared out the window at the swirling storm, occasionally passing a glance my way. Only when I glared and threw a coal at her did she skitter back into the kitchen.

  My father returned hours later, almost blue in the lips himself, his clothes wet from the snow. “He’s gone,” he said between panting breaths. “Mordan is gone, his house ransacked. There’s no sign of him. I have men searching, but . . .” He shook his head, eyes watery.

  I stared at him, the words striking me like a hammer to a nail, each syllable piercing down to my frozen core. No Mordan. No hope of being restored.

  Balling my hands into fists, I slammed them into the hearth’s coals.

  “I hate you!” I screamed, tears freezing in the corners of my eyes, blurring my vision. I lifted my hands and smashed them into the coals again, sending embers and charcoal flying all around me. “I hate you, Mordan! Damn you! I hate you!” Ashy smoke assaulted my face, and I coughed and gasped for air, pounding the heatless fire until the heavy soot forced me back.

  All the while careful tendrils of frost grew out from my person, climbing over the floor and walls until my family’s breaths hung as clouds in the air, and the blanket of snow grew thicker and thicker over the ground and rooftops outside.

  Mother unpacked our winter clothes, our cloaks and coats, blankets and boots, and we dressed warmly. My own layers did nothing to keep me warm. They added only weight, and they grew stiff as soon as I put them on, the fabric freezing over my icy form. Father kept the hearth roaring to combat the cold that flowed from me, fire that consumed what little wood we had collected during the first month of spring. Arctic wind howled outside, and the snow fell unceasingly. The same men who had searched high and low for Mordan now broke out their shovels to clear roads and porches. My curse had created the heaviest snowfall in Euwan’s history, and in the early months of spring, no less.