by Bree Barton
Seconds later, Mia and Zai were alone.
“I can’t do it,” she said suddenly, the words rushing out. “This was a mistake.”
“You’ve made it this far—you can’t turn back now.”
“She never came home. She clearly doesn’t want to see me. If she did, she wouldn’t have spent the last three years pretending to be dead.”
Mia hadn’t said any of these things aloud; she’d barely dared to think them. Now the words clung to the air, taking on more weight.
“People don’t always do the things we think they should,” Zai said. “But they often have good reasons. Even if those reasons are ones we’ll never understand.”
His gaze was steady. “She loves you, Mia. We always hurt the ones we love the most.”
Her eyes locked onto his.
“What did you just say?”
“I said she loves you. We always—”
“You said Mia.” The blood echoed in her ears. “I never gave you that name.”
Zai watched her, his expression blank. The silence clogged the air like smoke, until Mia was choking on everything his mouth didn’t say, and everything his eyes did.
Then it no longer mattered, because her mother swept onto the balcony.
Her mother.
Luminous red hair pinned in the Luumi style, woven into interlocking plaits. A heavy snow fox cloak draped over her shoulders. Older, but somehow younger, too. Wide hazel eyes.
Alive, alive, alive.
Mia’s thoughts splintered into pieces.
Mother.
The whisper never left her throat. Her heart was tangled up inside the word, a bloody, broken sob.
Mother.
But it wasn’t right; something was off. She was looking straight at Mia, but her eyes were cold, distant, the life sapped out of them.
“Mother?”
Mia took a tentative step forward, frightened by the deadness in her mother’s face.
“My red raven. You’ve come at last.”
Mia wanted to receive her mother’s words, to be bathed in their gentleness. But the vowels were hollow, the consonants stripped of warmth. They didn’t close the space between them. If anything, they emphasized it.
“I’ve missed you,” Mia said, hating how small she sounded, how young.
Her mother exhaled, so long and deep Mia wondered if she’d been holding her breath for three years. Surely this would break the spell. Her face would ease into the smile Mia knew so well, her hazel eyes dewed with happy tears. Wynna had always possessed a natural warmth that drew people to her, an effervescence of spirit and an ease in body that had embarrassed Mia as a girl—and that she now longed to emulate.
Mia needed that warmth. But when she looked into her mother’s eyes, they were dark. Wooden.
“Thank you, Zai.” Her mother clasped her hands together. “You have done exactly as I asked.”
The world slipped through Mia’s fingertips.
Zai knew her mother.
He’d done exactly as she asked.
Awareness landed with a dull thud. She was not charting her destiny, plotting her own course as she’d imagined. She had not brought Zai here.
He’d brought her.
Mia staggered toward the balcony—to fling herself off the ledge or to vomit, she wasn’t sure.
“Take her to my chambers,” Wynna said. “I’ll tend to her there.”
They were too late. Mia’s knees buckled beneath her. Her body stayed on the balcony, but her mind plunged into the dark.
11 Days Till the Weeping Moon
My silent sister,
Do my stories bore you? Perhaps you are not listening as closely as you should. Any storyteller who does not tell another, deeper story beneath the words has failed.
I assure you, I have not failed.
The quiet boy was the middle child. As is often the case with middle children, he sank into the unseen space between.
They were a gifted family; magic was the air they breathed. But the boy possessed none himself. He was more human than witch. For many years he resented it. Then, as his siblings twisted into strange, unnatural shapes, he began to feel proud of his humanness. He wanted to know his father, the man who had made him.
Over and over, the quiet boy pleaded with his mother to tell him about his father. “Was he handsome? Was he strong? Is he still alive?”
Her answer was always the same: “Your father was not a good man.” And that was that.
So the quiet boy resolved to find out on his own.
When his older sister crept into the village at night to sate her hunger, he followed her. He peeked into the houses while the men slept, trying to find a face he recognized, a face like his own.
And finally, after months of searching, he found him. The quiet boy sat beside the bed in silent reverence until his father stirred. One look at the quiet boy and the man knew exactly who he was.
“Do you have magic?” his father said.
“No,” said the boy proudly. “I’m not like the others.”
“I have three human children already. You are of no use to me unless you can do things they cannot.”
The quiet boy’s heart was broken. But he did not abandon hope. He returned to the ice kabma and watched his siblings—the way they plied their magic, bent the elements to their will. Bit by bit, he learned to pilfer the remnants they left behind.
When he returned to his father’s house, he could commandeer magic that did not belong to him. He had the power to melt sand to glass, turn certain kinds of stones into a weapon or a gift.
His father’s eyes gleamed. “You will make me a fortune,” he said, pulling a pair of shackles from behind his back.
But as the shackles snapped around the quiet boy’s wrists, something strange happened. He felt his arms soften into wings. His fingers were now gray feathers, velvety and thick, the tips alight with silver flames. As he rose above his father, the plumes licked the wooden walls, and the boy watched while both the house and the man inside it smoldered down to cinder.
The quiet boy flew home and bragged to his siblings that he was now the most powerful of all. But because he had stolen magic from the others, his hands were stolen from him.
The Silver Sorcerer is the Fourth Soul of Jyöl. He follows on the heels of the other Souls, spooning up the scraps of magic they leave behind. In the olden days, he would leave every child a gift on the last night of Jyöltide. The good child wakes to a small glass bird on her pillow. The bad child wokes to a thin glass feather in her heart.
Perhaps a story is both a weapon and a gift.
Perhaps, as you will see, the two are not so different.
Ever yours,
Angelyne
Chapter 29
More Death
THE SNOW WOLF WAS the best kind of assassin. Silent. Invisible. Lurking in the shadows, waiting to slit his victim’s throat.
Pilar could respect a man like that. She just couldn’t find him.
“Drink?” said the woman behind the bar, as Pilar plunked herself down on a wooden stool. The barmaid was thick hipped and quick fingered, with weathered brown skin and lines of icy blue ink flowing up both arms. More of a bar matron, really. She wore the Addi red cloak.
“No drink,” Pilar said. “I’m looking for someone.”
“This isn’t generally a place people come to. It’s a place people leave.”
Pilar stifled a groan. She’d heard this, or some version of it, everywhere.
Kom’Addi wasn’t a village—at least not in the way she’d originally thought. It was a cluster of connected villages filled with Addi reinsdyr herders. For the past three days, Pilar had dragged herself from one community to the next, always clutching her carved frostflower. But the rune hadn’t revealed a path to her father, and when she showed it to people in Kom’Addi, they looked at her like a common thief.
So she’d tried more traditional methods. She sat in taverns and alehouses. Talked. Listened. Plied patrons with spirits to loosen
their tongues.
No one knew anything about the Snow Wolf. Most people had never heard of him, and those who knew the name had no idea where he was. Pilar had come to understand that the Illuminations, the Jyöltide festival, the Wolf standing on the steps of the queen’s palace—none of it held any interest to the Addi. “Those are just Luumi tricks,” one boy had told her. “If you want to see magic, go outside and look up at the Ribbons.”
Instead of helpful information about the Snow Wolf, Pilar was learning an awful lot about reinsdyr. She learned herders were moving their herds inside fences to protect them from predators (silver lynxes and ice leopards in winter, scarlet bears in summer). She learned how angry people were that a Land Council in faraway Valavïk had accused one Addi herder of overgrazing, demanding that she slaughter forty-one of her one hundred beasts.
“You can’t survive with a herd of fifty-nine,” a man with a kind face had confided at the last tavern. “She has children to feed.”
When Pilar asked if the family would starve, he’d shaken his head. “We won’t let them. Kom’Addi is a community, and we act like one. This isn’t the first time some fool from Valavïk has tried to interfere with our livelihood. The Council is the newest chord in an old song.”
“Did Queen Freyja create the Council?”
“No, her uncle. Isn’t that lucky? When he isn’t busy ‘saving’ all of Luum’Addi with his magic ice, he still has time to meddle in Addi affairs.”
The Addi never said Luumia. When they spoke of the snow kingdom, it was always Luum’Addi.
Pilar had noticed something else over her three days in Kom’Addi: there was no fyre ice in sight.
“Who is it you’re looking for?” said the bar matron, polishing a glass. “I know all the thirsty souls who come around, so I might be of use. Though I’ll also say we’ve had quite a few foreign visitors lately. Very unusual for us.”
Pilar slid her frostflower across the bar. “Does that mean anything to you?”
The woman cocked a brow. “What are you doing with a rune like this? You’re not Addi. None of my business, but your coloring is Fojuen, if I had to guess. Maybe half Glasddiran.”
“I am not a river rat. I’m half Luumi.”
“You sure?” The bar matron tapped the bone carving. “If you were, this rune would have led you home.”
Pilar swiped the frostflower off the bar. She didn’t feel like defending her parentage to a stranger.
“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re asking. The Snow Queen gave it to me.”
“I see.” The bar matron swapped out the clean glass for a dirty one, kept right on polishing. “Would you like me to be impressed?”
“I’d like you to help me find the Snow Wolf.”
The woman shrugged. “The Wolf doesn’t hunt here. Never has. I’ve heard he doesn’t hunt in the other kingdoms, either. Killing magicians has gone out of style.”
A dormant assassin was impossible to find. Why couldn’t the Wolf wait to hang up his hat till after he’d helped her kill Zaga and Angelyne? Then he’d be more than welcome to retire to Kom’Addi, plant a nice garden, and herd reinsdyr till his hair went white.
Pilar tried to imagine a future as the mild-mannered daughter of a reinsdyr herder, living in an ice kabma with a rose garden out back. She couldn’t fathom it.
That was the problem. These days she had a harder and harder time imagining her future at all. She’d spent the better part of the last year dreaming about her triumphant return to Refúj, being embraced by her Dujia sisters, and finally earning her redemption. But the longer she spent off the island, the less she wanted to go back. She never thought about any of those women. The one person she did think about was Quin.
Cowardly, backstabbing Quin.
“There is one odd thing, though.” The bar matron dunked her towel in soapy water. “You’ve heard of the three sisters?”
“I have not.”
“None of my business, but a curious thing happened here in Kom’Addi a few months back. The sisters had just lost both parents to the pox. They were living with their grandparents in a kabma down the road from mine. One night they tucked the girls into bed, and the next morning, they were gone.”
“All three of them?” Pilar leaned forward on her stool. “They just vanished?”
“Without a trace. Some say they wandered out into the snow and got lost. But the frostflowers weren’t in the sisters’ room, which means they had them. And those runes should have led them home.” She wrung out her towel from end to end. “I think someone took those poor girls. They had a good bit of magic between the three.”
“Three Dujia go missing,” Pilar said slowly, “and you still don’t think the Snow Wolf had something to do with it?”
“I told you: he doesn’t hunt here. We’ve had peace in Luum’Addi for decades.” The bar matron slapped the towel onto the bar and began scrubbing out old rings. “The queen herself came to Kom’Addi to meet with the grieving grandparents. Drew the Hex on their front door. A nice gesture, though I suspect mostly for appearances.”
Pilar leaned back, pondering this new scrap of information. Freyja herself had said all agreements could be broken. If three Dujia girls had gone missing, why weren’t people at least talking about the Snow Wolf? Was there something—or someone—the Addi were more afraid of?
Frustrated, Pilar tucked the carving into her pocket. If she really had dead-ended, she didn’t know what to do next. Without her assassin father, she couldn’t kill her mother—which meant she couldn’t save Quin.
She hated that she’d trusted him.
She hated that she missed him.
Pilar slouched lower on the stool. At least Freyja had given her a fat pouch of coins. Small comfort, but something.
She pointed to the bottle of silver death.
“I’ll have a dram.”
The bar matron nodded. “Thought you’d come around. Hoarfrost?”
Pilar shook her head. “Just give me two thumbs.”
“Have three.” The woman reached for the bottle. “You need it.”
It didn’t take long for the licorice spirits to make Pilar’s blood thrum.
She scanned the tavern. It was cozy, all dark wood and candles. Mellow orange instead of fyre ice purple. At a nearby table, three black-haired men played cards with a hulking boy around Pilar’s age, a pasty blond with a tuft of ugly yellow hair above his lip.
Blond hair on face: not appealing. Blond curls on head: appealing.
She was thinking about Quin again.
For the last week Pilar had warred with herself over whether she should have left him. He was a pawn, a puppet, a liar. She couldn’t forgive him.
But she’d been too hotheaded in the music room to think things through. He wasn’t in control of his own actions. Pilar knew how it felt to be enkindled, a prisoner in your own body. Surely enthrallment was even worse.
Was he already back at Kaer Killian? Recaptured by her mother? Enthralled by Angelyne? Had she blamed the victim when she should have been focusing on the people who had hurt him?
Pilar ordered another dram of silver death. She had never believed in regret. But you didn’t have to believe in something for it to exist.
A warm voice slid through the air.
In the far corner, a young girl stepped onto a makeshift stage. She wore a silky silver dress and reindeer-skin slippers curling up at the tip. Dark red hair and dewy brown skin—a combination Pilar had never seen.
But it was the girl’s voice that rooted her to the spot. Low. Haunting. The guttural sounds formed deep in the girl’s belly, then flooded her mouth, rich and full. No words, but the song didn’t need them. The same few notes over and over told a story. The girl had lost someone.
Pilar was struck by the simple beauty of the song, how much it revealed with so little. But no one else in the tavern even noticed. The bar matron kept scrubbing out rings. The card players didn’t look up from their game.
Heathens. T
hey couldn’t even appreciate music.
Quin appreciated music.
There he was again. Four hells.
The last note of the song clung to the air. The girl sat on a stool, stage creaking beneath her. She fixed the silver folds of her dress. Pulled a small table toward her and began laying out objects.
Pilar turned to the bar matron. “Is she the entertainment?”
“We don’t pay her. But she still comes. Sings the same Yöluk every night. The Luumi outlawed our native songs years ago—thought only witches sung them. Today Yöluks aren’t forbidden, but you don’t hear many outside of Kom’Addi.”
She shooed Pilar off the stool. “Go, go. You’ll want to see what she does next.”
Pilar settled in a chair close to the stage.
The girl was younger than she’d thought. Underneath the thick layer of skin greases, she couldn’t be more than thirteen. There was something in her movements that Pilar understood. She was quick, watchful. Half her attention fixed on her hands, the other half elsewhere. Ready to strike.
The girl laid out a row of trinkets carved from silver rock: an hourglass, a crow’s wing, a rose. She licked her fingertips, then picked up the rose in her left hand and closed her fingers around it. She fixed her gaze on Pilar. Her eyes were deep brown.
“Which hand?” she said, presenting both fists.
“I don’t do magic tricks.”
“Which hand?”
Pilar nodded toward the girl’s left hand. “That one.”
But of course, when the girl opened her fist, there was nothing there.
“Let me guess,” Pilar said dryly. “There’s a rose in the other.”
“Wrong.”
The girl unclenched her right fist. Silver liquid pooled in her palm.
It was thick and syrupy. As the girl tipped her hand, the puddle slid from side to side.
“Fine,” Pilar said. “You have my attention. How’d you do it?”
“Magic.”
“Obviously. I meant what kind of magic?”
The girl closed and opened her fist again. This time the silver had shaped itself into a miniature ice leopard. The beast opened its mouth and roared.
Pilar leaned forward, intrigued. “Again.”