The Ruin of Snow

by Lacy Sheridan

  His dark eyes went wide, and he dropped his hand. “I’m sorry.”

  But he wasn’t. Sorry he got caught, perhaps, but not sorry he’d done it. I saw no remorse in his face. I closed my eyes, bowing my head and drawing a long, slow breath. Counted to ten. I was a Morningspell. Neyva Morningspell, the rightful heir to the fortune and family head. I didn’t come undone over boys. Especially not lying, sneaking, unfaithful boys. They were insects, little useless things that I could crush flat beneath my boots.

  Even if their dark eyes had seemed kind and sincere all this time.

  “Neyva?” Desmond tried again, and I felt the feather-light touch of his hand on my shoulder. I stiffened but didn’t let myself pull away, and I focused on him.

  “How long?” I asked instead. He was silent, staring at me, though I knew he understood what I meant. “How long has it been happening? How many times?”

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “You don’t know?” The edge crept back into my voice without my permission.

  “I didn’t plan on it happening,” he murmured, cutting his eyes down. “But I swear to you this is the only time it has.”

  His lips twitched, the left corner. Just barely. Somebody else might not have noticed. Some of the shock in me shivered and fractured, and magma leaked out between the cracks. “Don’t lie to me,” my voice was steadier than I expected. “Was it the first time or not, Desmond?” Silence. “The second?”

  “Third,” he replied, so quiet it might have been the wind.

  I didn’t know what to do. Neyva Morningspell, the perfect daughter and perfect weapon, was for the first time struck absolutely clueless. I stood there and stared at him, tears burning at the corners of my eyes. And then I started for the house again, without a word. There were no more words, and my voice had gone.

  Men lied and betrayed. I knew that. Mother had told me that all my life, and I’d seen it time and time again. Father. Altair. There was nobody in this world I could trust but myself. But I had trusted him. I’d been blinded by the sweet smiles and easy laugh. I’d been a fool.

  He chased after me again, overtaking me in a few steps. “Neyva!” He stopped me with his hands on my arms, eyes boring into mine. “Listen to me. I know you’re upset, and you have every right to be—”

  “Let go, Desmond.” The edge inside was making its way into dangerous territory.

  “—but we’re still as good as intended and you know it. Both of our families want this to happen and calling it off—”

  “I said, let go, Desmond.”

  “—would be a disaster for all of us. And I care about you, Neyva, I swear on the Lady—”

  I took a step back, trying to yank out of his grasp, but his hold tightened. Whatever magic I possessed, whatever training I had, he was bigger and stronger than me. His hands trapped me in place and my already racing heart picked up speed. There was a flurry of motion; I jerked away again, harder, and he held fast onto my arm, pulling me half around with the momentum. Something clattered to the frozen ground and I felt my hair spilling around my shoulders, unbound. My vision cleared on the hair stick at my feet.

  He released me abruptly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” He broke off as I bent to pick it up. The pale sun glinted on the sapphires and polished bone. On the deadly point.

  I could feel his fingers around my arm, hot and stone-hard.

  We’re still as good as intended and you know it.

  I care about you, I swear on the Lady.

  Something deep in me cracked apart like thin ice giving way to broad, rushing waters. The edge honed itself against the frozen shield around my heart. The garden flashed red, as red as the roses that blossomed in the sprint. As red as blood.

  “You only care about my name,” I said. “I’m only third in line, remember?” And then the point of the stick was buried in his chest, my hand wrapped around the polished handle.

  Desmond gasped and lurched, eyes going so wide I could see the whites all the way around. His face paled. Blood slipped across my shaking hands, warm enough to drive away the chill of the air. I pulled the weapon free and watched the way he bled, his fine shirt soaked through as he sank to his knees.

  A fresh wave of tears escaped, a sudden onslaught I couldn’t stop, and then the cold, hard ground was striking my knees too. He had collapsed, blood spreading across the ground. It reached my skirt, but I didn’t move away. I couldn’t find enough air; my head spun, and I thought I might faint.

  I looked from him to my hands, coated red. So much blood—I’d never expected so much blood. I’d thought of it, of course, of what it might be like to kill with something other than magic, but it had been a theoretical idea. A worst-case scenario. A what if.

  For the first time in my life I hadn’t thought of my magic at all. I hadn’t thought to curse him or use it to get away so I could clear my head. There was simply the weapon in my hands and the stinging, searing rage and betrayal coursing through me. And he was dead.

  Dead.

  Desmond was dead.

  Death shouldn’t have shaken me to the core like this, but I couldn’t move. I stared, trembling, until my voice managed to whisper out the one word circling my mind.

  “No.”

  He wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. Not him. He wasn’t a target, he was a pawn.

  But he was. His chest didn’t rise with breath. The pool of blood had stopped spreading. His eyes gaped wide, unseeing. All I could do was kneel there and gasp for breath, which was as difficult as if I’d been the one to be stabbed through the chest.

  “Neyva?”

  I jumped, head whipping toward Tulia’s cautious voice. I hadn’t heard her approaching—not like me at all, some distant part of my mind knew. She stood among the frost and dead plants, hands in the pockets of her dark cloak, eyes bouncing from me to Desmond. I must have been a sight, in only my dress, arms bare in the cold, kneeling in the blood and dirt. I wasn’t sure how long I had been here. Were my fingers numb from shock or cold?

  Tulia took a tiny step closer. “Is that Desmond?”

  Not, Is he dead? Not, Did you kill someone?

  But what had I expected?

  I managed a faint nod, fixated on his body. So frighteningly still. Tulia crouched next to me, avoiding the blood, and nudged his shoulder with two fingers. “He’s dead, Neyva.”

  “I know.” The sharpness was gone, leaving behind a ringing emptiness.

  Her gaze passed over me again, then fell on the bloody hair stick. “You stabbed him?”

  Another nod.

  “Why?”

  “He lied to me.” I knew she wasn’t asking for my motives; she was asking why I hadn’t used magic. If I’d decided to kill him, why do it so messily? I didn’t know how to tell her that I hadn’t decided. Not in the same way I’d decided every other kill of my life.

  “A little extreme for my tastes, but I can’t say I’m disappointed. He never particularly impressed me. Mother will have a fit, having to find you a new suitor.” I closed my eyes, shaking my head. I didn’t want to think about that now. But Tulia was already going on, musing, “I suppose you could bury him in the garden. The flowers would look lovely in the spring. And if you wanted to dig them out later his bones would be useful…” She trailed off, cocking her head as she thought through the possibilities.

  I couldn’t speak. She peered at me. “What is your plan for the body? Desmond Fiere can’t simply vanish.”

  “I don’t know,” I muttered.

  No, no, I wasn’t supposed to say that. I never said that. I didn’t do anything without a plan. A flawless plan.

  Today seemed to be a day for exceptions.

  “You don’t have a plan?” Tulia asked, incredulous. I shook my head again. “How did you get to killing him without having a plan for afterwards?”

  “I didn’t…” I stopped myself, because I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t speak that thought aloud—that I hadn’t wanted Desmond dead before the instant it happened
, and now I wasn’t sure I wanted it at all. Morningspells didn’t work that way. We didn’t let our emotions control us. We didn’t act rashly. And we didn’t make mistakes.

  Something in her gaze softened. “You’re crying.” I stared straight ahead. “Neyva.” Her tone made me look at her, and she repeated, “You’re crying. You’ve never cried over a kill.”

  When I didn’t reply, she heaved a deep breath and stood. “Alright. We can’t leave your well-known suitor lying in a pool of blood in our garden. Go inside and make yourself presentable, and bring enough materials for a good set of memory glamours. I’ll clean this up.”

  I followed her orders in a way I hadn’t since we’d been six and seven years old, without question, every movement numb and wrong. But I went, shutting myself in my rooms while I cleaned away the blood and changed. In the mirror, I wiped away my tears and running makeup. I scrubbed the hair stick until it was gleaming silver again, not a drop of blood in sight, and stored it in a drawer of my dressing table. When I was presentable again, looking for all the world as if the last half hour had never happened, I slung a cloak around my shoulders, gathered the materials, and flashed my reflection a smile that was strained and unsteady, but good enough to fool most.

  A Morningspell didn’t make mistakes.

  Desmond had lied and cheated, and paid the price. That was all.

  I straightened my shoulders and returned to the garden, where Tulia and a dazed-looking servant—glamoured, I knew, so he was seeing a far more innocent scene than reality—were hauling up the body. She met my gaze firmly, but there was something warm in her eyes. Like she knew something in me was shaken and had decided not to take advantage of it.

  “Get to the carriage. And prepare for the performance of your life.”

  Four

  “She found him, didn’t you know?”

  “A bloody mess.”

  “I couldn’t imagine.”

  “Poor thing.”

  The murmured gossip swirled in clouds around me like the perfume of the noblewomen it came from. The story had circulated within the first day, and all of Acalta knew it now. The unsuspecting Morningspell girl had stumbled across her suitor in the streets after he’d failed to arrive at their scheduled meeting place, killed by a common cutpurse. A thieving gone wrong, that was all—it happened often enough in a city like Acalta. Everything of value was missing, vanished into the wind with Desmond’s killer, and I’d seen nothing. In fact, he’d been dead for much of an hour by the time I’d found him and screamed so loudly everybody within two blocks had come running.

  So they said, of course.

  The scream had been not entirely an act. It had been a release to scream and let out every ounce of shock and horror and grief over what I’d done. A simple spell had smoothed out the details and nobody questioned them. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to be relieved.

  “These thieves are getting too daring,” a man grumbled as I passed, head down. “Coming into the noble squares! Is the city guard not doing their job?”

  “I’m sure we can forgive one slipping through the cracks,” a woman reassured him. “For all we know it wasn’t a thief. That girl was alone with him.”

  He huffed. “Every coin and jewel on him was gone, down to his buttons. What does a Morningspell need with those?”

  “Has anything stopped them from getting themselves an extra bit of gold?”

  I paused and peered at them from beneath the heavy hood of my fur-lined cloak. Both froze when they recognized me, the woman’s face paling. A lower family than mine, newer to the squares than the old money I spent most of my time around; I knew their faces but not their names. “How practical of you, to worry about buttons when an eighteen-year-old boy lies dead,” I said, and continued walking before I could see more than the first tinge of redness in their faces.

  Neither spoke again as the crowd filed into the Lady’s House, splitting at the door to take their places. I followed my sisters, a picturesque parade of black with my mother at the head, to the front of the cavernous room. Acalta had more Lady’s Houses than most cities, but only one served the nobility. It was grander than any other I’d seen, perhaps grander than any noble home in the squares. Stained glass at the head of the room depicted the Lady—a towering woman wrapped in a cloak of flowers and roots, stars in her hair—in gold and red and blue that sparkled in the winter sun. The high ceiling was painted as a dawn sky, the moon caught at one end and the sun at the other, and led to walls lined with ancient statues and curtained doorways. Each statue—men and women, children and adults—held a candle in its cupped hands, all lit. They cast the room in a dim, flickering light that made shadows leap and dance in time to my heart.

  I lowered my hood and drew a deep breath of air fragrant with smoke and flowers. At the front of the room, a single row away, sat the closed and sealed box Desmond’s body would spend eternity in. Sleek, polished dark wood reflected every flame in the room. The stained-glass Lady seemed to loom over it, eyes boring into mine. A sick feeling twisted the pit of my stomach.

  I pushed it away. He’d lied. He’d betrayed me. I had no reason to feel anything but triumph at his death. It was like any other. It served a purpose, and the purpose has been fulfilled. That was all.

  I forced my shoulders to stay back, my head raised. I was a Morningspell. We didn’t doubt, and we didn’t make mistakes.

  We stood behind Desmond’s family, and I couldn’t stop my gaze from flicking to his mother as she settled in front of us. One hand lifted, as if to reach toward the coffin, and then fell heavily to her side.

  I glanced at my own mother. Would she do such a thing, if I were to die suddenly?

  She hadn’t for my brother. She’d remained like a statue throughout Alaric’s funeral, practically unblinking.

  The Mother of the House began to speak, standing in front of the coffin, and I tore my attention to her. I stood/sat quiet and listened as she gifted us with blessings for healing and led us through prayers. Prayers to the Lady and her gods to guide Desmond to the afterlife with love and gentleness, prayers for Desmond’s soul’s goodness. The same prayers I’d heard time and time again.

  I supposed, if the practice had lasted for so many centuries, it must work. So, I closed my eyes and clasped my hands around the rose I carried. And I prayed. Not for love and gentleness and goodness. Not even for forgiveness. I didn’t know what I prayed for, but I was sure that was something the Lady was familiar with. There was no word for what I knew needed fixed, but I prayed that it would be. That the wrongness would be righted, because whatever in me had cracked at Desmond’s lies and confessions was still raw and broken, and it needed to be repaired.

  If it wasn’t I feared Mother would see it. I didn’t know what would happen to me then.

  When the prayers ended, I raised my head with everybody else, and Tulia, standing beside me, caught my eye. A tiny crease appeared between her brows, eyes sharp and hard like when she was preparing for a hunt. I faced forward before I started to wonder whether her thoughts were directed at me.

  We started moving again, Desmond’s coffin carried by several members of the House as the Mother led the crowd outside. We lingered in our loose formation, and I lifted my skirt as I descended the steps into the snow. It blanketed every inch of the graveyard, freezing the ground solid and dusting the stones and iron fences. We passed in somber silence through the graves, where newer families buried their dead, rows upon rows of mute figures weaving through buried and ignored corpses.

  I’d never liked graveyards. For a person so familiar with death they shouldn’t have bothered me, but all I felt when here were eyes. Like the eyes of the dead were staring at me from beneath my feet. A silly thought, a child’s superstition, but it flew into my mind with a vengeance now.

  How many of these dead had I put here?

  It doesn’t matter, I told myself, shaking my head to clear it. It was for a reason. Just like always. You are what you are, and they are what they are. Desmond
would never have loved a witch anyway, whatever your position.

  And it was back. The ice, the walls. The locked and chained gates around me. I’d let them be broken once. Never again.

  Past the graves came the crypts, towering stone structures choked by ivy, now frosted white like skeletal fingers wrapping around corners. Bare trees gave way to carved columns and frigid shadows. The Fiere crypt’s entrance was carved in the likeness of birds—in flight around the columns, trees winding behind them, and a pair of hawks proudly guarding the tall doors. From here on the ceremony would be private, meant for the family and House members only; those with no connection to Desmond shuffled out of the way to allow the rest of us to enter.

  Mother remained among them, showing not a glimmer of grief or remorse. I saw her lounging across the bed, eyes locked on me with that knowing smile. The smile that Sarafine gave me when she beat me to a kill, a smile of winning.

  My sisters went with her, leaving me alone to step up into the dim, candlelit entrance. I stood with the silent huddle of friends and family. A girl a year or two younger than me—a cousin, perhaps—stifled a sob into her sleeve. I swallowed a lump that was rising in my throat.

  No. No tears for him. No tears for anyone. You’re better than that.

  I was. I straightened my shoulders and focused on a spot at the head of the crypt as his mother placed a long-stemmed white rose across the coffin’s top. One by one, others stepped up to place theirs, white petals covering the top like snow, and then all eyes were on me. I blinked once, twice, took another breath, and walked toward it.

  The wood was the color of dark chocolate, some detached part of my mind decided. The color that was a shade too brown to be black, dark and rich and inviting. All the white roses seemed stark and bright against it.

  I twirled mine in my hands, then placed it on top of the pile. A red rose—tradition, for someone paired as publicly as Desmond and I were. Against the white ones it was too red.