Breath of Winter, A

by Edwards, Hailey

  I sniffed. “Is that more of the astringent?”

  “No. It’s pumice.” He scooped the contents of a yellow glass jar on his cloth and scrubbed. “While we’re at it, we might as well get rid of the dead skin and plaster before sealing your leg again.”

  I scrambled to snatch the rag from his hand. “I can clean myself.”

  He passed the ball of crumpled fabric to me. “If you insist.”

  “I do.” The pumice was creamy soap with harsh bits that dug in and scoured my skin. I savored its subtle floral fragrance and the tingling sensation left in its wake. “What’s that scent?”

  “Water lilies.”

  “I thought it smelled familiar.” I inhaled again, wishing I had a tub of hot water for soaking.

  “You like it then?”

  I paid him the highest compliment I had to give. “It reminds me of home.”

  “Good.” He poured fresh water into a shallow basin and offered it to me with a dry cloth.

  While rinsing my leg, I peeked up at him. “You made it?”

  “I did.” His gaze was far away, his thumb smoothing over the coin from his pocket. “For you.”

  Soft as his admission turned my foolish heart, I made light of it. “When did you find time?”

  “While you were riding ursus and slaying risers, I was bent over a mortar with a pestle.”

  “The ursus I was riding slayed the riser.” I wrung out the cloth and flung it at him. “All I did was cling for dear life while praying to the gods I didn’t fall off her or get eaten in the process. On the topic of ursus, the slain ones can hardly remain as they are. What will you do with the bodies?”

  “We’ll burn them.”

  “How—? Never mind. It’s probably best I don’t know.”

  Henri lifted a set of five metal treads welded onto a rectangular frame and set them on his lap.

  “What are those?” I touched the edge. Each tread resembled a dull knife blade.

  “In case you get an urge to go exploring on the crutches I’m no longer sure you should have, these will give you traction.” Shaking his head, he set to work wrapping my leg with plaster cloths while he lectured me on what I should and shouldn’t do if I ever intended to walk on my ankle again.

  I absorbed his key points with a nod, content to let him stroke and rub and smooth my leg.

  I could say this for Henri; the male was very good with his hands.

  Chapter Eleven

  Smoke clung to the inside of the laboratory, its faint menace a reminder of the slaughtered ursus. My eyes stung, but I was quick to assure myself it wasn’t the thought of Farrow’s cub that made my eyes leak. What sort of hunter was I to mourn alongside a mother for her cub when I had once considered traveling into the northlands to hunt their kind for its hide?

  Perhaps I saw a mother mourning her lost child more than a sow grieving for her cub. It called to mind my own mother and how she must be handling the loss of not one, but all six of her children.

  All was quiet. Conversation was a rare commodity these days. Even the merry bubbling and hissing from Henri’s pots and kettles was absent. Today’s dreary silence reminded me of a tomb.

  Henri exited the bastille, sealing the door behind him. “You’re up earlier than usual.”

  I patted the armrests of my chair. “I heard you when you brought the wheelchair this morning.”

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said. “I’ve already seen Ghedi. He’s better, thanks to you.”

  I startled. “You used the oil I made?” Of course he had. That was the point. And yet…

  “You’re going pale.” He crossed to me and rubbed my good shoulder. “Don’t panic. I have every confidence in your ability. If it helps, I tested your reduction on myself first.”

  “Oh yes.” I groaned. “Far better if my ineptitude kills an Araneidae heir than my brother.”

  “You love him, so yes. It would be better.” Henri gave me a final squeeze. “I left you to finish a task I should have handled. The least I could do was ensure the end result was as it should be.”

  “I have four more siblings where he came from.”

  “Lourdes has three more able-bodied heirs besides me,” he countered.

  I tapped a finger to my lips. “And yet, I believe she would take issue with your demise.”

  A mellow chime pinged overhead.

  I glanced around. “Expecting company?”

  “No. A delivery.” He pointed at the far wall. “It’s time to feed your ward.”

  “Do you need any help?” With the cure made, I had nothing pressing to do.

  “You’re welcome to come if you like.” He gestured for me to follow him. “Each morning, I ask her a series of questions which gives her a chance to earn her meal. Some sessions are more productive than others, as you can imagine.”

  “Have you asked if she knows about the risers?”

  “I have. She denies all knowledge of them. I wouldn’t have mentioned them to her at all, except for how high-strung she’s become as of late. I have no doubt she is very much aware of what’s happening, though I’m not sure how or if she has any influence over the events unfurling overhead.”

  “Kaidi said harbingers can only control the corpses they raise,” I reminded him.

  “That means if the risers aren’t our ward’s, there’s a good chance we’re dealing with only one other harbinger.” He shook his head. “More than that and they risk having too many risers following conflicting orders.”

  “From what Kaidi said, getting one horde to play together nicely is difficult enough.” Thank the gods for small mercies. “If each harbinger’s army refuses to play well with the others, at least they can’t coordinate an anti-Araneaean movement. They would be too unorganized.”

  “It’s better for us if they have trouble amassing and controlling their risers,” he agreed. “If they have grand designs, then we don’t know them. I don’t think our ward knows them either. She’s smart enough to realize the knowledge would be of great value to me. In her case, because of how you came to possess her, it’s difficult to say if all harbingers are kept ignorant or only this one.”

  “Isolated as Hishima kept her, it makes sense she wouldn’t understand much of her nature.” Cast in that light, she wasn’t a very useful specimen after all. “Still, we know she at least met the harbinger Hishima sought to deal with. It was that harbinger that gave him the name Necrita. She must have been more aware than ours, or better informed. I should have considered that.”

  “We all have enough on our minds. I hoped she might surprise me, but I think when Hishima decided to keep his mother as a pet, he crippled his bargaining ability. If another, more powerful harbinger saw how he treated one of her kind, she might have feared he would treat all her people as poorly. His attempt to broker peace for his city might have been its downfall.”

  “I’m not so sure as you are they feel fear,” I said. “Hunger and rage seem to be the range of their emotions. Our ward was kept in the crystal cavern beneath the city. What would it cost the harbinger to send her army to avenge a sister crippled by ignorance? Too much if you ask me. If our ward is largely useless to us, then she might have been equally useless to them. The majority of the infected appear to be female, so I assume the same is true of risers and harbingers. Since harbingers procreate by infecting other species, it seems likely to me they wouldn’t suffer maternal pangs when losing their offspring.”

  Pity almost stirred me. But I had seen the damage our ward was capable of doing. She might be defective by Necrita standards, but she was an anatomy lesson on our enemies that we needed.

  “Has our ward had anything interesting to say?” I should have asked him sooner, but between Ghedi’s return and the riser infiltrating the stables, there hadn’t been time to wonder at what Henri might have been learning from our ward during the time he spent with her.

  “It’s gibberish for the most part.” He pinched his nose. “The one phrase I understand is this: On
gilded wings, she will come. It’s a mantra. She chants it when I visit. It holds meaning to her. She thinks by saying it she will earn a treat. It’s a secret she wants to give in exchange for food.”

  To distract myself from what constituted a harbinger treat, I said, “It could mean anything.”

  “Most likely, she expects the harbinger who visited her in Titania to come again. Our ward’s wings are transparent and shot with yellow. Perhaps the color mellows with age? There’s no way to know without capturing a second specimen. At present, we must make do with what we have.”

  “I doubt your sister would welcome a second harbinger into her nest,” I agreed.

  “A temporary pass was as much as she was willing to give.” He lowered his hand. “It has to be enough. Our time is running short. At least once this is over we may have answers for Mana. I think she will be very interested in our notes on the results of using the unblessed dayflower oil.”

  “Is the blessing so important?” I asked. “If the cure works, then it works, right?”

  “You must understand.” He explained, “In Beltania, the flowers are grown in soil that is blessed by her mentor—Old Father—who is also a spirit walker. The plants are tended with blessings, harvested with thanks to the two gods, and each plant taken is spiritually cleansed. It’s hard to explain the level of care used in the cultivation of those flowers by her clan. For the Salticidae, they are the only medicinal plant they will ever see, taste, touch or consider.”

  “I had no idea the process was so involved.”

  “Mana and I…” He brought out his coin. “We argued the last night she was here. She gave me a few very precious dayflower seeds so that I might cultivate my own plants. The seeds that I couldn’t sprout, I ground up and used for other things. I tested them in all the ways I had heard her people used the dayflower.” He flipped the piece of gold. “Spirit walkers put a drop or two of dayflower oil on their tongues before they enter their healing fugue. I discovered through a similar test that the crushed seeds have hallucinogenic properties that can induce a fugue state.”

  I saw where this was headed. “You told Mana you don’t believe in her religion?”

  “Not in as many words,” he said quietly.

  I whistled. “She couldn’t have taken hearing that well.”

  “Mana left that night without a word. Vaughn was tasked with escorting her to Beltania. They had intended to leave three days after Pascale’s trial, but I woke up and they were gone.” He noticed the coin in his hand and pocketed his token. “I didn’t get to tell her goodbye.”

  “You’re still friends.” Or else Mana held her grudges tighter than I did.

  “I asked her permission to write her earlier that same night. She declined even that offer, or so I thought. Some days later, her first letter arrived.” He glanced up then. “That’s how I learned Mana had gone to Cathis to be with Vaughn.”

  “I’m sorry things ended the way they did.”

  “If she hadn’t left that night, she might not have discovered the cure.”

  “That’s true.”

  “If she had stayed…” His absolute attention centered on me. “I would have missed this, missed you.”

  The chime sounded again, several times in succession.

  Smoothing the Henri-induced chills from my arms, I smiled. “Edan’s replacement is impatient.”

  “That he is.” Henri strode past the kiln to a section of cabinets. To their right was a metal door with a plain handle. It was perhaps the length and height of my arm from elbow to wrist. When he pulled the door upward, he exposed a platter of raw varanus steaks stacked four high. He removed the tray and flipped a switch inside the compartment. In a moment, it began to rattle and shake and gradually to rise, exposing an empty shaft.

  “Huh.” I watched as it disappeared. “And so the mystery of the food delivery is solved.”

  “Not much of a mystery. It’s a simple pulley system. The chute is connected to the kitchen.”

  Simple, he said, as though all nests had such luxuries. Or the whimsy to think of such things.

  Pausing at my side, he gestured toward the bastille. “Are you coming?”

  “Right behind you.”

  Braden’s eyes were bleary, but he managed a stiff greeting. Once Henri and I entered the room, he locked the hatch and reclaimed his position, standing with his shoulders flush against the metal.

  Malik tipped his head when we passed. His back faced the wall connected to the right side of the cage, thankfully outside of our ward’s reach. Fynn mirrored him on the left side. He flashed me another of his unsettling smiles that reminded me I ought to speak with Henri soon.

  Braden coughed in his fist. “Asher stayed in the stables to help Kaleb and Tau with clean up.”

  He must have noticed me mentally tallying the positions of all those present.

  “I smelled smoke on my way in.” Inside the bastille, the scent was even stronger.

  “I lit the pyres earlier.” Braden patted his smudged shirt. “All they have left to do is feed the fires.”

  I blanched at the mental image of Farrow’s cub used as kindling, then shoved that retched thought aside. Only fools showed weakness around predators, and our arrival had caught our ward’s eye.

  Or perhaps it was the scent of fresh meat drawing her closer to the bars.

  “She’s coming down,” I said to Henri.

  Without paying her any obvious attention, he said, “Pretend you haven’t noticed.”

  None of the others spared her a glance. They must be used to the rules of engagement I was learning. From the edge of my vision, I saw her hands wrap around the bars and her head bobble. He stopped outside her grasp, near enough to give her hope she might skewer a steak with her claws.

  Still avoiding eye contact, Henri addressed her. “I brought something for you.”

  “Food. Yes,” she chirruped. “I smell meat. Give it to me.”

  He teased her by lifting the corner of the topmost steak. “I want to ask you a question first.”

  “Told you. This. What I know. On gilded wings, she comes.”

  “Who comes?” he asked. “Who is she?”

  Our ward shook her head. “Told you.”

  “You don’t know who she is, do you?”

  Her talons clacked. “Give me meat.”

  “Not until you tell me what I want to know.” He exposed a second steak. “Who is she?”

  “On gilded wings—” she tugged her wing out beside her, “—she comes.”

  Pity I had long denied bubbled to the surface. “She doesn’t know, Henri. Let her be.”

  “You don’t. I know.” She hissed at me. “She comes. You will be sorry. When she comes.”

  “Get on with it, Henri,” Braden urged. “You’ll just piss her off poking at her.”

  A glance from Henri quieted the male, but Braden wasn’t happy to have been hushed.

  Henri spoke to our ward again. “Will you tell me when she comes?”

  “Food now.” She reached through the bars. “Talk later.”

  “Once your stomach is full, you will go to sleep,” Henri chastised her. “I know better now.”

  Girlish laughter frothed from her lips. “Smart boy.”

  “I try.” Henri smiled for her. “Will you tell me?”

  “Like you.” She clutched the bars. “Think I will tell you.”

  “I would appreciate that very much.” From the plate, he lifted a raw hunk of meat.

  Our ward’s mouth watered. “Hungry.”

  “I know.” He tossed the treat to her, and her pointed, yellow teeth shredded it with relish.

  “Glad I haven’t eaten,” Braden muttered.

  “Quiet,” I warned him, though I had thought the same. At least I had the sense not to say it.

  “Want more.” Our ward licked down her palm then sucked her fingers. “More.”

  “There are risers in Erania.” He waited for her to respond. She didn’t. She began chewing on he
r nails. “Do you know what those are? The bodies your kind brings back to life with your song?”

  Our ward shoved her arms through the bars.

  “Have you heard of the yellow death?” he continued. “The southland scourge?”

  She alternated whimpering and hissing at him. “Can’t reach.”

  “Tell me something new.” Henri stepped back. “Then you can have another treat.”

  I sniffed the plate. “Put a little flame on that, and I wouldn’t mind having one myself.”

  Behind Henri, I heard the rustle of wings. Bare feet slapped on the floor of our ward’s cell. She kept on pacing until, with a snarl, she threw herself at the bars. The profanity she spewed was nothing in my vocabulary, except Zuri. It figured she would put in the effort of learning my name.

  Giving up on her doing more than pitching yet another tantrum, I shrugged at Henri. “We tried.”

  “Listen.” He cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”

  It started with a low hum, a steady note held in the back of our ward’s throat that chilled me.

  The longer she held the note, the more impossible it became to ignore. The sound compelled me to grasp my wheels and venture closer. I licked my lips and tasted her hungers on my tongue.

  It repelled me, shocked and paralyzed me. It startled me from a daze and left me sickened.

  “What’s wrong?” Henri’s voice was low, his gaze sliding to our ward as he spoke.

  “Do you feel it?” I swiped my hands down my arms. “Her song is—it’s sticky on my skin.”

  He eased closer to me. “It’s all in your mind.”

  There for a moment, he looked as worried for me as I felt. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.” He shifted so his foot blocked the nearest wheel to prevent me from rolling.

  A quick glimpse at my brothers proved they were also affected. Both males stared openly at our ward. I glanced back at her and saw the wicked glint in her eyes when she curled her fingers for her captive audience. Braden leaned against the hatch as he had the entire time. He kept his eyes shut tight, his chin tucked to his chest and his hands stuck beneath his arms.