Winter's Fallen (The Conquest of Kelemir Book 1)

by A. F. Dery

  She leaned on his arm more heavily than she meant to as he walked her back upstairs, and she bit back another apology as she felt her face heat. She couldn’t believe how tired she was now, when she’d felt fine such a short while before. She kept her eyes directly on the steps just ahead of her, not trusting herself to maintain her balance otherwise. After a few steps she felt Hadrian hesitate, then awkwardly put an arm around her waist. She glanced at him in surprise and saw his face reddening beneath his beard.

  “I don’t want you to fall off,” he said quickly, still looking blankly ahead. “You don’t feel very steady.”

  “I guess I was a little too ambitious for my first trip to the kitchen,” she confessed meekly, trying to put him at ease. The presence of his arm was very comforting, and she didn’t want him to take it away out of embarrassment. “I’m so tired, I can’t even tell you.”

  “And breathing in that smoke couldn’t have helped,” Hadrian muttered.

  “I did hold my breath in there, you know, and really, I’m fine,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  But something about the mention of smoke brought a traitorous tickle to the back of her throat, and she coughed before she could suppress it.

  Grace didn’t even have to look at him that time. She could feel the smugness radiating from him.

  “That was just a reflex because we were talking about it,” she muttered, fighting the urge to cross her arms over her chest.

  “You’re getting as bad about muttering as me!” he said gravely.

  She pressed her lips together and tried to ignore how his arm had started to shake.

  The next few days passed in a blur of loneliness for Hadrian. He felt bleak and curiously hollow as Grace left the room each day (or perhaps it was each night; he could hardly tell). He knew he could go with her, but he was reluctant to do so unasked; he felt like he would be some kind of pervert if he did, shadowing a young woman all day for no purpose. He knew he couldn’t be of much help with whatever it was she was doing, and he found it hard to believe he was very good company. When she returned, which she thankfully did at regular intervals, she almost immediately fell asleep, worn out by her labors.

  As he’d guessed, the wolf stayed with her. It was a comfort to him that at least she was not alone, in case there were other perils that he didn’t know about down there. He spent his days (or nights) listening intently in case she called for him. She never did.

  It was unseemly, how much he missed her. Unseemly and strange, because in reality, they’d spoken very little, particularly given how much time had now passed. But he felt her absence keenly and found himself longing once more for spring. She would go home, and he could finish what he’d nearly done the day she’d arrived. This pain would stop, it had to. It grew harder and harder to bear as the empty hours wore on. More and more, the rows of graves clamored for his attention and called for his presence in the darkness all around him.

  One day, Grace returned sooner than he expected. He was sitting in the chair in her room, as he found himself doing more and more often. She smelled like soap and something that made his mouth water.

  “Hadrian, I’ve been washing the linens,” she said brightly as she came in. “Do you have a bed in another room or-” She stopped abruptly.

  He cleared his throat. “There’s no other bed, I usually sleep in one chair or another. But don’t say you’re sorry, please. It’s fine. I don’t care where I sleep and I don’t sleep much anyway.”

  He nearly jumped out of his skin when her hand touched his cheek. “Are you all right?” she asked gently.

  “O-of course, why wouldn’t I be?” he stammered. He squinted into the shadows, wishing desperately he could make out just where she was among them.

  “You’re sad,” she said. Her hand touched his other cheek, and that’s when he realized to his horror that he’d been crying. He would have shot to his feet if he’d been sure of where she was, but he forced himself to stay still, not wanting to knock her over if she was standing in front of him.

  “I’m…no, everything is fine,” he said as firmly as he could manage, but the denial sounded weak even to his own ears, his voice traitorously cracking on the last words. He felt like his face was on fire, and wanted very badly to flee the young woman’s scrutiny.

  “I brought you something to eat,” she said. “You haven’t come down since you helped me with the rats.” He heard her moving, and he quickly stood up while he had the chance. “The wolf brought another deer and I found some roots in the cellar that were in fine shape, so I made stew. There was also a bag of grain that nothing had gotten to yet, so I made some bread.”

  “That’s…it was good of you to bring it up here, but you didn’t have to, really,” Hadrian said, but his stomach growled and he suddenly couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten, or what.

  “Please sit back down, and I’ll bring the little table over to you,” Grace said. There was a pleading note in her voice that he found difficult to refuse. He sat. A few minutes later, he was in some kind of paradise. Grace could cook. The bread was the unleavened kind, but after having no bread at all for quite some time, he thought he could have stuffed himself to his toes with it and still wanted more. Not that this was in any way a feasible idea: whatever she’d found would need to last some months still, for both of them.

  Still, he enjoyed it immensely, and at least momentarily forgot all his confusion and unhappiness of minutes before. Due perhaps to his poor eating habits, he was quickly full and felt indescribably sleepy as he sat back in the chair.

  He heard her moving the table away and felt a pang of sadness for it. “Whatever I didn’t eat, will you save it for me?” he murmured tiredly.

  There was no mistaking the smile in her voice when she answered. “Of course I will. I have to take down the dishes, but I’ll be back in a little while.”

  He fell asleep before she’d left the room. When next he woke, some time must have passed for she had returned and by the sound of it, was engaged in a flurry of activity.

  “What are you doing?” he asked groggily, stretching a bit.

  “Cleaning up,” she said simply.

  He groaned a little. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, but this place got into this condition for a reason. I’m afraid you’re wasting your time and effort.”

  “What else should I be doing with them?” she asked reasonably, and he had no answer for that.

  After that, he was rarely alone again, because she now spent all of her time, save for when she went down to cook or wash dishes, apparently cleaning the room they’d been spending most of their time in. He had to admit that it was much easier moving around now, and he seldom ran into anything any more, at least in that room.

  Because Grace returned, the wolf did as well, adding the scent of wet dog to the air. He was so relieved that she was back that he told himself he didn’t mind it.

  But the time inevitably came when she’d done all she evidently felt she could do in there, and she began to explore the other rooms in the top half of the tower. The first one she chose, by sheer chance or just Hadrian’s very poor luck, was his work room, and with that discovery came the first tentative questions.

  “Hadrian, I found a room full of bottles-”

  “Yes, that was my work room,” he said flatly. He hoped his tone would convey that he really wasn’t interested in identifying all that she found in there. “You really don’t need to bother with anything in there,” he added, just in case this was too subtle.

  “I don’t mind,” Grace replied cheerfully. “It’s actually very interesting-”

  “There are things in there that could hurt you, or even blind you,” he said pointedly. In truth, that was unlikely to happen unless she started conducting experiments with what she found, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “I’ll be careful. I even found some gloves so I don’t have to touch anything barehanded.”

  And that was all he heard of it for a little w
hile, to his immense relief. He thought she must have satisfied herself with sweeping up and arranging bottles by height or something. But then came the next spate of questions, out of nowhere: “What are all those things for, if I may ask? There’s just so much. I don’t even recognize most of the herbs.”

  “My research,” he said, again affecting the most aloof and uninterested tone of which he was capable.

  “Research? Research into what?” Grace sounded intrigued despite herself.

  “Magical things. Dangerous, magical things, related to magic, and dangerous,” Hadrian pronounced in sepulchral tones.

  Grace was silent for a while longer after that, and he nearly sighed out loud in relief. Then: “Are any of those bottles and things magical? I don’t know what most of them are, but they do look rather ordinary.”

  Hadrian hesitated, torn between remaining honest and conveniently dodging future questions and interest on her part. Honesty won out, unhappily for him. “They aren’t magical in and of themselves, magic has to be used on them,” he said grudgingly.

  “So you were using magic on them to find something out? Something dangerous?” She sounded a little confused. He sighed.

  “What difference does it make? I’m cursed with magic that is responsible for my miserable plight, remember? Magic is bad. Surely you don’t want to know any more about this?”

  “It is dangerous,” Grace answered slowly. “But…you do have it, and you don’t seem very happy even though you’re not using it anymore. Or at least I don’t think you are. You don’t really seem to have much to do at all.”

  “I sit a lot,” he said loftily, waving a hand in what he hoped was a devil-may-care fashion.

  “So I’ve seen. But maybe…” Grace hesitated. “Maybe I could help. I don’t have much more cleaning to do. I can’t use magic and I don’t want to, but if you need someone to help you resume your research, maybe I could. If you just needed help finding things, or something. I could do that. And then you could do what you came here to do, and you’d be happier, right?”

  Hadrian wasn’t sure how to answer that. At last he settled on, “but you don’t even know what I’m researching. What if it’s something terrible?”

  “I doubt it, but even if it was, you don’t appear to ever leave the tower, by the look of it, so what difference would it really make?”

  Again he was speechless. After a moment, Grace went on gently, “Wouldn’t you rather be doing something than sitting all day, thinking about whatever it is you’re thinking about?”

  He was forced to admit to himself that she had a point.

  Could I…? I only stopped because I could no longer see my way around. But maybe there is a way, with the help of someone who can see…I wouldn’t have to give up yet…if nothing came of it, no one is any worse off than they were before. And if I fail…there’s still the spring.

  “I have to think about it,” he told her at last, still hesitant. He hadn’t felt hope for so long and he still didn’t really feel it; surely it was impossible that he’d be able to get anywhere now, after all this time, with a stranded shepherdess as his assistant. The very thought was ridiculous to the point of absurdity.

  And yet…

  “I have to think about it,” he said again.

  “What’s there to think about?” Grace pressed. “You can’t keep on this way.” She paused, then said, very quietly, “I found the poison.”

  It felt like all the air left his lungs at once. He felt himself go completely cold, his hands starting to shake and his mouth going dry. He shook his head mutely. He didn’t know what to say. While he thought often of spring, he’d somehow managed to forget the actual bottle.

  “It was on one of the tables in here, and it is one of the very few things that had no dust on it. You’ve been touching it, very recently, and I know you haven’t been poisoning me, and I know you’re miserable. But that…that isn’t the answer, Hadrian.”

  He forced himself to swallow, his throat impossibly dry. His pulse was pounding in his ears. “How the hell would you know what the answer is?” he managed to say thickly. His voice came out like a growl. “You know nothing about it, about me, about any of this. You have no business to be talking to me about answers and what I should or shouldn’t do. You’re an innocent farm girl from a village no one’s ever heard of. You know nothing of life, of regret, of bad things that don’t just go away when the snow melts.”

  He heard a sound from her that could have been a gasp. “I do know,” she said firmly, though her voice shook. “I do know. You and your assumptions again! You say I don’t know you, but you don’t know me either. Innocent farm girl…you don’t even know why I’m here, what I’ve done.” She laughed bitterly. “I probably killed my entire village right before I came here, is that how you understand innocence?”

  “I don’t believe that,” he said quietly. And he didn’t. She’d shown too much concern for him and too little for herself by comparison to be so uncaring. She must be misunderstanding whatever it was she thought had happened. He told her so.

  “No, no, I’m not misunderstanding. I was supposed to be the tax for my village. We don’t produce anything good, you see. Even our fleece is poor compared to the villages surrounding us. We barely survive. So the warlord who claimed Haevor for the sake of convenience claims a virgin at the end of every autumn. This year, this year he claimed me.” A slightly hysterical laugh left her. “Me, can you believe that? Five years, he walked right past me, and this time, it was me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hadrian said sincerely. It was a terrible thought, what a man like that would do to a girl like Grace, under circumstances such as those. He felt ill just thinking of it. “Are you…I mean, you’re all right?”

  “I ran,” she said flatly, but he could hear the tears thickening her voice. “When they went to put me on the horse, I ran, and it started to snow, and I got lost…I abandoned my duty to my village, and by the time I realized what I’d done, the storm was too bad for me to get back, I passed out…you know the rest. There’s no telling what he did to my village in retaliation for my stupidity. I don’t know if I even have a village to go back to. And it’s all my fault, and I’m stuck here…there’s nothing I can do…” She began to sob incoherently. Her remorse was all too familiar, her pain twisting something inside of him that already ached. Without thinking Hadrian went to her, awkwardly putting an arm around her and patting her back.

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly.

  “No it’s not, how can you say that?” she wept, but he felt her press her face against his chest, felt her tears dampening his shirt and her hands clutch at his sides. He brought his other arm around her into an embrace. He was trembling uncontrollably, overcome by something he couldn’t name, but, still wracked by sobs, she didn’t give any indication that she noticed.

  “I…I’m sorry for what I said,” he murmured into her hair. It smelled like soap now too, he thought irrelevantly. “It’s hard, the things we have to live with sometimes…I understand that better than you might think. But you must see that you are not responsible for whatever that warlord did. If he chose to punish others for your perceived crime, that was his choice, not yours. As it is, you don’t even know what the consequence was, or if there even was one. Maybe he just chose someone else. You don’t know. But it’s not your fault, my dear, you must see that. You can’t be blamed for what others do.”

  “I’m a horrible coward,” she said in a small voice, muffled by his chest.

  But he heard her. “You were scared, and you had every right to be. I don’t think a true coward would have wanted to beat away rats with a broom, or would have asked me to toss her out to save my food supply. I don’t think not wanting to be chained to a warlord’s bed for the rest of a very short life counts as cowardice, either. You’re human, that’s all.”

  “Well maybe you’re just human too,” Grace said tearfully. “Should you die for that?”

  Hadrian stiffened, but he didn’t
let her go. “There’s more to it than that,” he said finally. “But maybe I shouldn’t die for it yet. I’m willing to concede that much. Maybe, at this point, it would be cowardice- real cowardice. I’ll think about your offer, I will.” He moved his hands to her arms and gently extricated himself from her. He lowered his face, very gently, and pressed his forehead to hers, closing his ruined eyes against the shadows. “Grace, I won’t do it while you’re here. I don’t want you to be afraid of that. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “That’s not what I’m afraid of…I don’t want you to die, Hadrian, whether I’m here or not,” Grace whispered. “Whatever bad things have happened…please…”

  Hadrian swallowed the lump in his throat and said again, “I’ll think about your offer.” If you knew, you wouldn’t be saying these things, he thought sadly. You’re still innocent, Grace, whatever you think. Why does my life matter to you so much? Are you still imagining heroism and life debts? He pulled away and, reaching up hesitantly, gently brushed the trails of tears from her cheeks with his thumbs. On an unexpected impulse, seized with a sudden tenderness for the sniffling girl, he briefly pressed his lips to her forehead.

  Before he could draw another breath, he heard a vicious snarling that made him grab Grace’s arm and pull her quickly to his side.

  “Wolf…it’s all right…I’m all right,” Grace said quickly. But the wolf continued to growl fiercely.

  On a hunch, Hadrian released her arm and stepped away from her. Immediately, the wolf quieted.

  “He’s staring at you,” Grace said in a low voice, “and his ears are down…”

  “He must think I was hurting you or something, since you were crying,” Hadrian said doubtfully. But his ominous feelings about the animal were returning in full force. It hadn’t made a sound until he’d kissed her forehead. Something isn’t right here.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After that, life shifted in a strange way. Grace continued cleaning Hadrian’s work room, but he came and sat with her while she did rather than remaining in the other room as he had before. She felt oddly aware of him now and self conscious in his presence even though he couldn’t see her, and their usual comfortable silence did not quite return. There was a tension to it now that hadn’t been there before, as though he was as aware of her now as she was of him. She caught herself watching him more and more throughout the day rather than paying strict attention to what her hands were doing as she cleaned, wondering about him. Somehow she started to notice that his face, though gaunt and badly bearded, was younger than she had first thought, and that his hands, usually resting on his thighs or fidgeting with his shirt hem as he sat, were long-fingered and graceful.