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

by A. F. Dery

  Only…it hadn’t been so mad.

  He hadn’t really known where he was going, or what he intended to do: he just needed to get away. He had walked into the room without thinking, then he had seen the window, with most of the glass long since broken out of it, likely by whatever had weakened the outer wall in the same place.

  Now that he stood there, he noticed that for the first time he could recall since the winter had begun, the snow had stopped. The air was bitterly cold and a shrill wind blew, but the air itself was dry. The sky was a solid sheet of gray, with no discernible clouds, looking almost close enough to touch; everything down on the ground was blanketed in pristine white. He could see it drifting up to the bare dark trees in the surrounding forest, their long spindly branches coated in ice that glittered like crystal even in the waning grayish light.

  He was numb, but it wasn’t from the cold.

  He was from Jetheth, and he had just taken a sheep from one of the flocks by their border before the plague had begun.

  It wasn’t proof of anything: Hadrian had said so himself. But if he were honest, if he thought back really hard…

  There were things that had happened around him, over the years. Even as a wolf. Little things, unimportant things, things that could be attributed to, well, anything. And so he had. Not just small, unseasonable changes in the weather, but changes in crops, with a farmer who thought he had planted wheat instead harvesting rye; changes in his surroundings, pottery breaking or bottles leaking for no apparent reason. Just small things, that could have meant anything, that could have been caused by any number of things that had nothing whatsoever to do with magic. At the time, it had never even occurred to him that they could be related his…problem, condition, whatever it was.

  Yet those things happened around him, and Hadrian’s logic could not be faulted: if Hadrian’s magic didn’t work on the plague, then it had to be different magic causing it. Hadn’t he, Rupert, suggested as much himself?

  Of course he’d never imagined for a moment that it could be his magic. But he was there, in Jetheth, and had still been there when Hadrian and his lord had come to see what they had done. At the time, in his grief over his brother, who was among the first to fall, he had thought they came to gloat in their victory and assure themselves of their success, but now…

  They wanted to see what went wrong.

  The thought came unwanted, unbidden, as did the vague wolf-memory of Hadrian’s younger face, looking surprisingly grim for one who should have been celebrating his success. There had been shadows under his eyes.

  Rupert closed his own eyes briefly, trying to banish the image. He didn’t want to believe it, but…Hadrian couldn’t have known he was from Jetheth. He didn’t even have an accent anymore after the time he had spent away studying, in his effort to control his magic and become a mage. There was no way he could have known, and it would have been foolishness to blindly guess at something that could so easily be denied. There were a number of places that had been infected with the plague; Jetheth seemed like an unlikely random pick. Even if it was the only one Hadrian could think of since he had actually visited the place shortly after the plague had broken out, it didn’t explain how different magic had changed the plague, and it didn’t explain the reaction he’d had when the pieces fell into place in his mind.

  Rupert had been sincerely afraid for the man, had even known a moment of true panic. The look on Hadrian’s unseeing face had been like a man being tortured, a rictus of pain, his mouth open in a scream that had no sound.

  Of all the things he was willing to attribute to the man, he did not think there was any way he was that good of a liar.

  Rupert had not stayed to hear the end of the conversation. He didn’t want to know Grace’s reaction: that she had heard the same words was enough for him to know. Maybe she believed Hadrian and maybe she didn’t. It didn’t matter. He did.

  He, not Hadrian, had killed those people. He had killed his own brother, the only family he had left, the only person who had never feared him, who had trusted him completely, even knowing his difficulties. A sudden horror stabbed through him; after all the time he had spent as a wolf, he could barely even remember the younger man’s face.

  Again he closed his eyes. He could not allow it to go on any longer. He could go the rest of his life without any harmful changes being made to the world and people around him by his magic, or he could destroy everything he came across, possibly without even knowing it. There was no way to predict, and he knew of nothing left to try.

  It had to stop. He had to stop. It had been selfish to run, and selfish to think he could keep Grace safe from himself. He had wanted so much to keep her safe, and to keep her with him.

  The wolf inside him howled.

  He felt as cold and still as the stones around him.

  “Rupert?”

  He heard Grace’s sweet voice. She had found him. I…should…have…known…she’d…come, he thought. His thoughts were coming in a slow, thick trickle. She…accepted…Hadrian…even…after… she…knew…

  “Rupert, please come down, you’re freezing up there,” she said, her voice rising in alarm. “You’re turning gray…please…”

  He felt very heavy, so heavy he couldn’t even open his eyes again and look at her one last time.

  But a final thought entered his mind. The least he could do, after all else he had done.

  “Tell…him…the plague…is over…” he forced the words out through lips he couldn’t feel.

  “Rupert?” Grace’s voice was confused.

  “It…ended….years…ago.” The last word barely made it past his lips. It was harder and harder to move his jaw.

  There was something else, but he couldn’t finish the thought. Again he heard Grace’s voice, but it sounded muffled, as though it was coming from much farther away than the same room. “Rupert, don’t…please, whatever you heard…we’ll figure something out…please, come down!”

  She kept talking, but he could no longer make out the words, and then her voice faded out completely.

  Then there was nothing.

  Another month passed before the world began to thaw.

  When Hadrian first heard the dripping water from the trees outside the tower, he felt torn between fear and profound relief. Fear, because Grace was still determined to return to Haevor and take responsibility for whatever had happened after she had run, and relief because the tower, once both his haven and his self-imposed prison, was now the source of nightmares for them both.

  Now when he closed his eyes, and when he didn’t, he thought of the dead, and Grace, and Rupert, turned to stone.

  He had not been able to see him, of course, but there had been no doubting Grace’s description. When he had tried to discern the other man using his magic, there was nothing to discern. It was as if he had blinked out of existence entirely.

  “He must have heard us,” Grace had sobbed. “He must have heard, he must have been from Jetheth…or he would never have…”

  The thought was horrifying. Even more horrifying was the thought that Rupert could have turned himself into stone without even knowing what he was doing.

  Hadrian wisely did not say this to Grace, and he was deeply thankful that the idea did not appear to have occurred to her.

  Once he had felt resentment for the man, for being so selfish and endangering others as he had in the process. But now he felt nothing but pity. He had truly suffered for something he had had no control over or choice about.

  None better than he to know the cost of such suffering.

  Grace had pleaded with him. “Can you change him back? Or maybe you know someone who could?”

  But Hadrian had shaken his head regretfully. “I’m sorry Grace. I can’t even sense him with my magic anymore. I don’t know that it’s possible to turn him back, but I wouldn’t know enough of his kind of magic to try even if it were. I know of no one else who would help him, not when execution is what is required of mages who can’
t control their magic. I’ll think on it, but…” His voice trailed off. As much as he wanted to comfort her, what she was asking just didn’t seem possible.

  “His face, his face is so sad, Hadrian. So hopeless. I’m…I’m glad you can’t see it. He looks like you used to, when I first came here,” she had said quietly.

  The words haunted him. In his dreams, he saw a man made of stone, wearing his own face. Grace’s nights were similarly troubled, and though he remained respectful of the fact that she was not yet his wife (and inwardly he still feared she would change her mind after returning to Haevor), they soon began sleeping in each other’s arms on a blanket in front of the fire in the kitchen. Even the room upstairs was too close to their dreams’ origin to be endured.

  Her embrace was a comfort that he would not even try to put into words. In those hours, there was peace in his heart that all the stone wolf-men and angry peasants in the world were powerless to destroy.

  As the days passed, they did not work any longer on the cure. They did not even return to the work room and did not speak of it at all. Hadrian knew that even if they had, he did not have the skill required with Rupert’s form of magic. He had genuinely never even been capable of producing the cure, but the thought no longer bothered him as it had at first.

  He knew that if his life had unfolded differently, he never would have found Grace. That knowledge was somehow a balm for all of the wounds the past years had left on his soul.

  Instead they spent their waking hours talking about what their lives had once been like, and what they hoped they might one day be. Neither wanted to return to their first homes, if such were possible, but to start new somewhere else. They both wanted children, and they agreed without discussion that they did not want any of them becoming mages if it could be helped. Hadrian wanted to use his knowledge of herbs to make remedies for people (”non-magical remedies,” he emphasized) and he agreed to teach Grace as his assistant. He had always been impressed by how bright she was, and the idea of working by her side filled him with a quiet elation. That was a life he could embrace, no matter what came in his dreams.

  The food supply dwindled to nearly nothing, and they took walks to the other uninhabited rooms on the ground floor of the tower in an effort to ignore their growling stomachs, with Grace describing to him what she found there. They made guesses and invented lives about who had lived there before, because the tower had been long deserted before Hadrian had gotten there. They did everything they could, in short, to spend the time and try to put from their minds what was on the top floor, eternally silent, and what awaited them so near at hand in their future.

  One day, many days after Grace had found Rupert, as she laid down next to Hadrian for the night by the fire and he draped an arm around her, she said suddenly into the stillness, “He said something to me right before he…well, you know. I forgot about it at first. Seeing him like that drove it straight from my mind.”

  She sounded troubled, and he knew she had to be talking about Rupert. They seldom spoke of him since that day, though Hadrian was sure he had weighed on both their minds often.

  He stroked her hair gently, trying to comfort her. “He was likely very upset at the time,” he ventured.

  “Yes, but…Hadrian, he said the plague is over. That it ended.”

  Hadrian went still, his hand falling from her hair. “What? What else?”

  “That’s it. He said to tell you it ended years ago.” She turned over, and he felt her breath against his face. “I wasn’t sure, when I remembered, if I should tell you. I was afraid of how you’d take it, if it’s true.” She was quiet a moment. “Could it be true? Can a plague just…end?”

  “Yes, it’s possible it could die out. The magic itself, if it was unstable, could have given out, causing it to turn back into an ordinary illness that would have passed like all illnesses do. If it was accidental magic that changed it, it almost certainly would have been quite unstable,” Hadrian answered. “If it is true that’s what happened, he would have been the one in the best position to know. He’s seen much more of the world than you have, and been in it far more recently than I.” He sighed heavily. “Gods, why didn’t he say anything? All this time…even if he thought I wasn’t really trying to find a cure, why not just say there was no need for one?”

  Grace rubbed his arm soothingly. “I tried to get you working on one again because I thought it would give you some will to live, Hadrian. He told me once he wouldn’t harm you until I was all right with it…which of course I never was. He may have kept quiet both to see if you were really trying to find a cure, and because he feared what you would do if you knew the truth about it, and that I would blame him.” She hesitated. “I’m afraid of what you’ll do, too.”

  “Oh Grace,” Hadrian breathed. He took her hand and kissed it. “You don’t have anything to be afraid of. Maybe at one time, news like that would have pushed me over the edge, but that’s when I had nothing else to live for. Now I have a life outside this tower, with you, just waiting for me.”

  “I hope we do,” she whispered. He knew Haevor was growing heavier and heavier on her mind as the days passed.

  “I’ll keep you safe, Grace,” he promised, and he hoped she would forgive him if he had to do just that.

  But she meant too much to him to just allow her to march to her death.

  And now, after what was both the longest and shortest winter he had ever spent in the tower, it was time to leave it. Neither he nor Grace ever said as much, but they both felt it coming, and he washed himself and dressed in clothes that Grace had mended for him: traditional mage robes, because even blind, he was still what he was, and he hoped it would make a suitable impression to the villagers of Haevor, were there any left to see it.

  One morning he woke and she wasn’t by his side, but standing somewhere by the door outside the kitchen. He put on his cloak and boots before going out to her.

  It was time.

  “I think we can make it through now,” was all she said. Her voice was steady, but he knew her well enough by now to guess at what she was feeling. He knew how he had felt, when he’d gone to Jetheth after the reports about the plague.

  “You’ll need to guide me,” he said. “My memory will only be able to get you as far as the pass.”

  “Without a blizzard going on, I think I’ll be able to find my way back,” Grace said. “I can’t have made it as far as it felt like I did at the time. Not with the snow coming down the way it was. Of course, I don’t know how far Rupert-”

  And there she stopped abruptly. She’d barely been able to say his name since it happened.

  Hadrian reached out a hand, and he felt her take it, her fingers warm in his, but trembling.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They gathered up the meager supplies they’d already packed and went out into the cold, the snow still coming nearly to their knees. Laboriously, they made their way into the pass, and then before long, they were in the woods.

  After all his years in the tower, the outside world felt strange to Hadrian, both too open, and, due to his inability to make anything of the dark shadows before his eyes, too closed. He felt vulnerable in a way he never had in the tower, exposed to whatever came across him. Everything seemed very loud, from the far off call of a bird of prey, to the snow crunching under their boots, to the wind in the bare, wet branches overhead.

  He held Grace’s hand tightly. I’ll learn to live with it, he thought.

  Grace said very little as they walked. He assumed she was concentrating on her surroundings and finding her way back, but he knew the dread that must be building within her as they came closer to the answers she was both seeking and fearing. He would never forget the seemingly eternal ride to Jetheth all those years ago.

  After a while he said into the silence, “It’s going to be all right, Grace. I’m with you.”

  She paused, and squeezed his hand. “I know,” she said softly. “I just keep imagining what I’ll find…as if
my imagination could ever prepare me, if the worst did happen.”

  They continued walking in silence.

  Some hours later, Grace froze where she stood, causing Hadrian to bump into her.

  “Sorry,” she murmured. “But…we’re by the tree line. I can see the field now, through the trees…the field where I was when I ran. The village proper is just past it.”

  She was shaking. He put an arm around her, pressing his lips to her hair.

  “It feels like such a long time ago,” she murmured. “Like a lifetime. I don’t feel like the same person who left.”

  “You’re not,” he said simply.

  He felt Grace turn and put an arm around his waist. “Whatever happens next,” she said, her voice thick with emotion, “I want you to know…I love you. And the time I’ve spent with you, it’s changed me too. I’m ready to face what I’ve done, and…if I must pay for it with my life…I feel like my life will be leaving something behind. Something good.”

  She kissed him, and he held onto her as if she anchored him to life, seized with anguish. “I love you too, Grace. And I’m proud of you, no matter what anyone says.” He couldn’t bring himself to say anything else. He struggled to pull himself together and forced himself to open his arms so she could step out of them.

  Again she took his hand and they left the forest.

  “It’s a big field,” she told him as they walked. Her words were coming a little fast, but he understood them. “All virgins old enough to bear children are brought out when it’s time. There have been a lot of early arranged marriages purely to protect daughters from being eligible for the tax. Some do it while their children are still infants, but there’s always the danger that the husband won’t live long enough and the arrangement will fall through. We’ve never seen any magical plagues, but there are certainly enough non-magical ones to keep our numbers on the low side. I’ve lost four siblings myself before they were old enough to walk.”

  Hadrian nodded. “I’ve seen much of that myself- or rather, I did see it. I’ve always wondered if magic couldn’t do more to prevent it…not that I’m about to be meddling with such things now.”