Followed by Frost

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  I withdrew from the fire and took to my room for the next two days, huddled and shivering on my bed, thinking of how the world—and how Mordan—had so cruelly wronged me, and wishing death would take me. I realize now how ironic such a plea was, but at that point I had truly meant it, for each moment was a misery.

  The snows hardened the ground and killed the weak sprouts that had pushed through the soil—flowers and vegetables alike. Many tried to unbury their gardens and cover them, but my snow would not relent. Our own food stores had grown weak over the true winter, and we had not yet purchased or harvested enough produce to last through another. Men started to slog through the snow to my home to either complain or to brainstorm a solution to the problem. However, my home was the coldest in Euwan, so my father began to meet with them elsewhere. What they discussed, I didn’t know, but I wanted to.

  On the third day I left my house of my own volition, ignoring my mother’s pleas for me to stay. I stepped into the storm shoeless and coatless, for the cold could not possibly affect me more than it already did. The storm seemed to follow me wherever I went. When I walked far enough, the snow lessened for a time, but as soon as I stopped, it brewed around me anew, icy winds whipping through my hair and whistling in my ears.

  I walked from home to home, aching and sore, searching for my father. It wasn’t until I gave up the search and walked to Ashlen’s house that I found the village men. They had rendezvoused in my friend’s home. I wondered if they’d kept Ashlen from seeing me or if she’d been too cowardly to brave the snow.

  I stopped outside the front-room window and watched as the eight or nine men inside stood in a circle and argued. The wind and the glass hid their words from me, but I could tell they were angry, worried. My own father stared hard at the floor, his mouth twisted into a perpetual frown. It was through this window Ashlen saw me in passing. Her face, uncharacteristically gaunt, was almost unrecognizable. Then again, so was mine.

  The wind blew over me. I made the signs for What is happening? with my hand, my frozen fingers barely nimble enough to form the words.

  She signed back, My brother is sick.

  No, the men. What is happening?

  She shook her head. He’s sick from the cold. Gesturing to the circle, she added, Worried.

  So am I! I motioned with both hands, struggling to bend my knuckles. Cold! Cold! Why am I not dead?

  But Ashlen only shook her head, solemn, and signed, The Hutcheses’ boy is dying.

  I threw my hands in the air and turned away from her, heading back into the storm. Even my best friend had no sympathy for me.

  But as I climbed over the snowy hill toward my house, I thought of what she had said. The Hutcheses’ boy, dying. That family only had one son, a six-year-old boy with big ears but a charming smile. All the children in Euwan shared a classroom, and Bennion Hutches always sat so attentively in the front row. He had once picked flowers for me, not knowing they were weeds.

  I could not believe Ashlen’s claim—surely my storm was no worse than a bad winter night, and no one could grow ill so quickly. I decided I needed to see Bennion for myself. I passed through my yard and cut through the snow-laden willow-wacks—several branches had fallen from the trees, unable to bear winter’s weight—and over to the Hutcheses’ small cottage.

  I knocked on the door, the wood frosting beneath my touch.

  It took a long moment before Antrid opened the door, a short, plump woman with stubby fingers. She didn’t recognize me at first—I could tell from the way she squinted over her glasses, frames I had always thought too thick for her face. When she knew me, she seemed afraid, but common hospitality kept her from slamming the door shut.

  “Bennion,” I said, snow blowing over me. “I heard he’s sick.”

  She nodded, shivering. “Caught in the storm . . . The cold is too much. Please . . . go home. It’s too cold.”

  “I want to see him.”

  She hesitated. Antrid was a mousy woman, but she still managed to say, “I don’t want your curse in this house.”

  I shivered and folded my arms, some small part of me still thinking the gesture would warm me. “Please,” I added.

  She frowned, but the moment she relaxed in consideration I shoved the door open and stepped aside, barging into her home. A fire blazed in the hearth on the far side of the front room, heating a pot of water. Lines of frost spread from my feet across the floor, but the fire drove them back. It must have been very warm inside the house, though I could feel none of it.

  “Please don’t hurt him!” Antrid begged. I did not see her husband, Toren, and wondered if he was with the others at Ashlen’s house.

  I followed Antrid down the hallway and into her bedroom, where Bennion lay in the middle of her large bed, blankets pulled up to his chin. His cheeks were flushed and his breaths strained with each small heave of his chest. Sweat beaded against his temples.

  Antrid took a rag from atop his forehead and turned it over, then frowned. Ignoring me for the moment, she hurried from the room, perhaps for water.

  I stared at Bennion’s tiny body and listened to his labored breaths. Sick from the cold. Sick because of me, though I blamed Mordan for it. Mordan had made this child ill. Mordan had killed the crops in Euwan. Mordan had frozen me through, causing me such unrelenting pain that even sleep was nearly unachievable.

  Mordan had caused this twisting guilt in my chest.

  Suddenly a man stooped over Bennion. I blinked, certain it was a phantom, but he was still there, and my sluggish heartbeat quickened. The man looked ethereal at first, but he appeared more and more solid the longer I stared. And stared I did, for I had never seen this man before, and there were only two ways into the bedroom: through the door beside me or through the window, locked and curtained. That, and I had watched him materialize, a ghost turned flesh. Though I had not thought it possible, an even colder chill ran through my body.

  The man was tall. Very tall. He had pale, white skin lined with bold, violet veins. A soft, wide-brimmed black hat rested on his head, from which fell a cascade of dark auburn hair, spilling over his shoulders like thick forest smoke. He wore fine clothing: a maroon coat, black velvet cloak, and high black boots with large gold buckles. A gold necklace hung from his neck, and a ruby the size of a duck egg shone from the amulet at its end.

  My bones grew all the colder at the sight of this strange, richly dressed apparition. I wondered if I had finally lost my wits.

  As if feeling my gaze, he turned his head and looked at me with bright amber eyes. My back hit the wall; I had not realized until then that I was retreating. He reached up with a veiny hand and tipped his hat to me just as Antrid shuffled through the door with a freshly moistened rag and bowl of broth.

  She gave me a hard stare before sitting on the mattress beside her son, completely oblivious to the towering, shadowed man across from her. I realized she could not see him. This man was not an ordinary person, but he did not seem like one of the craft.

  “His time has come,” the dark figure said, and I realized he spoke Angrean, a dead language recorded in only the most scholarly works, the language that had first inspired my fascination with old tongues. I had heard it spoken only once, by a scholar passing through Euwan two summers ago, but this creature’s tongue uttered it in a darkly musical way that no human could ever hope to imitate. Had my mind not been so warped with fear, I would have been shocked by my ability to understand the language’s nuances. I held my middle tightly as though ready to sick up, and clenched my jaw tightly to keep my teeth from chattering.

  He placed his hand on Bennion’s forehead, over the new cloth Antrid had set upon it, and lifted it skyward. Ethereal smoke rose from the small boy, swirling in tan and cerulean flames. It vanished just as quickly.

  The man turned from the bed and smiled at me. “Until we meet again, Smitha.”

  He left the same way he came—not suddenly, as Mordan had, but by slowly fading: flesh, to ghost, to gone.

  I gas
ped, cold air flooding my lungs, for I knew then that I had seen Death himself, that he had spoken to me, and that he knew my name. Death, a being so reviled that few dared speak of him, even in fairy tales. A force that could only be named by the finality of his purpose. No sooner had he disappeared than Antrid wailed, a horrid sound that echoed between the wooden walls.

  “No! No, Bennion!” she cried, throwing herself over the boy’s body. “God in heaven, don’t take him!”

  I shook my head, my own cold forgotten for the moment, and darted from the bedroom and out the front door. I stumbled through the willow-wacks and collapsed outside my barn. I retched, spilling the few contents of my stomach into the snow, then retched again, droplets of acid freezing to my lips.

  Had I known Death then as I do now, I would have pleaded with him over the Hutcheses’ boy. Bartered with him, perhaps even attempted to reason with him. But I had not, and so he had come, taking the soul of little Bennion in his wake.

  The death of the Hutcheses’ only son was “the last water in the well,” as Imad would later say. For the following morning, I could not convince even my own father to keep me.

  CHAPTER 3

  “She must go.”

  The words echoed between my ears. I looked away from the villagers who had gathered around the hearth in my own house and locked my cold eyes on to the window, where the gap between the curtains provided yet another reminder of my suffering. The dawn sun peered over the mountains to the east, in the one sliver of sky untouched by my snow cloud. It cast a reddish glow on the storm that ravaged Euwan, almost making the snowflakes look like raining blood. I sat on the kitchen floor, massaging frozen fingers with frozen fingers, wincing as cramps tore at my muscles. It took all of my strength not to curl in on myself and disappear into a single, frozen knot, but I would not cower before these people who believed they had the right to decide my fate. People who, I believed, would have proclaimed to love me only days earlier. Ice crystals veined the floor around me, stretching as far as the fire’s heat would allow. And now these men—Toren Hutches, my neighbor and Bennion’s father; Jacks Wineer, Ashlen’s father; Cuper Tode, who ran the mercantile; and even my own father stood discussing my fate in front of me as though I were a pestilence. As though I weren’t sitting right there, hearing everything from their mouths.

  “It’s killed my boy!” Toren shouted, tears in his blue eyes. “And look at your other child!”

  My father glanced at Marrine, who lay curled in blankets by the hearth, her head resting on Mother’s lap. Mother stroked her hair. Marrine had fallen sick like the others, the continuous cold too strong for her to bear. Still, her fever had broken during the night.

  “She’s a disease, Chard,” Cuper said, not bothering to lower his voice. Wrinkles etched his forehead in tight arches, emphasizing his receding hairline, and he trembled with the chill of my aura. “You’ve seen how it follows her. I wouldn’t wish this curse on anyone, let alone on her and your family, but we will all die in our very beds if she doesn’t go. There’s no hope of catching Mordan, not now. We don’t even know which direction he went. And you’d be a fool to seek out another wizard’s aid! You’ll curse the whole town, you will.”

  I slammed my fist against the cupboard door beside me, sending frost cascading across it. A sharp pain ran up my arm, magnified by the cold. “This is my home!” I cried, my tears freezing on my lashes. “I have every right—”

  “You lost that right when you brought the wrath of a wizard upon us,” Toren interrupted.

  “I’m not the one who let him stay here in the first place,” I quipped.

  All eyes went to my father. He had been the one to open his heart to Mordan when Mordan was only a weary traveler. But no one could blame him for it. My father hadn’t known any better, and Mordan had seemed to be a perfect citizen until that day in the willow-wacks. The day he couldn’t take no for an answer.

  Jacks, Ashlen’s father, met my eyes, and I saw some sadness in his gaze. I had spent so much time at his home over the years, I was nearly family. “Will you really stay here and watch your family die? Watch them starve away or freeze to death? What will it take, Smitha? Marrine’s passing? Ashlen’s?” His words were harsh, yet his tone was soft, pleading.

  “That isn’t fair!” I cried, panic seizing my frozen heart. Not only did I have to be cursed, but cast out as well? I’d die! “You don’t even know how it feels. You don’t even know! I feel dead already, so cold . . . You don’t even know!”

  I covered my face with my hands, tears slowly freezing against my palms. I would die next, anyway. I had seen Death, and he had known my name. A human body wasn’t meant to survive such a curse. I shivered.

  The men were silent for a long moment, or perhaps they spoke in whispers—I could not hear over my own sobs. Finally, though, I caught my father’s words: “Give me one day. One more day, and she’ll be gone.”

  For a moment I was truly frozen, immobile in my prison of ice. I had always expected to leave home someday, when I was wed. Not like this. Not with my own father betraying me.

  I pushed myself to my feet, frost webbing about my footsteps. I stared at my father, unable to summon the words to defend myself. I looked to my mother, but she avoided my gaze. I had been cast out by my own family, my own flesh and blood. For the first time in my life I was unwanted, cast aside like sawdust.

  I had nothing to say, nothing that could soothe the indignity that clung to me like candle wax. I turned from the kitchen and ran down the wintry hallway to my room, slamming the door behind me. The wood had chilled so thoroughly over the days of my cursed residency that it splintered. I didn’t care. If they wanted me to leave, I would leave. They would have the rest of their lives to marinate in the regret of their choice.

  I dropped to the floor, followed by frost, and rummaged through the boxes under my bed. I pulled out my schoolbag, threw it on the bed, and began searching through my dresser drawers for clothes. I expected a knock on my door, an apology, but it never came. No one, not even Father, sought to make amends.

  Even my anger felt cold.

  I cried, icy teardrops pattering unevenly on the floor as I wadded up a chemise and shoved it into the corner of my bag, the fabric already stiffening from my touch. My bag was not large, so I took my two favorite dresses and folded them tightly inside, then pulled a third over the one I wore. I packed my hairbrush, chalk for my teeth, and three of my books, one of which included the Hraric volume I had borrowed from Mrs. Thornes. She would get her spring back, but she’d never see this book again.

  Crouching, I pulled out the last drawer of my dresser and grabbed my hoard of honey taffies. I took one in my hands, and my rigid fingers struggled with the wrapper. Before I had fully removed it, the taffy had turned rock hard. I let it fall from my hands. It hit the floorboards and cracked into three uneven pieces.

  I trembled but not from the cold. Not entirely. My curse gripped me like a noose, expanding as far as Euwan’s borders and stealing from me even the small joy I would get from something as small as a cherished candy. I realized then, staring at the broken taffy, that I was truly on my own—for if my own family could cast me out, surely no stranger would show pity on me. The very cold that had destroyed my life was my closest and only companion.

  I resumed packing, moving much slower now, wanting to savor what little time I had left in my room. When I finally emerged, the men had gone. Father and Mother sat silently in the front room, and Marrine dozed by the fire. I went to the icebox to collect what food I could carry—how I would manage to find food after leaving Euwan and its surrounding villages, I did not know—and rummaged through the cupboards for extra supplies without a word. At least I would not have to worry about the food spoiling, only how I would be able to chew it.

  My father came into my room as I was cramming my rations into what little space remained in my bag. He stood at the doorway. I heard his teeth chatter from being even that close to me.

  “We have a day, Smit
ha,” he said, sounding hoarse. Was it from emotion, or was he, too, catching sick? “You won’t have to leave until tomorrow. We agreed on a day.”

  “I will not stay where I am unwanted,” I said, truly feeling the role of a martyr. “I’ll leave now.”

  I wanted him to argue with me, to insist—no, demand—that I stay until morning, to tell me I was still part of the family, no matter what had happened to me. No matter that my eyes appeared sunken and my skin sickly, no matter that my very breath froze the air around me. No matter that I could not so much as hug my family good-bye without hurting them.

  But he did not. At that time, my father had resigned himself to what must be, and I did not care to see the pain that ate him up inside, a pain that surely must have surpassed my own, for his had come by choice, and with choice came guilt. My father had always been my greatest supporter—he drove me to the city for plays and tutoring in theatre despite my mother’s objections to it, he thinned out his money to ensure I had all my needs and most of my wants, and he even, I’m ashamed to say, believed every false account I offered him, including those that maligned Marrine. The decision to cast me out must have hurt him more than anyone.

  “We love you,” he said as I fastened the buttons along the mouth of my bag. His words croaked in his throat. Ready to cry again, I bit the inside of my cheek to contain myself.

  I turned to him and saw pools in his eyes, one tear escaping to be lost in the forest of his beard. I stepped toward him but stopped myself. Though I wanted to hug him badly—for his comfort and my own—I knew I could not touch him. I had seen how quickly my skin had frozen my parents’ hands. The layers of his shirt would not be enough to protect him. I was angry, I was forlorn, but I did not want to hurt my family.

  I did not want another Bennion on my shoulders.

  I thought of Ashlen’s brother. Yes, I would leave now, before I hurt anyone else.

  Swallowing, my icy throat barely able to pull the spit down, I pulled my schoolbag over my shoulder, braided my hair, and left my room. I waited for my father to step aside before I walked out of the room. My mother stood from the worn sofa as I entered the front room and tried to speak to me, but sobs bouncing in her throat made her words unclear. Again I bit my cheek, hard enough to taste cold blood. I had to leave quickly, before I could think too much on the matter. For whatever reason, I was determined not to let my family see me cry.