I glanced to Marrine, who watched me with a pout. My pest of a sister had no respect for my privacy and shared none of my interests, yet she somehow tolerated me to the point of loving me, most days. Strangely enough, I would miss her most of all.
“Remember me,” I said, a whisper, for my own throat had swollen with emotion. “How I was.”
My mother cried, her choked breaths fogging in the cold air—my cold air—as I walked to the front door of the only home I had ever known. I opened it to the torrent outside, a blizzard of purest white, and heard Marrine call out my name just as I shut the door behind me. A tear formed in the corner of my eye; I whisked it away before it could freeze.
I marched into the whiteness—blinded by whiteness—and did not look back.
Even with the constant shoveling from the snow harvesters, the snow on the road reached my knees, and I trudged through it as one might wallow through mud. It clung to my skin, though its touch was no colder. Still, it sucked me down and slowed my progress. I was panting before I even reached the turnery, but the exertion brought no flush to my face, no sweat to my body. My heart, at least, beat a little quicker, though it still felt like a cold and leaden weight within my chest.
I passed the mercantile and a few more homes, shutters closed and chimneys smoking, before the road stretched into the forests. My feet already ached, but I pushed forward, this time not wanting anyone to find me or chase after me. I gripped my skirt in hard fists and marched away from my home, the shield of opaque clouds following. I did not know where I would go, only that my route needed to be away. Away from Euwan.
The snowfall began to lighten one mile outside of Euwan and stopped completely after another. The storm seemed content to rest as it floated over me, tracing my path with a strange exactness, always keeping me at the center of its shadow. As the forest thinned and the ground sloped, I looked back at Euwan, mostly hidden beneath its layers of snow, and saw the sun shining on it so brightly it hurt my eyes. I determined that the storm Mordan had bestowed upon me reached about a mile beyond me in any given direction. The snow would stay off my hometown if I stayed where I was, but surely the cold winds would still haunt it in the summer, and I was unwanted besides, so I kept moving, my frozen feet throbbing with every step.
I occupied my thoughts with Mordan as I plodded onward, trying to distract myself from my walk and from the cold by thinking of what I would do to him should we ever meet again. I imagined my hands around his neck, squeezing until he couldn’t breathe, the bitterness of my touch freezing the blood in his veins. How ironic it would be for him to die by the very thing he had created. It reminded me of a Hraric play.
I went over what I would say to him until I had a full speech memorized, and I muttered it again and again as I passed over a stream too quickly for the water to freeze. Each time I added to it—another insult, another observation, another plea. I recited it so many times that, to this day, I still remember every word.
I don’t know how far I had gone by the time the sun began to set, sinking into the distant horizon where my winter did not reach. Fifteen miles, at least. I realized that the land around me was completely unfamiliar. I could no longer be sure in which direction Euwan lay.
Shivering, I sat amidst the roots of an old oak tree and removed my bag from my aching shoulder. I rubbed the muscles at the base of my neck, but it did little good. My schoolbag retained the shape of my shoulders, the fabric having frozen in place. My stomach growled, for I had not eaten all day. I carefully wrapped a piece of cheese in my skirts in the hopes of keeping it warm, and I devoured it quickly, swallowing half-chewed bites before they could freeze in my mouth.
I saw no reason to build a fire, as I needed it neither to cook nor for warmth, but when a lone wolf’s hungry howl sounded in the mountains behind me, I scrambled for the flint I had taken from my kitchen and began gathering what wood I could find. Each stick and twig froze in my fingers. I quickly realized I could not touch the wood with my skin, for surely my fire would never light. I pulled gloves from my schoolbag and hastily tugged them on and built a fire the way Danner had once shown me—Danner, the last boy I had allowed to kiss me, one year my junior. I wondered, briefly, what he thought of me now, and felt some relief that he had not seen me in my cursed state, ugly as I was.
I paused before my unlit fire. Did I really want the light? Any passersby would be able to see all I had lost—the paleness of my skin, the age in my hair, and the dark circles around my eyes . . . I would win no hearts with my face, and my body had lost its softness and flexibility. Even my dresses hung awkwardly from my frame, the stitches too rigid to fall as intended.
Ultimately my fear of the dark overpowered my vanity, and I returned to my fire. It took several tries, and I nearly lit my left glove on fire, but I managed a spark to get my kindling going. As soon as the flames started, snow began to fall around me, dainty flakes I couldn’t even feel. Fortunately the thick boughs of my oak tree protected my little camp enough that my fire did not go out. Still, I kept my distance from it, not wanting my surrounding chill to weaken its blaze.
Searching the darkness around me for wolves, I comforted myself with the fact that any predator that dared to enter my prison of winter would only get one bite of me before the cold overtook it. But animals have a keen sense humans do not. Perhaps they sensed the wrongness of my storm, for no wolf ever trespassed my camp, not then nor in the years to come.
However, as I tried to forget the cold long enough to sleep, I realized there was one predator who would not be frightened off by my curse. On the contrary—it seemed to draw him to me like a trout to a fly.
He appeared on the edge of the firelight, his grin spreading from cheek to cheek, his velvet cloak stirring in the winter wind. I recognized him immediately.
Death tipped his hat to me.
CHAPTER 4
“We meet again,” he said, speaking in old Angrean. His voice sounded like warmed molasses.
My body grew so cold—so terribly cold—that every breath raked burning trails down my throat and lungs. My knees and elbows locked. It was as if the very sight of him had turned me into an ice statue, half-carved and immobile in the heavy block of my foundation.
The light seemed to bend around him as he stepped to the side of the fire. The black of his cloak appeared never ending: a deep pit with no floor, or dark sky with no moon or stars. His amber eyes glowed almost the way a cat’s would.
They were narrow, searching eyes set above a long nose and wide mouth, which curved at the ends in the hint of a smile. His face looked ageless and smooth—a carving of alabaster.
“Have you . . . come to kill me?” I asked in flawed Angrean. My voice quavered with my question.
To my surprise¸ he threw back his head and laughed. I jumped, horrified by the idea of Death finding the prospect of my demise amusing.
He collected himself and answered, “I see I can pass on the introductions.”
Somehow I found the strength to crawl away from him, backwards, until the thick trunk of the oak tree blocked my escape. Its roots glimmered with frost under my hands. “You are Death.”
He smiled. “Ofttimes those close to the brink can see me, or parts of me. But you, Smitha, you are special.”
I shivered uncontrollably, my teeth chattering. The snow started to thicken around my camp, the small flakes falling with a greater purpose. “Because I see all of you?” I whispered.
“Because I have not come to collect,” he replied, taking a seat beside the fire. The ruby amulet around his neck glinted orange. The light, at least, touched that much of him.
I stared wide-eyed. “Collect?”
“Not in the way you suppose,” he said coolly, tilting his head slightly to the right. The wide brim of his hat hid his eyes, but I knew he still watched me. I felt his gaze the way one feels the pelting of hail or the slip of a hammer. My chilled heart raced. Still a slow drum, but quicker than it had beaten in days.
“You will liv
e another day,” he said, more amused than anything else. “I can hardly kill someone who speaks my tongue so adequately.”
I swallowed but found no moisture in my mouth. “Then why can I see you? And how do you know my name?”
“I know the names of all who are born,” he said, leaning forward and revealing those penetrating eyes. “For all of them will eventually die. As for you . . . you’ve drawn my attention, Smitha. It is a deathly curse you carry, if you’ll excuse the joke.”
“I didn’t ask for it.”
He grinned. “Does any man or woman ask for a curse? But yours carries death with you. Is it any wonder that I would take an . . . interest?”
“No!” I shouted, my violet fingernails digging into the oak’s root. “I did not kill that boy. Mordan did. He did everything!”
Chilly tears brimmed in my eyes. I quickly blinked them away.
“I see how it is,” Death replied, rubbing his smooth chin.
I pushed a stray hair behind my ear. “Why are you here?”
“I told you,” he said, smile unfading. “You interest me. However you may see it, Smitha—however you wish to lay the blame—you and I are a lot alike. We are neither dead nor living—entities who exist between worlds. There are few of our kind, but we tend to make good company.”
I scoffed.
“And we’re both cold, in our own way,” he finished, those glowing eyes studying me from foot to forehead. “Your curse doesn’t bother me.”
He stood and walked toward me, his long legs carrying him faster than they should. I leapt to my feet, but before I could run, he appeared before me, leaning down, the brim of his hat almost touching the top of my head.
He took my wrist in his hand, a loose grip, and held it before my nose, his skin almost as pale as my own. He wore no gloves, not even a ring, but touching me directly did not so much as raise goose bumps on his skin, and surely the heat of the fire—heat I still could not feel—was not strong enough to banish the cold.
I realized I still trembled, even more so in his grip. He released me after a moment and stepped back. I craned my neck to see his shadowed face.
“No one will help you, Smitha,” he said, his voice deep and honey-like, quiet. The fire cracked behind him. “No one will take you in. But I will.”
The shock of his words ceased my trembling. “What?”
He smiled. “The realm beyond this one is grander than you could imagine.”
I shuddered, imagining my body still and unmoving, buried deep in the frozen tundra beneath my feet. I imagined a world of blackness and mourning, the cries of the dead forever echoing around me. And though I had often considered death a preferable fate to life with my curse, I was suddenly desperate to survive.
I hugged myself. “No. No!”
He closed the small space between us so quickly I did not see him move. He took my chin in his long fingers.
“Come now,” he said with a smirk. “Do you fear Death?”
And with no warning, he faded before my eyes just as he had in the Hutcheses’ home.
I half wondered if so many days in the unyielding cold had begun to warp my mind, for surely Death had not just stood before me, touched me, and offered to take me away to the unknown world beyond. Surely I had imagined all of it, for Death himself could not have taken an interest—an interest!—in me, whatever that entailed. Surely Death did not lust after women the way mortal men did. He had talked to me more like one talks to a pet than a person.
But glancing to my wrist, I could still feel the press of his fingers. An insignificant gesture, but no one had dared touch me since Mordan had laid this godforsaken curse upon my head. No one had touched me since my father had reached for my hand and drawn his back, burned.
I touched my cold wrist with cold fingers and knew that Death had come for me.
It was the first visit of many.
CHAPTER 5
I woke the next morning encased in snow. Without a roof over my head and a fire burning in the hearth, there was nothing to protect me from the elements of my own curse. A biting chill flowed through me, and I wished to fall asleep again, if only to escape it.
I dug my way out, only to be greeted by whipping winter winds. Everything around me shimmered white, and the oak’s great branches sagged under the weight of snow. The winds had scattered the wood of my fire for several paces, the flames long since extinguished.
I grabbed a handful of snow and ate it slowly as I walked. My father had once told me, if caught in a storm, not to eat straight snow for refreshment, for it would lower my body temperature and cause me to freeze. Now that I was already frozen, that wisdom no longer applied to me. The snow didn’t even melt on my tongue.
The winds slowed as I loped through the snow, and gradually the clouds rested from their mystical downpour. It seemed so strange to walk over green grass and past flowering trees when I felt so bitterly cold. As long as I kept walking, my storm could not build enough strength to harm any of it. As long as I kept walking.
My feet quickly remembered the previous day’s trek and began to ache before midmorning. Euwan was a small village, and I was not accustomed to walking very far for anything. The cold that encased my feet made every step that much more painful. There was no relief, for the skin never numbed. I cursed Mordan’s name for the thousandth time, but there was no one around to hear me.
But thoughts of Mordan reminded me of the last dinner I had shared with my family, the one Mordan had so selfishly intruded on. Father had spoken of wizards up north—something about throwing fire and a political war.
Save for early morning and dusk, my storm cloud hid the sun from me, but I was not so far from Euwan that I could not determine which way was north. I hoped, a spark amidst cinders, that perhaps the rumors were true, that other wizards had come as far south as Iyoden. A wizard had cursed me; perhaps a wizard could cure me as well.
Fear clawed at me as I began my slow slog north. My knees stiffened with it. If I could even find a wizard, who was to say he would not laugh at my plight, worsen it, or even kill me?
A new layer of gooseflesh ran up my back and down my arms, each bump burning with cold. What if Mordan had fled north, to his own kind? How much more pain would he rain down upon me should we reunite?
But Mordan had come to Euwan for a reason. I concluded he had run from the wizards the same way he had run from me, so onward I trekked.
Yet I had not forgotten the previous night’s visitor. Several times in my journey I glanced over my shoulder, searching for that tall, cloaked silhouette, but Death did not follow me. There was, in that, some sense of relief. The cold that afflicted me was unbearable, but I feared death, and determined then that, even alone, I would survive. I didn’t know how, but I would live.
I ate my breakfast as I climbed hill after wooded hill, careful to wrap the dried meat in my spare chemise before lifting it to my lips, trying to keep it as soft as possible. Somewhere in the shadow of the storm clouds that followed me, an owl hooted and took flight, the cold having awoken it from its slumber.
During a rest I pulled off my shoes with inflexible fingers to study my frozen feet. The skin over my heels had begun to crack. I wept as I traced my fingertips over the splits. I had no oils or salves to rub into the flesh. I had not thought to bring any. Again I recited the harsh words I had prepared for Mordan, and when that failed to offer me comfort, I scripted a speech for all those in Euwan who had abandoned me. Not even Ashlen had come to say good-bye.
The cracks in my feet marked only the beginning of my ailments. I learned quickly enough that, were I not careful, my own urine would freeze to me when I relieved myself. I could not bathe without the water—no matter how swift the river’s current—hardening around me. And, no matter where I fled, Death was never far behind.
He appeared on the opposite bank of the river two days after his last visit, strolling as casually as if he were within the walls of his own home. I did not notice him at first, but when I did, I
startled. Acting on instinct, I ran in the opposite direction, darting through forest and thicket. Thorns caught on the skirt of my dress and tore it, but I did not slow. The clouds above me shifted, always keeping me in their shadow, and a chilled wind pushed at my back.
I didn’t stop until I reached a small glade, a flock of blackbirds springing skyward at my arrival. As I leaned against a birch tree, gasping for air, the trunk quickly frosted beneath my touch.
Death appeared before me, smiling as though the chase had never happened. Then again, I doubted Death had chased me at all, only waited for me to stop.
“I assume that’s a yes,” he said, lifting the rim of his broad hat.
I held my stomach, sucking in gulps of air. “T-To what?” I couldn’t be sure if the stutter came from the constant chattering of my teeth or from the fear that roiled in my gut like bubbling iron.
He tilted his head. “That you are afraid of me.”
“Of course I am!” I shouted, turning back the way I had come. I moved as quickly as my sore feet could carry me, trying to keep the trees between us. “Everyone is afraid of death!”
He materialized before me again, effortless. I stopped so suddenly I fell backward, landing hard on my tailbone. I winced at the impact but picked myself up, gripping the strap of my schoolbag.
“Not everyone,” he said, for once appearing more thoughtful than amused. He studied me once more. “Sadriel.”
I backed away from him, my eyes wide.
He took a step forward, but only one, allowing me my space. “My name,” he clarified. “Sadriel.”
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