Snowstorm King

by H L Macfarlane

  “Elina, are you okay?” Daven asked, abruptly bringing her back into the present.

  She laughed softly. “I’m fine. More than fine, really. I’m glad to have a half-day. I can help my mother out for a while.”

  “Ah, might I be able to interest you in coming for a drink in Gill’s tavern? I don’t want to push you, just…you said you didn’t have much time because of working at the castle, so…”

  Maybe it was because of the alcohol still in her system, or Elina’s desire to show off to the people of Alder that she’d managed to do exactly what they thought she couldn’t, but she nodded her head. “I’d be happy to, Daven.”

  It rather seemed that Daven himself was the happy one upon hearing her response. He walked her straight to the front door of her mother’s tailor shop and even then seemed reluctant to part. But eventually he did, with promises to see her in the tavern after dinner, and Elina entered the shop much to Lily’s surprise.

  “Elina!” she cried out. “I was not expecting you back so soon. Are you – have you been drinking? What happened to you?”

  Elina could only laugh. Or course her mother could tell that she was drunk. “It’s a…story for another time,” she said, “when I know a little more about it myself. I’m going to change and fix my hair then I’ll come back and help you out.”

  Her mother tsked. “You absolutely will not. Go to sleep and sober up. Heaven knows you could do with the sleep, anyway.”

  “Dutifully noted. And…” Elina glanced at the front door. “I may be going to the tavern tonight for a drink, if that’s okay.”

  “Are you meeting Daven?”

  Elina blushed. “How did you know?”

  “Oh come now,” her mother laughed. “I’ve always known the boy had his eye on you. Nice to see he finally plucked up the courage to talk to you.”

  “I – how did you know that? I never saw him looking at me!”

  The look on Lily’s face was entirely sympathetic as she surveyed her daughter. “Of course you didn’t. He only looked when you couldn’t see. I saw, though.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Would it have changed your circumstances in Alder if you knew? We both know it wouldn’t. I didn’t want to hurt you more than I already have by telling you about people who wanted to get to know you but couldn’t.”

  “I…” Elina reached her mother’s side and held her hand. “You have never hurt me, mama.”

  “I have; you’ve merely lived with it every day of your life so you cannot see it. Things would be different for you if you were –”

  “Don’t you dare say ‘if I was like everyone else’. I don’t need that, mama. I like who I am, and if the rest of the town are only acknowledging me now that I’ve helped them when nobody else could then that’s on them, not you or me.”

  It was only in saying it that Elina realised it was true. She’d always wanted to be part of the town before – to look like them and laugh with them. But now she knew better. There was a world outside of Alder, even if she’d never seen it, and the opinions of one town meant little and less in the grand scheme of things.

  Especially when the ‘grand scheme of things’ involves curses and weather magic and trapping a king in a castle.

  Because that was the truth of it; Elina’s problems were tiny compared to Kilian’s. They didn’t even matter. No wonder he’d been so disinterested in her ‘sob story’, as he’d put it, when they’d first met. Because Elina could leave at any point, really; it was fear holding her back.

  Kilian couldn’t so much as step a foot outside of his castle.

  “Elina? Do you feel ill? Did you drink too much?”

  She blinked, then shook her head as she smiled. “No, mama. I just have…a lot to think about. I’ll go and sleep.”

  “I am so proud of you. Keep working hard and then, when winter is over, let’s leave Alder for good.”

  Elina had never given her mother a proper answer when she’d talked about leaving before. This time, she did.

  “Absolutely. Spring can’t come quickly enough.”

  *

  When Elina arrived in Gill’s tavern she was decidedly sober and full of nerves. She’d considered letting her hair hang loose but, as expected, she was too much of a coward to do it, even though she had decided hours before that she didn’t care about fitting into Alder anymore. So her hair remained braided around her head, and she wore an inoffensive, dove-grey dress that nevertheless stood out for how finely made it was. Elina had made it herself, in truth, though the town did not know how talented she was. They only bought products her mother made, after all.

  “Elina, over here!” Daven called out when he spied her. Nervously she made her way through the throng of thirsty tavern-goers, painfully aware of everyone’s eyes on her. When she sat down Daven immediately handed her a tankard of ale, though she’d never drank the stuff before.

  “A toast to Prince Kilian for providing us with the alcohol we’re drinking, and to Miss Brodeur for wrangling it out of him!” he announced. To Elina’s surprise people actually cheered for this, even though it meant cheering for her.

  And then she was bombarded by conversation after conversation – answering more questions and speaking to more people than she ever had in her life. To her right Daven sat proudly, which didn’t seem to be disingenuous at all. He was proud of her.

  She wondered how proud of her he’d be if he knew what she’d been up to that morning.

  Don’t think about Kilian, Elina thought. Now was not the time. When she was back in her bed, alone, she could think about him. But even that caused her to blush. He was the one who told me to think about him in bed, though he definitely didn’t mean for me to mull over his problems.

  But how could she not? Now that Elina’s own, highly insignificant, problem seemed to have been solved, she wanted to help him. She wanted to free Kilian from his prison.

  A lustrous wave of dark hair by the stairs alerted Elina to the fact that Scarlett had come down to the tavern floor. Adrian wasn’t with her. When Elina caught her eye the woman smiled, but shook her head as an indication for Elina not to join her. It sent a shiver up Elina’s spine; what was going on?

  Should I tell Scarlett and Adrian about Kilian’s curse?

  Of course Elina wanted to – how else could she help him, after all? But it wasn’t her secret to share. She didn’t have the right to talk to other people about it. And yet even so…

  “Elina, did your mother make your dress?” a young woman around Elina’s age asked, bringing her back out of her head. “It’s gorgeous!”

  “It’s soft as sin, too,” Daven added on, stroking a finger up the sleeve as if touching Elina was the most natural thing in the world. Again, she thought of Kilian, and how it felt like electricity was running through her whenever he touched her. She had wanted to run away from getting shocked just as badly as she yearned for the feeling. Daven’s touch wasn’t like that. It felt familiar and safe, though in truth they’d only been speaking to each other for two days.

  “I made it, actually,” Elina said bashfully, to the sound of a dozen envious cries.

  “You must make me one in blue!”

  “I want one with flowers embroidered in the bodice for spring!”

  “Can you make an overcoat this soft?”

  The comment gave Elina an unexpected flash of inspiration. Though she couldn’t hope to help Kilian with breaking his curse on her own, she could do something about him always being cold.

  And she could start with the ragged, threadbare excuse for an overcoat he practically lived in.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kilian

  Kilian had never been so cold. Which was saying something, because he was almost always cold. But without alcohol in his system to fool his brain into thinking he was warm he couldn’t stop shaking. His body was wracked with painful jerks and shivers that set his teeth on edge.

  His head was killing him, too; he’d never had so p
ainful and so constant a migraine before. He had no appetite and, when he did eat, it wasn’t long before he simply threw the food back up. A fever had broken across his brow which, even when setting him on fire, altogether felt like he’d been plunged into a biting lake of ice water.

  But Kilian was no idiot. He knew he deserved each and every inch of pain his body was currently experiencing. It was a just punishment for keeping himself inebriated for the past nine of his twenty-five pitiful years. His system literally did not know how to cope without any alcohol. Dully he thought about calling the doctor in to help him only to remember that he’d fired the man for so unfairly allowing his father to die.

  I am a horrible person, he thought, brain rattling in his skull as he shivered beneath several blankets on his bed. It’s no wonder nothing’s happened with Elina since she got drunk with me.

  This wasn’t strictly the reason, of course. For the past few days Kilian had been so ill and barely-conscious that he’d pushed Elina to help the other servants in the castle instead of looking after him. But still. He’d hoped she’d insist on waiting on him every moment of every day anyway, rather than take him up on his offer to leave him alone.

  For Kilian was miserable alone. And he’d always been alone, so he was always miserable. It was only in meeting Elina that he could even acknowledge this, however, since to admit to being lonely was pitiable.

  Yet despite calling me pathetic Elina is still here.

  Kilian was ashamed by his drunken admission of loneliness to her, especially since she’d had no trouble expressing the same feelings to him from the very beginning with regards to the people of Alder. He’d never felt so dishonest.

  “Shut up, brain…” he mumbled, groaning as he twisted in bed. It didn’t do well to think about the person he’d become after all these years. And it wasn’t as if Kilian had drastically changed in personality when he’d started drinking; he had always been an unpleasant person. Elina’s mother, Lily, would be able to attest to that, from when she watched in horror as three-year-old Kilian burned the clothes she’d so carefully made for him.

  He was a snob. He was bad-tempered. He had a superiority complex a mile high. He was impulsive and cowardly and cruel-tongued and –

  “I want Elina.”

  The words were barely a puff of breath upon the air in his room. Though the fire was burning brightly, Kilian’s chambers felt like ice. Or, rather, Kilian himself felt like he was made of ice, in a furnace that could never melt him.

  He was so cold.

  Kilian could only really tell what time of day it was by when he spied Elina arriving at the castle in the morning, since when he wasn’t lying in bed he was collapsed by his window, watching the wind relieve the forest of snow only for more to replace it.

  She was almost always accompanied by the woodcutter, Daven, though occasionally another person or two decided to join their morning walk even though the weather was horrific and the hour ungodly. The fact that it was always men talking to Elina only served to make Kilian’s mood worse – was she so oblivious as to not understand what they were interested in? It was clear as day from where Kilian sat, watching, even through the snow.

  But Elina seemed to be enjoying the company. He couldn’t help but wonder if, now she had been accepted by her town, she was no longer interested in Kilian, no matter how reluctant that interest had been in the first place. He had to remind himself that he’d forced Elina to get drunk the day she kissed him and they ended up in the bath together. Even Kilian could see how her actions could be explained as being the result of coercion rather than being voluntary.

  It only made him feel worse.

  Even though it was definitely colder outside than in his room he longed to be down there, amongst the swirling snow. He’d always hated the castle grounds before – for no reason whatsoever other than Kilian hated everything – but now they were tantalising. He couldn’t set foot in the gardens, or the courtyard, or the forest. He couldn’t use the hot springs, the only part of the castle and its grounds he would ever profess to enjoying.

  He couldn’t show Elina around all the places he used to hide from his parents and brother, or the spot in the forest where he’d disappear to with a stolen bottle of wine even as young as thirteen. Kilian had never wanted to tell anyone about his childhood before. And, now that he did, Elina didn’t seem to be interested enough to listen to him talk about it. Kilian didn’t like how that made him feel at all.

  Rolling around in bed to try and untangle himself from a blanket currently wound around his leg, Kilian yelped in surprise when he accidentally overshot the movement and ended up on the floor. When he bashed his head upon the wooden floorboards his vision went white, then black.

  *

  When he came to, Kilian was still lying on the floor exactly where he’d fallen, feeling even worse than he had felt before. His head felt like it was going to split open, but when he retched nothing came out. There was nothing left for him to throw up.

  The room was almost dark; the fire had burned low and the sun – wherever it had been behind the clouds – had clearly long since set.

  I can’t believe I knocked myself out for hours by falling out of bed, Kilian thought, laughing bitterly. But the only audible sound that left his mouth was a garbled cry; fumbling in the darkness he reached for a metal pitcher of water that sat on a table by his bedside. When he poured the stinging, freezing liquid down his throat more of it escaped his mouth than was swallowed, leaving trails of ice water running down his neck.

  He wished the water were vodka. Or wine. Or ale, which he hated. He couldn’t stand the pain of merely existing anymore. And so Kilian staggered to his feet, clutching his well-worn overcoat around himself as he tried desperately to find any kind of alcohol whatsoever in his room. When no bottles became immediately apparent, he began pushing chairs over and knocking down tables, smashing ornaments and vases to the floor in his quest to find something that would numb his existence.

  There was nothing.

  All he had to do was call for a servant and Kilian would be handed over anything he so desired. But if he did that then he knew he’d truly failed, and he’d never be able to stop drinking until his sorry excuse for a life was well and truly spent.

  Kilian sagged against the window. For there was his answer – he couldn’t drink, even if he found some irresistible volume of alcohol hidden away in a corner of his room that he was yet to upturn. He had to endure the unendurable until he was no longer in pain.

  “How long will that be?” Kilian sighed, voice weak and insubstantial as he shivered violently. He didn’t even have the capacity to shout for a servant, much less Elina, and he was the one who’d told them all to leave him alone. Kilian’s solitude was his own damn fault, and he knew it.

  In a moment of madness he undid the latch on his window, hauling open the man-sized panes of glass until he could stand on the window ledge and feel the full force of the wind buffet his entire body. It should have been strong enough to drag Kilian off the ledge and down, down, down to his death.

  But he could not leave the castle, so the wind did nothing to him.

  He was ashamed when tears began to well up in his eyes. Kilian wasn’t even sure he wanted to die. He was certainly too much of a coward to run a blade through his heart or slit his throat or swallow poison or even let himself freeze to death. But falling through the window into a storm of his own making…

  There was something poetic and circular about it, like it was the way Kilian was supposed to die. Except that he couldn’t. Maybe that was why he liked it; it was something he could never have.

  “Oh my god – Kilian!”

  Elina slammed into his back and wrapped her arms around his waist, dragging him away from the window ledge as far as she could. Kilian didn’t even resist.

  “What were you – why were you doing that?” she asked, voice hysterical as she continued to cling to him. Elina was warm and Kilian freezing; he relished the embrace.


  “I wasn’t doing anything,” he said weakly, which was technically the truth.

  “Don’t lie to me! You think I can’t work out what you were –”

  “I can’t leave the castle, Elina. If I was going to kill myself it wouldn’t be by jumping out of the window.”

  “That…that sounds like you tried, to see if it was possible.”

  Kilian didn’t respond, confirming Elina’s suspicions. He didn’t want to turn around and face her when he still had tears in his eyes. But he was shivering so badly, and he hardly felt able to support his own weight.

  “Kilian, why did you – why would you tell me to work with the other servants when you’re like this?” Elina asked quietly. With utmost care she took a step backwards and, when Kilian followed, another, and another, until they reached his bed. Then she let go of him, shaking out and rearranging the pile of blankets upon it before gently pushing Kilian on top of them.

  “Get in there. Now. I’m going to get the fire going again and bring you food, and you’re going to eat it.” In the darkness she couldn’t see his tears or, if she could, Elina didn’t acknowledge them.

  He stared at her, helpless. “I can’t keep anything down. I can’t feel anything except the cold, even in my stomach. It hurts, Elina.”

  Her expression crumpled. “Then why would you tell me not to look after you? I could have helped you!”

  “I…” Kilian looked away. “I wanted you to insist on looking after me yourself. I wanted it to be your choice.”

  “Are you an idiot?!” she yelled, stepping forward as if to slap him but tripping on a box Kilian had thrown to the floor instead. She cursed aloud. “What did you do to your room? Why are you like this? Why are you –”

  “I don’t know what to do with myself. I want to die.”