There was only enough time for him to seal the letter with wax before one of the village boys burst into the cabin.
“It’s here,” he said breathlessly. “We saw it through the schoolhouse windows—down by the stream.”
North and I stood at the same moment, but his arm lashed out, stalling me.
“Stay here!” he said. I took a step forward, but he would have none of it.
“Right here!” he said. “For once in your life, do as I say!”
The cabin door slammed shut behind him, but it didn’t stay that way for long. The last time North had gone off like this, he had come back with burns from a dragon. I wasn’t going to be left behind, not again.
The afternoon air cut through my thin dress as I ran, following North down the long hill. And when he and his cloaks finally got so far ahead that they were out of sight, I followed the trail his boot prints had left behind.
At the first sign of the specter the children had been drawn inside, and the bell inside the school’s small tower was still ringing. I was sure I heard someone call my name, once, maybe even twice, but I kept running. My hair flew around my face as I made a sharp turn straight into the forest.
The sound of the bell died slowly, just as I lost the trail of North’s boot prints in a clearing. I glanced around. He must have twisted—it was the only explanation. That, or he had climbed up into the trees.
I moved to the other edge of the clearing. Nothing. Not even a rabbit or bird.
There was, however, the strangest sensation at my feet. Even through the leather of my boots, I could feel the brush of cool silk against my skin. The mist from the mountains had rolled down into the forest, hovering around my ankles in a pool of white.
Yet when I moved, so did the mist. It swirled without the aid of wind, gathering into large pockets between the trees. A breeze lifted the hem of my dress and sent my hair flying.
I took a step back. My skin felt ready to crawl off my bones.
The hand that latched on to my bare arm felt frozen to the touch, and that alone was enough to make me scream.
“Miss Mirabil!” Lady Aphra said in a rush of breath. Her face had lost all its robust color. “Do you not understand the concept of danger? Or is there so much dust and dirt crammed up in your ears that you can’t listen to the warnings people have given you?”
“Did you see?” I gasped. “Did you see it?”
“I saw nothing but a foolish girl, running out into the woods to get herself killed!”
The old woman’s fingernails dug into my skin like claws and didn’t release me until we were halfway up the hill to her cottage. When I did look back, I saw nothing to be frightened of except the suddenly empty air.
I was tempted to escape the confines of Aphra’s cabin more than once, and the desire grew with each passing hour—each minute—North was gone. I forced myself to stay inside, alternating between weaving North’s cloak and playing with those few potion ingredients I had left. My mind was too restless to settle.
After a few hours, Lady Aphra shut the door quietly behind her and set a small basket beside me on the floor. I looked, surprised to find it full of more plants than I could identify.
“They go to waste in my garden,” she explained, her voice low and rough. “I don’t have the patience for such things. I suspect you’ll need them more than I will.”
“Thank you,” I said. It wasn’t an apology for the way she had scolded me earlier, but it was likely the closest thing I would receive. I poured the pain elixir I had just finished into an empty jar.
Lady Aphra walked over to the small window. Her eyes were cast out over the valley below, but I knew exactly what they were searching for.
“He’ll take care of it,” I said, trying to sound confident.
“I’m sure. I am getting a little concerned, however,” she said. She wiped her hands on her apron. “He’d better be back before dark.”
“Are the children still inside?” I asked.
“We’ve kept them in the schoolhouse all day, but they won’t stand for it much longer,” she said.
“I’m sure—” I began, but her body tightened like a spring, and she shot toward the door.
I jumped to my feet and followed her outside. I hoped that with the day’s work done, North would be open to the idea of traveling that night.
But when North came into sight, it was clear we would not be traveling.
“What happened?” Lady Aphra demanded.
Supported on either side by a villager, North was barely able to keep his own head up. Several of his cloaks had nasty gashes or were missing pieces entirely. His dark pants and shirt were spotted with dirt and blood. He had a shallow cut on his face, and his dark eyes were closed.
“North…” At my touch, he blinked.
“Hullo, Syd,” he mumbled as the men lifted him up the steps of the cabin and onto the nearest pile of bedding. His breathing was low and hard—I couldn’t understand what he was trying to say.
Seeing the grimace of pain on his face, I lifted the jar of pain elixir to his mouth and helped him to drink it.
“If you have something for sleep, you’d better give him that, too,” Aphra said in a low voice. I retrieved another jar from my bag, and North drank its contents just as obediently. I lowered his head back onto the bedding.
Lady Aphra rose and signaled for the other men to follow her outside.
“What happened?” I whispered. “Are you all right?”
“He got away…,” North breathed, succumbing to the sleeping draft. “He…”
I leaned back, finally releasing the anxiety and fear I had been holding inside of me all day.
“It’s all right,” I said, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. I began unlacing one of his boots. “We’ll get him. We won’t let him stop us.”
Beneath the leather were the shreds of a sock, a sock that may or may not have been red at one point in its miserable life but was now a faint pink. A sock that was gaping open at the heel and sliding down North’s ankle, completely stretched out.
“I guess I’ll have to forget about the cloak for a while,” I said, covering my mouth and nose with my free hand. “Socks it is.” In his sleep, North seemed to snort in approval. I peeled the sock away, holding it in front of me like a rotten piece of fruit. I held my breath while I used my free hand to open the window and drop the sock outside.
The other boot was laced tighter than the first, and I had a terrible time picking apart the knot with my stubby fingernails. As a weaver, I prided myself on being able to untangle the worst of knots, but this one was almost impossible. North didn’t help me much, either; he kept shifting away from my hands. I held him firmly in place, giving him a look that I wished he had been awake to see. I was practically screaming in frustration when the worn string finally gave. I ripped the boot off his foot none too gently. Another worn-out sock came with it, leaving a large, reeking, perfectly black foot in my lap.
I’m not sure how long I knelt there. My first ridiculous thought was that the foot was just black with soot and grime, but not even the water from the room’s small basin could wash the color away. The entire foot was solid black, right up to the ankle. North was practically kicking me with it now. Somehow, even in his sleep, he knew that I had unwittingly unwrapped one of his secrets. And he was powerless to stop it.
I lifted his other foot, noticing for the first time the edge of black on the two smallest toes. I pulled away his thick gloves and threw them across the room. The little finger on his left hand was black, and the next two were tinged a marble gray. His right hand was still—mercifully—his own, with spots of mud and dirt beneath his nails.
I brought his hands to my forehead and released the breath I had been holding in a low sob.
“So now you see what’s been before you this entire time.”
Lady Aphra came to kneel beside me, setting down a bowl of clean water. She took one of North’s limp hands in her own, her thumb running ove
r his exposed skin.
“No wonder he never took those stupid boots off,” I choked out, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. “What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s a curse,” she said. “I don’t quite understand it myself, but I do know that the man I see now bears very little resemblance to the boy I knew.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“After his father died and his mother sent him to be trained by Pascal, he was sullen, as any boy ought to be after losing someone,” Aphra said. “But after a year with Pascal, he was happy, clever, a smart aleck, and a complete monster when he wanted to be. Then the curse struck him, and he’s never been the same. His old smile and humor come in flashes, but the pain he feels and his anger toward the curse steal them away more and more as the years go by. This war has put him in an even worse place than before.”
“Is there a cure?” I asked. “Some way to ease his pain at least?”
Aphra placed North’s hand in my own. “No, Miss Mirabil, there is no cure. Wayland has spent his life looking, as his father and his grandfather did. Pascal refused to take on more apprentices in order to search for a way to help him, but there was nothing to be found.”
“And so, what? He’ll suffer from it his entire life? He’ll drink his pain away, or rely on sleeping drafts?”
Lady Aphra shook her head. “He’ll die long before then.”
I gripped North’s hand. “You’re—You can’t be serious.”
“His father died at the age of thirty-five, while serving as the Sorcerer Imperial,” Aphra said. “Pascal still hasn’t recovered from the loss of him, and the thought of losing Wayland the same way has left us all helpless.”
I looked down at North’s face, still young and handsome in sleep, free of any sign of discomfort. He looked like a different person to me, and the thought alone was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Lady Aphra stood, her knees cracking from the effort. She smoothed the hair back from my face.
“The curse only affects the sons in the family line, probably with the intent of ending the family line entirely,” she said. “But you’ll need to get the full story from him.”
“Is there really nothing I can do for him?” I asked. “Nothing?”
Aphra turned in the doorway. “Love him,” she said. “For someone who has grown up hating himself and fearing that there’s nothing for him in this world but pain, there is no greater gift. Do you understand?”
I nodded, but I didn’t say another word. Not while I tucked the blanket up around his chin, not while I brushed his hair from his face, not while I relit the fire. Lady Aphra’s words echoed in my mind, but I forced them out and focused on nothing but the way the shadows played across North’s face.
I had half of North’s story now, but I knew the other half of it wouldn’t come as easily. The secret of his pain ran deeper than I could have imagined. Who was Wayland North, I thought, and how many layers would I be forced to peel away before I actually found him?
I was fairly ravenous by the time one of the older girls brought in dinner. It was only sandwiches and milk, but I was so hungry I practically inhaled the contents of the plate. When I finished my own, I drank North’s milk as well, surprised to find it still so cool after being next to the fire.
I thought about mending the threadbare fabric of his cloaks, but the events of the day had relit my desire to complete the single one, still unfinished on the loom. North deserved so much better than his ugly, battered cloaks—I wanted something to show the story of his life as I had seen it, without the gaping holes and tears that constantly ate away at him.
As I wove near the fire, its flickering light cast moving shadows over my loom. My eyes drifted over to North, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest. It was useless—I couldn’t focus on the strands of blue that I was binding together; and I could hardly pay attention to each drop of rain I was forming around the shape of the dragon. When I looked at my hands again, the blue yarn seemed to glow in my hands.
I dropped the yarn and pushed myself away from it. The entire cloak seemed to blur in my eyes, a mass of color and light.
Falling to my knees again, I took up the spool of red thread and began blending it haphazardly with the blue. As the fire of the dragon came to life, so did the fire in the hearth. It crackled and hissed, billowing out for a moment. In his sleep, North began to mumble.
The thread fell from my lifeless fingers. I breathed in the cool air of the cabin, but the heat inside me was too much; there was little I could do but crawl toward the bedding, trembling and crying as I wrapped myself in its heavy layers.
It was only a short while before I woke again, my mind hazy with sleep and something else. The room was darker than before; the fire had died down to mere touches of warmth and light. My hands and feet felt stiff and cold. I brought my knees up to my chest and tried to rub some feeling back into my limbs.
Cold, I thought. Cold, cold, cold.
I woke several more times after that—or maybe I wasn’t even awake, I couldn’t be sure. The world around me felt like a feverish dream. Everything was slow and so, so painful. I sat up and dragged my bedding loudly across the wooden floor until it was directly in front of the fire. I picked up a log from the small pile, but it fell through my hands and thudded loudly against the floor. There was no feeling in my fingers, my palms, my arms. I braced my side against the wall and slid down, forcing my knees to stop straining and aching.
The rest was a blur of sound and agony. I must have pushed the log into the fireplace and sparked something, because the next time I woke, it was to Lady Aphra frantically calling my name and pulling me out of the fire I had started.
“Sydelle!” She was shouting. “Sydelle, wake up!”
I tried to open my eyes, to let her know how badly I hurt all over, but all I could mumble was “terrible, terrible cold” because it was all I could feel and think. Hundreds, thousands, millions of needles pricked my skin, and I let out a cry of anguish. Worse than breaking my arm, worse than falling onto fire-hot rocks. Worse than anything I had ever felt.
“Wayland!” she yelled. “Wake up!”
North’s face hovered above me, but there were black blotches floating in my vision. It wasn’t until he took my face between his hands that my sight momentarily cleared. Eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, gloves. Gloves. He had put his gloves back on.
“Syd,” he said. His voice sounded much closer, and I was beginning to feel his hand rubbing hard circles on my chest, over my heart. My eyes closed, too heavy to keep open.
“What did she have?” North demanded. “What did she eat? Drink?”
“It was just milk and a sandwich,” Lady Aphra said. “The healer is coming; it’s taking her a while to get up the hill with the storm.”
“She doesn’t have time to wait,” North said sharply. “Go get me some of the thyme and heartroot from your garden. Get my bag and find me a bloody bowl, please!”
“The snow—” Lady Aphra began. Yes, the snow, the snow. My mind clung to the word deliriously, even as my entire chest constricted with immeasurable pain, and I cried. The snow…
Something hit the ground beside my face. I felt it shake the floor, but the voice that accompanied it was much harder to distinguish.
“Pale…pulled her out…hands…”
A pair of strong arms pulled me up from the floor, though my limbs were dead weight. I was a lump of skin and bones, lifeless, freezing. Something warm wrapped around me, something red that I could sense beneath my closed eyelids.
I felt North before I heard him. That same tingling warmth that I associated with him seeped under my skin, even if just for a moment. My back was pressed against his chest, and his tall frame completely enveloped me. I felt his heart racing.
“N…Nor…,” I cried. “Please help me, please, it hurts, it hurts. I can’t breathe. Please…”
“You’re going to be all right,” he said fiercely. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”
There was pounding and screaming all around me. For one horrifying moment, I thought that the shrieking was coming from me, but my throat and voice were frozen. I couldn’t breathe—I couldn’t breathe.
“Shut…door…here!”
“Storm…help…”
“Get over here!” North barked. His face turned next to my ear, and I could feel his hand rubbing my chest for a brief moment. “Just breathe, Syd. I’m here. I know it hurts, but you have to breathe, you stubborn girl….”
I was gasping, willing my hands to lift from my lap to pry off the imaginary fingers that had encircled my throat. Everything was lethargic and cold and dark except for North’s glove and its hard, uneven circles. That glove and the slowing beat of my heart.
“Mix the heartroot in now; just squeeze out two drops or it’ll kill her—can you possibly go any faster? Give me the bowl; just let me do it—here, now put it over the fire—have you never made a kulde antidote before?”
“Wayland! Don’t…”
“…the storm…get more…”
“The girl…”
“…Sydelle…look…she’s not…”
“Be quiet, both of you!” North thundered, and the room was silent once again. North’s body was shaking erratically, and he was breathing against my ear, breathing hard as if for both of us. He grasped my jaw gently and forced it open. Something hard was pressed against my lips.
“You have to drink this. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “Please drink it, please.”
The warm liquid went down my throat, even as I coughed and sputtered against it. Disgusting. It tasted of death and dirt.
North held me the entire time, forcing me to drink all of the bowl’s contents. Every single burning, foul drop.
I felt…
I felt nothing. And then everything.
This time I knew I was the one screaming. Beneath my skin, everything burst back to life with a roaring blaze that consumed me, pushing its way through my veins and forcing out the tolerable numbness behind my eyes. My head was thundering in pain.