Rone’s happy expression changed to one of disbelief as their daughter came, born on the backs of a hundred creature fairies, Chriel in the lead. Elice was wrapped in white fur. Slate brown eyes were set in a round face with pink lips, soft brown hair, and creamy skin.
“This is your daughter,” Ilyenna said.
Rone simply stared. “She has your eyes and lips.”
“And your chin and cheeks.”
He cleared his throat and said thickly, “But how? The time couldn’t have come yet.”
Ilyenna cocked her head to the side. “Qari says we are never with child longer than a season.”
He shook his head. “Can I hold her?”
Ilyenna took her daughter in her arms. The fur blanket fell back, revealing soft, delicate skin. Ilyenna handed her over.
Rone held her carefully, as if afraid she might break. “Elice?”
The girl reached up and patted his face. He flinched in pain.
Ilyenna tisked and touched his cheek, instantly drawing away the cold of Elice’s touch. “We must teach her to keep her cold inside. Until then, you must be very careful.”
His eyes wide, Rone rubbed his cheek. “What did she do?”
Ilyenna grinned and took Elice from his arms. Bending down, she let her child’s chubby fingers skim the top of the nearby lake. Intricate, swirling patterns of ice fanned out. Quickly, Ilyenna withdrew Elice and wrapped her in the furs.
“Summer wouldn’t approve,” she said with a hint of pride.
Rone hesitated before tentatively taking Ilyenna’s hand. “You can’t stay here?”
She shook her head. “I am a queen. I live with my fairies.”
“Then I will go with you.”
Ilyenna watched Elice. “And what of your people?”
He looked sadly back at the clan house. “I never really came back to them.” He touched her face again. “You’re not the only one who has changed. I don’t belong here anymore. I belong with you.”
Ilyenna searched Rone’s gaze for signs of doubt. All she saw was relief, as if a great pain inside him had eased.
“The transformation will make you impervious to the cold, but you shall never again feel the warmth of the summer sun on your face. Never smell a freshly mowed field. Never taste the sweetness of a juneberry. And you will never see your family again.”
Rone didn’t hesitate. “Since you left, I have felt none of those things. I have been empty.”
“Chriel,” Ilyenna called. The fairy with rabbit fur wings moved to take Elice. “I have chosen Rone Argon as my consort. Make him a friend of winter.”
“Wonderful, my queen!” Chriel changed direction, fluttering forward and pressing her lips to Rone’s.
He stopped shivering as golden sun spilled over the valley. “I—I’m not cold anymore.”
Ilyenna smiled. For the first time since she’d been reborn as the winter queen, she felt whole.
Rone took her hand in his. He was smiling and splitting his gaze between Ilyenna and their daughter. “I love you,” he said.
In response, she called an aurora to dance before the stars. Spreading her great wings, she drew him to her and took to the skies.
The blistering wind blowing in from the desert was so hot even the flies had disappeared. The only creatures still visible were the fairies Nelay had followed to the dry riverbed—fairies she was careful to never look at directly.
Sheep bleated impatiently around her as she pushed her handmade wooden shovel into the damp silt and dragged it back. She dug deeper and deeper. The sheep sniffed at the ground and crowded her. Her family’s hobbled donkey even stepped on her foot. “Asat! Move!” She rammed him with her shoulder and shouted at the sheep. They scattered like oil in water, but it wasn’t long before they turned to slowly circle Nelay, a circle that tightened with every turn.
Eventually, the dampness turned into mud, which gave way to puddles, the edges of which began to connect ever so slowly. Using her shovel, Nelay tossed clods of mud at the sheep. “Bossy! Patches! Get back!”
She managed to keep the animals off long enough to strain and drink her fill and replenish four water skins—two each for herself and her older brother, Panar. These she looped around her scrawny neck.
The water fairies flitted at the edge of her peripheral vision, but Nelay was practiced at avoiding them and didn’t turn her head to watch.
Last, she unwound her headscarf and held it in the water, keeping it out of the mud as much as possible. When it was thoroughly soaked, she draped it back around her head and shoulders, her whole body relaxing in a silent sigh of relief.
As soon as she stood, the sheep charged the long fissure she’d created, nearly knocking her over as they sucked desperately at the water. She backed up, bumping and jostling against the two dozen sheep, the water skins banging against her ribs. Finally free of the animals, she flicked water off her fingers before hooking the shovel back on Asat’s packsaddle.
She counted the sheep to make sure they were all there, starting with her favorites. Blua wore the bell. She was obedient, always the first to come when Nelay called. Her characteristic bleat—the blua sound that had inspired her name—was the loudest as she jostled with the others for access to the water.
Mag had a few blotches of black on her face that reminded Nelay of a magpie. Day was always the first one up in the mornings, and her mangled ear made her easy to find. And Farter . . . Nelay grinned.
All the sheep were accounted for except the one her father, Denar, had gone in search of. About a league from the water hole, he had noticed one of the pregnant ewes, Snotty, had gone missing. He’d told Nelay and Panar to go on ahead while he searched for her. Nelay bit her lip and tried not to think of the hours that had passed since her father left that morning.
Finished with her counting, she took two steps before bothering to look up and nearly collided with a bush. But what drew her up short wasn’t the thorns—it was the fairy within the biting branches. Nelay stared at her wings, made of small leaves woven together with silk by spider mites. About the size of a small bird, the fairy was not beautiful as much as terrible. All the fairies were. For though they resembled mankind, with all the same features in the same places, their bodies were too thin, their faces too narrow. But even more than that was the bone-deep knowledge that Nelay was inferior.
For the fairies had magic.
Every night as long as Nelay could remember, her mother had whispered that Nelay must never acknowledge the fairies, with their beautiful wings and cruel faces. She must never let them realize she had the sight. Because if they knew, the priestesses of the Temple of Fire would come and take Nelay away.
And that was only if she survived the fairies’ attention, for they were tricksy and cruel.
Nelay realized she’d been staring and forced her eyes to slide past the fairy, forced herself to continue past the bush as though she didn’t feel shaken. She lifted one of the water skins to her mouth. The liquid tasted like dirt, the fine silt coating her tongue and sticking to her throat.
The banks of the dry riverbed were choked with dying brush. Watching for snakes, Nelay ignored another fairy as she climbed up the steep embankment. At the top, she had to grip her headscarf to keep the wind from snatching it off her head.
Her brother’s sharp gaze searched the barren landscape, wide valleys between table mountains, so named for their steep, cliff-like sides and flat tops. With black hair, dark eyes, and dusky skin, Panar looked like a taller, angrier version of Nelay.
“Do you see him?” Nelay asked loudly to be heard over the wind.
“If I had, I would have told you by now.” Panar said derisively. He was always mean when he was scared.
With only one sheep to slow her father down, Nelay had thought he would have caught up to them by now. “What are we going to do?”
Panar took his water skins from her and looped them over his neck and shoulder before taking a long drink. “Get down there and dig out that water ho
le again.”
Nelay looked back. The sheep had trampled it, turning it into a muddy mess, which made it impossible for them to drink. It would probably need clearing out three or four times before they moved on.
“Why don’t you dig it, and I’ll watch?” she asked.
Panar shoved her. She stumbled, her foot landing half on and half off the embankment. Windmilling her arms, she barely managed to catch a brittle branch. It cracked, partially breaking off in her hand, but it was enough to steady her.
Only three years older than her, he thought twelve made him a man, and therefore in charge. She planted both fists on her hips and shot him a glare. “Rotten, maggoty sheep guts!” She had been saving that insult for just such a moment as this.
Panar whipped out his sling and filled it with a rock. Nelay took off, slipping and sliding down the dirt embankment to land on her knees on the dry riverbed. A rock thudded into the dirt beside her. He had missed.
Darting for cover behind the same bush the fairy hid inside, Nelay suppressed a fierce grin of satisfaction. She was a better shot—always had been. It goaded Panar, so he practiced every day, for hours.
Yet she was still better. Nelay knew better than to rub it in, though. He was bigger than her, and stronger, and any snide remarks would cost her dearly.
Another rock thwacked into the bush—if the poor plant wasn’t already dead, Panar would probably kill it by day’s end.
Trying very hard to ignore the fairy that was close enough to touch, Nelay waited until she was sure Panar had given up before she shuffled back to the water hole, which was worse than just muddy, as sheep didn’t care much where they left their droppings. She sighed. That’s why she always filled her family’s water skins first.
Sheep weren’t very smart. Her mother always said it was because they used all their energy to grow pretty wool. Nelay’s mother always took the opportunity to remind her that just because she had enormous brown eyes, a beautiful dusky complexion, and hair that shone with a dark iridescence didn’t mean she should spend any energy thinking about it, or she’d wind up as stupid as the sheep.
At the thought of her mother, Nelay felt guilt well up inside her chest. Following the fairies to water was a dangerous thing to do. She was bound to attract their attention if she kept it up.
But two years after the famine began, all the creeks had dried up. If Nelay hadn’t used her sight, her family would have had to sell the sheep long ago.
At least the sheep weren’t as desperately thirsty this time, so they didn’t crowd her as much as she cleared out the mud. She backed up and let them have at it.
It wasn’t long before they started to bed down in the shade. After checking for snakes and scorpions in the protected spot beside the bush the spider-mite fairy had hid inside, Nelay unloaded the tent from Asat’s pack saddle. The ovat—ancient Idaran for the dying wind—was almost upon them, and the tent would provide protection from the intense heat.
She set up the tent same as she had a thousand times before. Nelay didn’t have any incense, but she reached into her pocket and rubbed her thumb along the small glass idol her father had bought her at the Arcina market last summer. Nelay’s mother had been angry when she’d seen the idol, an image of the Goddess of Fire, but she hadn’t taken it away.
Nelay’s thumb seemed to fit perfectly in the groove between the woman’s folded wings. “Let the fire burn within me,” Nelay muttered the invocation just as the low-level priestess had showed her.
Finished with the tent, Nelay settled on her sheepskin rug and dug in the pouch at her waist. On the walk here, she’d managed to find a few withered nuts and a couple of beetles, but it wasn’t more than a mouthful. She ate the beetles first so she wouldn’t be stuck with their aftertaste. She chewed the nuts slowly, making them last, but the meager amount only made her feel hungrier.
There had been a time when her family had had food. Not a lot of it, but enough. Such decadence seemed a lifetime ago.
Nelay remembered the last time it rained—a stingy sprinkle that had left concave indentations in the dirt. The world had smelled wonderful, of starving soil rejoicing in its first taste of water in months. But that had been all it was. A taste. Just enough to wet the soil’s mouth and no more.
Panar slid down the embankment, sweat staining his robe, and his face flushed with heat even he couldn’t endure for long. He started poking around at the base of the brush, no doubt trying to scare up a scorpion or, better yet, a lizard.
When he came up with nothing, he soaked his headscarf in the water, ate a handful of nuts, and lay down as far away from Nelay as he could get and still be in the tent. Within minutes, he was snoring.
A sudden burn of anger started in her chest. How could he sleep without hearing the scrape of Father’s carving knife bringing dead wood to life? Without the smell of resin? Didn’t Panar know that their father should have returned long ago—that something must be wrong?
Nelay rolled over, curling around her hollow stomach. She was hungry. She was always hungry. They all were. As the hours passed and still Father hadn’t come, she grew more and more certain they couldn’t go on like this—weaker and hungrier by the day.
If she could use her sight to track fairies and find water, surely she could use it to find something to eat. She could save them.
When the worst of the ovat had passed, Nelay slipped from the tent. Panar could watch the sheep. He could dig out the hole.
She moved quietly to their donkey, Asat, and pulled her spear out of the packsaddle. Nelay made sure her brother was still sleeping, then tied her headscarf over her face to protect it from the wind and started out.
Even at the base of the riverbed, the hardiest of plants were brittle with death. Every day, Nelay and her father and brother had to range farther and farther to find anything for the sheep to forage. As she moved away from the water, the plant fairies grew scarce. It wasn’t like each bush had its own fairy. More like one fairy oversaw each species of plant within its territory.
A person without the sight would see only an insect, a mouse, a bird, or sometimes nothing at all. But Nelay saw a mouse fairy, with whiskers and twitchy ears, hovering over a warren. She could only guess at the creature’s purpose. At any rate, a mouse would only be a mouthful, so she moved on.
There were lots of spider fairies, with eight creepy eyes stacked on top of each other, a furry dress, and spider silk wings. But Nelay was sick of eating bugs. She wanted meat.
As the wind slacked off, a nervous flutter started in her belly. If her brother hadn’t awakened already, he would soon. They were never supposed to leave the sheep—or each other. She and Panar were supposed to protect the sheep from lions and jackals, but the last time Nelay had seen a predator more dangerous than a lone leopard was when a pride had attacked the flock over a year ago and killed all their sheep dogs.
Since then, even the jackals had abandoned this place. There was nothing worth staying for.
Nelay caught sight of a few more plant fairies out of the corner of her eye. She was careful never to lock gazes with them, for then they would know she could see them.
She paused when she spotted a fairy darting back and forth above a large, bleached branch, her wings shining with scales. Nelay stepped closer and saw the subtle pattern in the fairy’s wings—the same pattern as a spitting cobra.
A swift spike of fear burned through her veins. All her life, she’d avoided snakes, for every single one was poisonous. Some just killed faster than others. The big cobras could spit more than twice as far as Nelay was tall. But she doubted she’d find anything else. And if she came back empty-handed, Panar would make sure he didn’t miss with his stones.
Hooking her spear on her belt, Nelay reached into her second pouch, feeling the smooth stones she was always on the lookout for. She chose one without actually glancing at it—she could tell by the feel that it was perfect.
She pulled her sling from her belt and settled the stone in the cup. The fairy h
ad stopped her frantic flying and was hovering, watching. But Nelay couldn’t think of the fairy, or the fact that she’d attracted her attention. Not taking her eyes from the branch, Nelay bent down and grabbed a large stick, worn smooth by the dead river and made brittle by the heat. She tossed it at the large branch and heard a hiss in response.
Keeping her eyelids slitted just in case, she threw another. Another hiss and then a long snake the size of her arm rose up, its hood flared at the sides of its delicate head. It was black, except for the nearly translucent skin below the hood, which was covered in a greasy-looking substance the color of rotted sheep’s milk. The snake was shedding its skin.
Without hesitation Nelay wound up once and let the rock fly. And missed.
The cobra reared back and spit, its poison striking her legs. With a backward stumble, she swallowed her yelp. The snake slithered over the rock in a blur of sinuous movement, coming at her.
Nelay didn’t have time to think. She ran. Being hungry was better than dying from snake venom. When she dared look back, the snake still chased her but was far enough back to be out of spitting range. Gulping a deep breath, she filled her sling, spun around, and let it fly.
When the snake jerked, Nelay knew she’d hit it. It spit at her, but this time the poison landed in the dirt before her. She wound up and released another rock. The creature flopped down and went still.
She gaped in disbelief. She’d killed it. Something so scary and deadly, and she, a nine-year-old girl, had killed it. A grin spread across Nelay’s face, but slid off when she felt the snake fairy’s watchful gaze.
Taking her spear from her belt, Nelay approached the snake cautiously. Its head was smashed and oozing blood. Panar said they could still bite even after they were dead. She didn’t know if that was true or not, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She dropped a huge rock on the creature’s head and sawed it off with her spear, leaving the head under the rock.
Every instinct in her screamed against reaching out and grabbing its tail, but there was no other way to bring the meat home. As soon as she touched it, the body writhed and the stump struck her arm. With a scream, Nelay dropped it and stumbled back, her heart leaping in her chest.