Snow Like Ashes (3 page)
My brow creases. “You’re far from helpless, Mather.”
His half smile returns and he shrugs. “At the very least, this lapis lazuli was a connection to Winter. And having it helped me feel stronger, I guess.”
I bite my lip, not missing how he brushed past what I said.
He takes my hand and rolls the stone into my palm. “I want you to have it.”
Giddiness floods my senses when Mather doesn’t let go of my hand, doesn’t look away from me. And the light flickering in his eyes—this is important to him. He’s passing me a part of his childhood.
I pull the lapis lazuli closer to examine it in the dying sunlight. It’s impossibly blue, no bigger than a coin, with darker strands of azure running along its surface.
Outside of the lost chasm, magic has only ever existed in the Royal Conduits of the eight kingdoms in Primoria, reserved for rulers to use as needed. Not in objects like this small, blue stone, sitting so inconspicuously in my palm. But I know why Mather wanted to believe the stone has magic: sometimes placing our belief in something bigger than ourselves helps us get to a point where we can be enough on our own, magic or no magic.
“Not that I don’t think you’ll be fine,” he adds. “It just helped me sometimes, having a piece of Winter with me.”
I squeeze the stone, coolness gathering in my chest beside the slow, dull thudding of my heart. “Thank you.” I nod to his ankle. “For everything. You didn’t—”
He shakes his head. “Yes, I did. You deserve to fight for your home as much as the rest of us do.”
I swallow. We’re still alone outside of camp, with only the faint breeze pushing through the grass and a few scraggy trees nearby. “I should pack.”
Mather nods, his face blank again with that maddening, impenetrable nothingness. He fakes a limp into camp, my shoulder under one of his arms to help the charade. I keep a hand around his waist, the other clutching the lapis lazuli. I’m barely able to draw in full breaths, I’m so aware of his body against mine, of how when I look at him, I see the life Sir says we’re fighting for. Something simple and happy, just Mather and me in a cozy cottage in Winter.
But he’s not just Mather—he
is
Winter. He will always be Winter first and foremost, and there is a palace in his future, not a cottage.
So I help him over to the fire and hurry to pack what I’ll need for the trip, moving and doing in silence because silence is infinitely easier than talking. And now, finally, I’m moving and doing what I’ve always wanted—helping my kingdom.
WHEN I WAS
eight, we moved our camp once again to make it harder for Angra to track us—this time, to Autumn. Until then, my life had been no bigger than the perimeters of our sad little camps in the Eldridge Forest. We passed through Autumn’s capital, Oktuber, on our way to their southern forests, filling our carts and loading our horses with supplies.
Autumn was as similar to the foliage-heavy Eldridge as a snowflake is to a flame. The dense humidity of the Eldridge was nonexistent in Autumn’s dry coolness, its yellow-and-red forests sleepy and crunchy and colored with warmth. Oktuber was a maze of rickety barns and tents in maroon, azure, and sunshine orange, with the crystalline blue sky gleaming above, a sharp and beautiful contrast to the kingdom’s earth tones. But it was the Autumnians themselves who left me gaping—they were beautiful.
Their hair hung in tendrils as dark as the night sky, swaying in the dust kicked up from the roads that wove through Autumn’s tent cities. Their skin glistened the same coppery brown as the leaves on some of their trees, only where the leaves were crinkled and dry, the Autumnians’ faces were perfectly creamy.
I touched my own skin, as pale as the clouds drifting over us, and ran my fingers across the cap covering my blindingly white hair. My entire life, I had been surrounded only by the other Winterian escapees. It had never occurred to me that anyone might look different, but as I gazed at black eyes set in lush brown skin, I wished for my skin to be that pretty shade, and for my blue eyes to be a dark mystery too.
I told my wish to Alysson, who was tasked with keeping Mather and me out of trouble while everyone else gathered supplies. Her brow pinched in the wake of my admission. “The world is full of lovely people, Meira. I bet somewhere there is an Autumnian girl wanting to have skin the color of snow just as you want skin the color of earth.”
My gaze flicked around, but I didn’t see anyone watching us, at least not with the same yearning with which I watched them. I tugged at my cap. “Then why do we have to hide our hair?”
Alysson’s hand went to her own hair, wrapped up in a blue length of fabric. In retrospect, hiding our white hair didn’t do much to keep people from realizing who we were—if anything, it only made them look at us twice, noting first our hats or fabric-wrapped heads, then our pale skin and blue eyes and how wholly out of place we were. But Sir never backed down in his insistence that we needed to at least try to disguise ourselves, lest Angra get word of our location.
After a deep inhale, Alysson touched my cheek, her fingers cool. “You won’t have to hide forever, sweetheart. Someday our features will blend in, not stand out.”
I doubt she meant blending into Spring.
I shove my hands into the pockets beneath my heavy black cloak, the dense wool swaying around the weapons strapped to my back and legs. The cloak’s hood covers my head, hiding me in shadows as I stroll casually down the dirt road, the darkness of midnight falling on me from the half-moon sky. Every few seconds I peek up through the hood, noting the walls of Lynia just ahead, the gate at the end of this road flanked by flickering torches and a handful of Spring guards.
A shiver runs down my spine, but I keep my posture tall and confident, adding a cocky sway to my step the closer I get to Lynia’s north gate. The Feni River gurgles off to my left, marking the northern border of Spring before it flows out to the Destas Sea. A bridge connects to the gate up ahead, linking Lynia to the Rania Plains over the river in a wide swoop of stone and wood. My eyes dart over it, to the darkened field beyond, before swinging back ahead. An escape route to keep in mind.
The Kingdom of Spring stretches to my right, drastically different from the barren, grassy prairie lands of the Rania Plains. In the daytime, rolling hills of lush greenery cascade all around, forests of blossoming cherry trees, fields of wildflowers in a rainbow of colors. In the nighttime, Spring looks far more like what it really is—cloaked in shadows, everything drenched in black.
It didn’t take long to travel to Lynia, what with the breakneck pace Finn demanded. A little more than two days after we set out, we reached the port city. We hid our horses in an abandoned barn and waited until night, then split up to approach Lynia from the north and the south. Getting into Lynia is the easy part—getting out will be the fun part.
One other traveler strides down the road in front of me, a man slumped on his horse. He reaches the guards first, mumbles something about finding work at Lynia’s docks the next day, and after a few moments of quiet muttering, they let him pass unmolested. I swallow. Based on the recon work Finn and I did, the patrol in Lynia has been increased along the wall and gates, making it impossible to sneak in unnoticed. But it
is
possible to pass as a Spring citizen, and waltz into Lynia with the guards’ blessing. I keep my pace steady as I approach.
“Halt,” one guard orders, flinging out a hand to block my way.
I step back, careful to keep my face out of the direct light of the sconces on my right and left. “On my way to the Dancing Flower Inn,” I recite, the cover Finn and I came up with. My voice rumbles out low and deep to make myself as gender-neutral as possible. “Meeting a man for work.”
Which isn’t entirely a lie. Well, the Dancing Flower Inn is a lie—Sir told us about it and a handful of other landmarks in Lynia. Our real mark is the Keep, Lynia’s seat of government and, according to Sir, the location of the locket half. My eyes flick past the guards—all five of them—to the great circular tower that looms above the other buildings in Lynia. It’s in the center of the city, at least a half-hour trip. Finn will have the same from his end of the city.
I swing my gaze back to the guards. Two study me, the rest lean lazily against the wall, their breastplates gleaming in the flickering torchlight—silver armor with a black sun on their chests. Angra’s sun. I’m not sure how much tighter I can ball my fists; my nails are already digging into my palms.
“Lots of people coming in for work at this hour. Odd, isn’t it?” One of the guards cocks his head, his Spring-blond hair shorn against his scalp, his green eyes translucent in the combination of firelight and darkness. Exactly what I was counting on.
I finally tip my head back, the hood of my cloak sliding just enough for the firelight to touch my face. The flames will wash out my blue eyes just as they do his, making me look, enough for the guards at least, like a green-eyed Spring citizen. Spring citizens have skin a few shades darker than Winterians, but pale nonetheless, and the yellow light should make me look enough like one of them that they’ll let me pass. I hope. No amount of tricks of the light could make my hair look anything but white, so it remains tucked safely under a black cap, which will also make me look more like a boy than a girl. I hope. So many
I hope
s. I bite my tongue, keeping my focus on the guard.
His eyes flash over me, one brow lifting in an expression that makes my blood freeze solid in my veins. “And what kind of work are you meeting this man for, girl?” he sneers.
His comrades perk up. The fact that they know I’m a girl isn’t ideal, but that’s the part of my disguise I’m least worried about—if they know I’m a Winterian, it will be a hundred kinds of bad.
I draw in a calming breath and pull up the coyest smile I can manage, angling my body slightly toward him. “Work you can’t afford,” I reply, throwing him a wink and strutting past them into the city. I hold my breath, waiting for them to shout at me to stop, waiting for one of them to run after me and try to convince me that actually he
can
afford it. But all I hear is a roar of laughter, and one of the guards applauds.
“Make our king proud!” he shouts, and I hurry into the city, leaving the jeering soldiers far behind before disgust or fear can creep up on me at what I just did.
I yank my focus back to the task at hand. The port on the northeastern coastal tip of Spring, Lynia is sleepy and calm and lacking any hint of Spring’s usual brutality, mainly because the closest Winterian work camp is a day’s ride inland. Angra can’t have damaged, hollow Winterian slaves sullying Spring’s image when trading ships from other kingdoms dock here. Lynia’s peace is only a mask painted on so the rest of the world can pretend that cracked and withered Winterian hands didn’t make the goods they buy.
The streets around the gate aren’t exactly busy, but they aren’t empty either. A few taverns stand in halos of firelight, the ruckus of laughter and music emanating in muffled bursts from within. A handful of drunkards stumbles from tavern to tavern, but that’s it. As if the rest of Lynia would rather stay tucked in their beds than partake of nighttime frivolities.
I’ve been in enough of Primoria’s cities to know this isn’t normal—most cities stay loud and bright even after the sun sets, and sneaking through them is all too easy. But in Spring, everything is quieter and more tense. If I stand still and hold my breath, I can practically
feel
Angra’s evil. The way he uses his conduit’s magic to pour devotion into his people, so that every Spring citizen responds to every situation like the guard: “Make our king proud!”
Other kingdoms use their conduits as they should be used—to enhance the already existing strengths of their lands and people. To make fields yield a plethora of fruit, to make soldiers strong, to make sick people healthy. But Angra uses his conduit to enhance the bad—to snuff out anything good unless it benefits him. To make every soul in his kingdom an empty shell of servitude.
I duck down a deserted alley, heart pumping adrenaline in thick rivers through my body, but I don’t slow my pace, even as I reach the stack of crates against a wall at the end. In a burst of movement I’m up the crates, scaling the wall, and rolling onto the tiles of the roof next to me, a handful of stories in the air. Spring soldiers may find Lynia’s deserted streets easier to patrol, but spotting enemy soldiers on rooftops is a slightly more difficult task.
Chunks of tile crumble under my boots as I push into a sprint, a breath away from the edge of the roof and three stories of night air. I launch into the void, black cloak fluttering behind me through a smokestack’s bitter cloud. The next roof slides under me like a field beneath a horse’s hooves, nothing but speed and the jolt of running feet meeting solid ground. I drop-roll into the shadow of a chimney and wait a moment, holding my breath. No shouts of alarm. No clanking of armor moving closer.
Towering over the city, I have an unobstructed view of the land beyond Lynia’s walls. The silhouette of the Klaryns paints jagged black teeth across the southern horizon, a quiet, sleeping beast that watches over all the Seasons—the Summer Kingdom farthest west, Autumn next, then Winter, and finally the Spring Kingdom on the Destas Sea. I wish we could see each other as the mountains see us—resting side by side in the arms of a watchful giant— instead of as separated, divided, enemies. If we did, maybe together we could find the way back into the chasm of magic.
My fingers run over my pocket, Mather’s lapis lazuli ball tucked against my thigh, and I growl at myself. Sir would have slapped me across the back of my head by now to get me to refocus on what I’m doing, instead of what might be done.
I clear the next rooftops without a problem, angling my progress toward the Keep under the blue-black sky. The only thing that concerns me now is the shadow scaling the western wall of the tower. Finn should be a horrible soldier, but for whatever reason his short, stubby blob of Winterian girth has outdone my only slightly taller stick figure of Winterian agility on every mission we’ve worked together.