Bluewing (3 page)

I returned to Jonn’s side. He and Everiss were engaged in a conversation, and the sound of their voices reached my ears like the murmur of a stream. I stopped a few feet away, giving them privacy, but when they noticed me, she straightened and stepped away.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” Jonn asked in his scolding-but-affectionate way. “You’ve been up almost all night. You’re going to get sick if you keep pushing yourself this way.”

“Shouldn’t you?” I countered. “You’re the one who gets seizures.”

“I can sleep whenever I want, since I never leave this room. You, on the other hand, are always chasing all over the Frost. You need rest.”

He’d become more verbal lately, more assertive and direct. Throughout our childhood he’d always been the quiet one, content to follow my lead without arguing, the silent source of support who’d given me strength after our parents’ deaths. He’d never done much beyond helping with the family quota and composing riddles and music for the amusement of Ivy and me, because his withered leg and frequent seizures had rendered him ineligible to take his full place as a grown man in the village, with all the privileges and responsibilities that such a role entailed. But now he gave orders and directed projects and bossed me about my sleeping habits.

My gaze slid to Everiss’s bobbing hair as she sashayed across the room to speak with Juniper over the stewpot, and I wondered if the source of Jonn’s sizzle had anything to do with the smile currently stretched across her face.

But my brother was waiting for my excuse, and I didn’t feel like pondering the complicated relationship between him and Everiss Dyer. Not today. I sat, leaning both elbows on the table as I massaged my temples with my fingertips. “I’m expecting Ivy to show up this morning. I’m not going to miss her visit because I’m asleep.”

“I’ll wake you,” he said, but then his eyes lit up, and I turned and saw a skinny, freckled girl with nut-brown hair and eyes too big for her face slip through the doors. My sister. She clutched a bag in her hands. She always brought supplies—food and salt and soap, and sometimes a little sugar. She was like an angel, dispensing mercy in small doses just when we needed it most.

Ivy crossed the room at a brisk walk. My attention sharpened as I noticed she was limping.

“What happened to your leg?” I demanded.

She slid into the chair across from us. “Good morning, sister. I’m doing well, how are you?”

I shook my head. “I’m worried about that limp, that’s what.”

Jonn put his hand on my arm to silence me. “Glad to see you made it safely.”

“The limp is nothing. I tripped and banged my ankle on a rock.” She waved a hand dismissively and then reached into her sack. “Look, I brought sugar this time. A shipment came in from Aeralis.”

My mouth watered in spite of everything, because sugar was a rare delicacy these days. A memory floated through my head—our mother, baking cookies with the precious ingredient, and Jonn and I sitting by the hearth weaving frantically because we couldn’t have any until our quota was done for the day.

“How are things in the village?” Jonn asked.

“Not good,” my sister muttered, running a finger across the table. “Raine has made another curfew, a tighter one. Quota has gone up because he’s increased the number of soldiers in the village, but we have no way to realistically meet his demands and continue to feed ourselves properly. There is not enough food and not enough time. People are growing angry, desperate. Some are stealing from the soldiers’ rations or trying to fudge their quota totals, but if they’re caught, they are flogged, made to eat mud, left in stocks overnight until they get frostbite on their fingers. Raine always manages to be creative.”

I grimaced. “And how are you managing?”

“I’m all right.” Ivy glanced around the room and dropped her voice to a whisper. “How did the mission go?”

“Not as well as we had hoped.”

“They found papers with Adam’s location, but not Ann’s,” Jonn explained.

“And?” Ivy asked.

“It’s far.” I said the words softly, and the momentary despair that consumed me must have leaked into my voice, because my sister’s face crumpled. She cared about Adam and Ann, too. They had been constants in her life as much as mine.

“Farther than you traveled to find me?” Gabe asked, grabbed a chair and sinking into it beside me.

Ivy didn’t smile at Gabe, but the harsh planes of her face eased at his presence. He reached across the table and touched her hand in greeting.

“That’s different,” I said. “I used the gate.”

“Can’t you use the gate to travel to Astralux?”

Jonn shook his head. “We have to have a connecting portal, and the one in Echlos is the only one left as far as we know. It can connect to itself in the past, which is how we sent you and the others back, but we can’t simply leap through it and expect to appear in another location in this time.”

“What about the PLD? Isn’t that a portal?”

“The PLD is here with us,” I said. “So that wouldn’t work, either. We’d have to go the old-fashioned way. On foot.”

“There are trains past the border that run to Astralux,” he said. “They run through the ice fields between the Frost and Aeralis, carrying wood and coal.”

I visualized it—the black lines of the train tracks biting into the snow, the guards in their long coats, the harsh white and blue of the earth and sky. Gabe’s breath, a cloud slipping from his lips. Mine matching. Running, our fingers slipping on cold metal as we tried to grab hold and hang on.

“We’ll discuss it more later,” Jonn said, and his voice pulled me back to the present. “Right now, you both need to sleep.”

“We need to get in touch with the Trio,” I said. “With Atticus dead and Adam missing, we have no leader.”

“The Trio?” My sister’s face wrinkled in confusion.

“They are the ones in charge of the Thorns. Their identities are secret, so I don’t know their names...but I know Adam sent and received messages from them, so he must have had some way to contact them. I need to find out how. I need to tell them our situation here—the fugitives, Atticus’s death—and I need to get our instructions. Maybe they can help us, send supplies, another leader.”

“You are our leader now,” Ivy said.

I snorted. “I’ve not been given that authority. And furthermore, I don’t want it.”

“You think they’d send someone else?” Gabe asked.

Jonn leaned across the table and rapped his knuckles in front of me. “You should sleep,” he repeated. “Both of you.”

“I want to know what happened to Ivy’s leg first.”

“No,” she insisted. “I just tripped over a log.”

“I thought you said you banged it on a rock.”

She sighed loudly. “First I tripped over the log, then I hit it on the rock.”

“Lia,” Jonn said. “I really think you should let this go for now and get some rest.”

This time, I acquiesced to him, because he was right. I needed rest. I was done arguing for the night.

Gabe helped me up, and his hand lingered a little on mine. I wondered if he was remembering our kiss earlier. Together we walked toward the cots that we’d pushed close together to make a makeshift place for the four of us—Jonn, Everiss, Gabe, and me.

“I’m truly sorry that we didn’t find anything,” he said once we’d reached the cots. “I know you miss him. I know you want him here again, safe. I don’t...” he stopped.

Something knotted in my chest. This was a conversation that had been brewing between us for some time, but I was too tired to have it now. I started to shake my head, and Gabe put a finger to my lips.

“This isn’t about me. You care about Adam...and I care about you. So we’ll find him. Besides,” he added with a twitch of a smile, “he saved my life. I should try to even the score.” His eyes flicked to mine. “Sleep. You’re not much of a talker when you’re tired, Lia Weaver. Or any time, for that matter. I know better than to push my luck with you now.”

I sank onto the nearest cot and tugged the blankets over my body. And before sleep claimed me, thoughts swirled in my head like birds before a storm. I found no rest from them.

THE SNOW CRUNCHED beneath my boots as I slipped through the Frost alone. All around me, the silence was broken by the crackle of snow falling and the musical sound of melting ice. Daylight sparkled on dripping icicles and glittered on the edges of wet pine needles.

The Thaw was coming, stronger every day, and the cold was damp, slipping inside my lungs and clinging to my clothes. My breath curled from my lips in a white vapor. My thoughts spiraled.

Earlier that day, I’d been to see Abel Brewer.

He didn’t know anything about his brother’s whereabouts. He’d moved methodically as we spoke, never stopping as he split logs and shoveled snow. He had barely looked at me. His face, haggard and etched with fatigue, was a study in neutrality. But his hands spoke another story. They were restless, harsh as they swung the axe and stripped bark from the wood. He didn’t know how Adam had communicated with the Thorns leaders, he’d said. His brother spent much time wandering the Frost alone, he said. There were places that Adam used to go, he said. Places no one else knew about.

Places.

Now I was looking for such places.

Could these places contain some way to contact the Trio? Adam had kept contact with them somehow. I’d already searched the location where I’d once met Adam, a place not too far from my family’s farm. But the hole in the ground contained little of value in regards to my quest, and I’d moved on. Now I roamed the Frost, seeking for any place where Adam might have kept the means to contact the Trio.

The wind caught the edges of my cloak and made it flutter as I squeezed between two tree trunks bent at awkward angles. Watchers had done it, maybe, although I didn’t see any tracks. I scrambled over a rock and stopped to catch my breath.

As I did, I looked around me. The landscape was familiar, but in a faint, dreamy way. The trees were different, the rocks more exposed, and everything was blanketed in snow and ice.

I looked closer. There, at the edge of the trees, an almost imperceptible swell caught my eye. A roof, gently rounded beneath a bank of snow.

My lips curved in a smile. I knew this place. I’d seen it 500 years ago, in the distance past, before the Frost was cold. Before Watchers openly roamed. Before the Ancient Ones’ society crumbled. This was the ruins of the private lab of Doctor Meridus Borde, my ancestor, the ancestor of all the Weavers with their special blood.

I approached the structure slowly. Centuries of forest decay covered the building. Only a small portion of the original dwelling still peeked above the surface. A tangle of brush obscured the place where the door had been.

I pushed the branches aside and stopped in astonishment. A path had been cleared through them, a recent path. It looked to be less than a year old, judging by the accumulation of debris and vegetation that had gathered in the wake of the severed limbs and shoveled earth.

Was this Adam’s doing?

My heart began to pound, and my fingers trembled as I pushed aside a few creeping tendrils of frost vine and stepped to the threshold. The door gave easily when I pushed against it, and I stumbled inside amid a shower of damp dirt and chunks of snow.

The wooden floor clattered under my feet. The air smelled faintly of dust and dried things. Sunlight streamed around me, illuminating the space.

The room vaguely resembled the place I remembered. Shelves cluttered with books and papers lined the walls. Two chairs lay on their sides, knocked over at some point and never righted again. Some of the legs were broken. Tables were crammed into every corner, piled high with strange inventions. I ran my fingers across a dust-covered cog and touched an opaque bubble of dark glass. What were these things? They looked like parts of some long-deceased monster of steel and brass.

I moved on toward the shelves. Glass crunched under my boots, and a draft of dusty air filled my nose. Memories assaulted me—memories of Borde showing me the journal he’d found, one that contained references to my family’s riddles and to the Thorns. Where was that journal now? I searched the room but found nothing of value beyond a few books that I set aside to give to Jonn. Almost everything had crumbled into garbage. I looked for
The Snow Parables,
which I’d seen on these shelves 500 years earlier. My parents had owned such a book.

I didn’t see it.

A chill skittered down my spine. Were the book I’d seen in the past and the book my parents possessed one and the same? How would they have gotten it?

Leaving the main room, I found the hall, a chasm of dusty darkness that echoed as I fumbled down it. I stumbled into what had been Borde’s bedroom. A sagging mattress and disheveled sheets were barely visible from the light shining through the door in the main room. Where was the closet? Borde had kept a light-making device there. Ah, there was the door. I opened it.

My fingers bumped against metal as I groped in the darkness at the back of the closet shelves. I wrapped them around whatever I’d found and tugged, dragging out a long, narrow box.

The box was shiny, pristine, unlike the things in the main room that had deteriorated with time or neglect. I lifted it with a grunt and carried it to where the light was better. I jiggled the latch, but the box didn’t open. I lifted it and shook, and I heard things sliding around.

There was something inside.

My investigations turned up nothing else. Finally, I picked up the box and pulled the door of the laboratory shut behind me. I would look again tomorrow for Adam’s means of communication with the Trio. Cold air bit my cheeks as I plunged into the wilderness again, heading for home.

Before I’d gone too far, the snap of branches made me freeze. My muscles quivered as I held still and silent, listening. It couldn’t be a Watcher—they didn’t wander during the day—but there were any other number of lethal things roaming the Frost that might cross my path. Drawing my cloak around me, I eased back into a bush of snow blossoms and crouched close to the snow.

Something dark and alien moved clumsily through the white ten yards away. I filled my lungs with cold air and held the breath inside me.