Book II. Chapter 82: Cold Crone |
Ardi crouched and ran his hand over the clumps of nearly-russet snow that had been churned together with earthy slush. The icy needles still clung to the viscous mud, thick with moisture and the breath of soil drifting into slumber. They waited for night to come, for their mistress to breathe new life into their tiny shards.
The young man listened to their quiet whispers full of naive hopes and supplications carried by courier winds to the City on the Hill. Ardan reached out after the messengers running along invisible paths and overheard what the vanguard of winter—the fluffy, glistening, melting snow—was whispering.
In its tale, Ard saw the heavy tires of a truck tearing through the night’s frozen glaze; heard the lamentations of a woman of about twenty-six—the wind snatching up laundry she had hung on lines; he felt... something dark, hungry and cold—not cold like winter, but like something dead, something that had voluntarily forsaken life—seize him by the wrist.
Severing his connection to a fragment of something that wasn’t even a Name, but something far more minuscule, Ardan recoiled and looked at the ashen-faced Bazhen.
* * *
Bazhen had been about to repeat his question when his companion—the typically taciturn cowboy who never quite knew how to relax or enjoy himself—had dropped to the ground. He’d pressed a broad hand crowned with nails that weren’t entirely human against the frozen clumps of mud dusted with snow.
Bazhen was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an outstanding student. Far from it. He had loved jurisprudence since his childhood, relishing in its ability to solve with words what most people couldn’t solve at all—but nothing more than that. Bazhen held no particular reverence for Star Magic, and had ended up at the Grand simply because, without going into the details of his rather eventful life, such had been the will of the Face of Light.
But he did remember a few things from his lectures. He knew enough to pass his examinations (if not earn a stipend) and to recognize the art of the Firstborn, even if Bazhen had forgotten what it was called.
The amber, almost bestial eyes of his companion were suddenly veiled by a dense blue haze. It was as though someone had torn Kargaam silk and, setting the fraying threads alight, drawn them across Ard’s eye sockets. The blue smoke touched his brows and descended toward his cheeks. And with it, the ground beneath their feet gave a faint tremor.
Bazhen reached for his grimoire, then recalled that, besides the Basic Shield and Spark spells, its pages held nothing else. And those would hardly be of any use here. He also thought he could hear a melody… It was the… chiming of icy bells.
For some reason, he wanted to burrow deeper into his coat, and a tremor ran through his body. Bazhen had been cold before, but now he had the distinct impression that he was standing naked somewhere on the shore of a bay that had been sealed beneath a layer of ice during the New Month.
* * *
“I’m sorry,” Ardi apologized sincerely and shook the snow from his hand.
“Wh-what was that?” Bazhen asked, teeth chattering, exhaling thick clouds of vapor.
His suddenly bluish lips were gradually returning to a healthy pink. The pallid skin of his face flushed with blood, and his frozen eyelashes, eyebrows and light stubble grew damp from the melting frost.
Ardan opened his mouth, then promptly closed it again. How was he supposed to explain to Bazhen that over the past year and a half, he had not only started Hearing the world around him more keenly, but his bond with the Name of Ice and Snow—and all its aspects—had also grown several times stronger?
Just last year, he wouldn’t have been able to hear the whispers of snowflakes clinging to frozen mud—even if they’d been surrounded by meter-high drifts, Ardan would have still remained utterly deaf to their stories.
But not now.
Not when the Queen of Winter was set to claim her rightful dominion soon. The dark train of her somber gown would stretch across the land, and all who knew how to wrap themselves in its shadow would grow stronger.
Ardi knew how.
Atta’nha had taught him.
“Winter,” was all Ardan said.
He was still looking at his hand. The skin there prickled with the shards of the snowflakes’ whispers.
“As if that’s supposed to explain something,” Bazhen huffed and, shaking himself like a dog, pointed at the house. “What now, cowboy? Is there any point in us going up there, or do we call in our dear employer’s operatives and try to get my car out of the rut?”
Ardi would have liked to answer “yes” to those last two questions. However, the voice of the wise she-wolf echoed in his memory:
“...one day, like all those who are trained to Listen and Speak, you will have to fulfill your duties...”
Perhaps Ardan was neither fully human nor fully Matabar, but he was still a Speaker. A student of the Witch of Ice and Snow. He had obligations beyond those conferred upon him by the documents of the Black House.
“Something about the look in your eyes really doesn’t sit well with me, cowboy,” Bazhen whistled.
“Operatives won’t be any help here,” Ardan replied. “And we won’t manage to get the car out before dark.”
“Can’t you write some kind of seal to pull it free?” Bazhen squinted at him. “You’re supposed to be the future luminary of Star Engineering, aren’t you?”
“I probably could,” Ardan shrugged. “But I definitely won’t get it done before dark. Especially since you,” Ardi glanced at the modest number of rays depicted on Bazhen’s epaulettes, “don’t have enough power.”
“What’s my alternative, then?”
Ardi only spread his arms out and silently nodded toward the house.
“Eternal Angels,” Bazhen shook his head dejectedly. “So, I’ve got a choice without a choice... Fine, let’s say that, given everything you’ve just said, you know what we’re walking into, right?”
Ardan’s lips stretched into an apologetic smile.
“I have a suspicion, but I’m not certain yet.”
“Oh great mountain sorcerer,” Bazhen rolled his eyes, “do enlighten me already.”
Ardan stood still for several seconds, then looked toward the forest. The sun was already caressing the tops of the firs with the last rays of a drowsy day. In less than half an hour, the field and hill would be shrouded in a pall of black velvet. And they would do well to be under a roof by then.
“Let’s go,” was all Ardan said, finally stepping across the invisible threshold.
Bazhen spent a moment shifting his gaze between the building and his mired automobile, then he cursed and hurried after the young man. Ardi would have liked to warn Bazhen about what he should prepare himself for, but he feared that doing so would only make things worse.
If he had read the situation correctly, and the one he suspected had indeed called upon the home of the half-elf and his family, then the addition of an already-anxious Bazhen would only hinder matters.
Treading carefully along the swept path, Ardan examined everything with care. He was searching for any trace, any definitive evidence that his suspicions were not groundless. After all, the sulfurous smell could also be explained by low-grade diesel stored in the shed, and the sensation of death lingering in the tales of the young snow could always be attributed to the proximity of the forest, where the frosts had killed off the warmth-loving vegetation.
Of course, Ardan didn’t indulge in the futile hope that this was all there was to it, but neither did he possess any sort of guarantee that a Homeless Fae was present.
After climbing the short steps of the small porch, Ardan was about to knock on the door with the crown of his staff but stopped himself just in time. Given that he now carried a Green Star accumulator within it—a civilian model, but an accumulator nonetheless—things could have ended rather badly. For the door, naturally.
Instead, the young man grasped the heavy iron ring clamped in the jaws of an iron dog’s head, and knocked three times. Bazhen, who was standing beside him, muttered something about the absence of a Ley-doorbell and wiring.
Ardan had slept through their drive across the Firstborn settlement, but even had the half-elf’s house not stood on the outskirts, the young man very much doubted that the wiring situation would have been any different. Generators alone were far from cheap, and laying down cables, purchasing equipment, and the constant upkeep of consumables could cause even the fattest purse to slim down considerably.
And so, even at such a seemingly-insignificant distance from the city, the Empire’s citizens could lag quite noticeably behind the march of technological progress.
Ardan, due to the peculiarities of his life, had long since grown accustomed to such contrasts. The same could not be said of Bazhen.
After standing around for several more icy seconds, at the mercy of the gusts of chilling wind, they finally heard the clatter of heels. A woman opened the door. The very same one Ardi had “seen” in the whispers of the snowflakes.
She was of modest height, with no discernible waist, possessed a surprisingly long torso, short legs, and a rather ample bosom that neither a gray shawl nor a sweater worn over a heavy house dress could conceal. With her tight bun of black hair that had not yet surrendered to gray, slightly puffy face, and the dark circles under her eyes, she looked more deeply exhausted and nearly bereft of hope than aging or unattractive.
She turned out to be somewhat older than the snow’s memories had suggested. Around twenty-eight, maybe. Give or take a year. Ardan still couldn’t gauge human age very well on sight.
“Mrs.-”
“Marina Ail,” she introduced herself.
“Mrs. Ail,” Ardan greeted her. “My name is Ard Egobar, and this is Bazhen Eorsky. We’ve come-”
“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Ail interrupted him. She wasn’t motivated by rudeness, but impatience and obvious relief. “Come in.”
The moment Ard had spoken, even the skin of her face had seemed to tighten, and in her eyes, where gray despair had previously dwelt, sparks of hope had flared anew. Admittedly, it was likely his broad smile that had done it.
As they entered the foyer, where they quickly removed their shoes and outer garments, and then headed into the spacious parlor that flowed seamlessly into the dining room and kitchen, Ardi tried to listen to what his Speaker senses were telling him. But he kept running into a veil of silence.
The walls were still too young to speak of anything beyond their memory of the builders’ hands and tools. And the foundation, which had stood since times when the Metropolis had not yet reeked of factory smog, maintained a viscous silence. It had endured too much to share its memories with the first stranger who came along—let alone an outsider.
Everything else in the house looked perfectly ordinary. There were carpets on the parquet, wallpaper on the walls, furniture, family portraits, and other various paintings. These were people of comfortable means, but not wealthy enough to count themselves among the rich. More like... what was that new term Ardi had heard in a recent Jurisprudence lecture... that’s right—the middle class.
Apparently, thanks to the growth of industry and domestic trade in the Empire, as in most countries around the world, a new social stratum was emerging. The ones who were neither rich nor poor, but in the middle. Hence—the middle class. Though scholarly circles were still debating the matter.
“I’ll go fetch my husband—he’s upstairs with our daughter,” Mrs. Ail guided Ardan and Bazhen to the fireplace and gestured toward the armchairs. “It’ll just take a couple of minutes.”
She had nearly vanished up the stairs when Ardan called out after her:
“And the other children?”
Mrs. Ail froze on the step and, turning halfway, answered briefly:
“They’re with my brother. We... sent them there a week ago, when... things got worse.”
Ardan nodded, and the mistress of the house disappeared upstairs. Ardi, settling into the armchair, extended his hand toward the fireplace. The flames warmed him but did not burn.
“Ail... Nalail...” Bazhen muttered. “I’ve never understood the principle by which elven surnames are formed.”
“Elves don’t have surnames,” Ardi withdrew his hand from the flames and unconsciously touched his watch, beneath which the mark left by the lips of Allane’Eari, the Princess of Winter, had nearly faded. “Due to the length of their lifespans, their society bypassed-”
“The communal stage, as a result of which, the phenomenon of surnames never developed among them,” Bazhen finished for him. “I’m not Captain Pnev, Ard. I graduated school quite successfully, same as you, and I study at the Grand. So spare me the educational lectures.”
“Sorry.”
Bazhen just waved it off.
“It’s simply always puzzled me why, in mixed marriages, the surname comes from the last three letters of the elf’s name,” Bazhen said, looking around and fidgeting ceaselessly in his chair. “Why not four? Or five. Or two. Why exactly three?”
Ardi said nothing. He didn’t know and, if he was being honest, had never given the matter any thought. Why three? Because... such is the dream of the Sleeping Spirits. Or, as Mart Borskov would have put it—that was simply how things had developed throughout history.
Bazhen was about to say something else when the sound of heavy footsteps came from the staircase. A half-blood was descending. He was slightly shorter than Ard himself, without long ears, but with eyes that were decidedly inhuman—which indicated through which line the Firstborn blood had been passed on. Mr. Nalail had been born of an elf father and a human mother, not the other way around. And that meant that his lifespan was nearly indistinguishable from a human’s.
This was due to the peculiarities of elven blood, in which the female half was dominant. And that was precisely why, if the scholars’ theories were to be believed, it was so difficult to tell a female elf from a male one at first sight.
Slightly stooped beneath the weight of his own burdens, with a rather modest and somewhat fragile build, Mr. Nalail possessed such a refined face that even his frayed nerves could not conceal its beauty. Of course, that observation was based on how well Ardan could judge male beauty in the first place—a phenomenon that had always remained a mystery to him. Ardi could tell whether a man was strong or weak, brave or cowardly, proud or simple, but a man’s beauty was something that he didn’t have even the faintest notion about.
“I’m glad to see you again, gentlemen.” They exchanged handshakes.
Ardi noted how weak the half-elf’s slender fingers were.
“Darling, would you bring us and our guests some tea, please?” Mr. Nalail asked, settling into the free armchair beside the mages.
The woman headed toward the dining room and kitchen, and the men were left to discuss things.
“If, after what Mr. Eorsky conveyed to you, you are still here, Mr. Egobar, then my worst fears have been confirmed,” the half-blood was doing everything in his power to maintain his composure, but his voice trembled, and fear had taken residence within his gaze. He wasn’t afraid of what might happen to him, but the one who’d remained upstairs.
Ardan leaned forward slightly.
“May I ask you several questions, Mr. Nalail?” He said, striving to keep his own voice from shaking.
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“Of course, Mr. Egobar.”
“Has anyone ever died in this house?”
Bazhen, who had already picked up a cup of fragrant herbal tea, very nearly dropped it on the floor. Mrs. Ail set the tray on the side table and then went to stand behind her husband.
“I know the stories of my father’s people, Mr. Egobar,” the half-blood continued to carefully maintain the appearance of self-control. He didn’t do so to impress his guests, but for the sake of his wife. “I thought the same thing.”
“By the Eternal Angels, what are you-” Bazhen began, but Ardan silenced him with a light tap of his staff against the floor.
“This is an old house, Mr. Egobar,” Nalail continued. “It once belonged to my mother’s family, long ago. Then, when the capital began to grow, that family moved to the city, and the settlement emptied out entirely. So, they gave it to my father’s people. Those who wanted to live here.”
Mrs. Ail placed her hand on her husband’s shoulder, and for a few brief moments, barely perceptibly, he pressed his cheek against it. This was a gesture that was all too familiar to Ard. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t to Bazhen.
“Many have died here, Mr. Egobar. The same as in any old house.”
“I understand,” Ardan nodded. “I’ll move on to my other questions, Mr. Nalail. Your daughter—how old is she?”
“She just turned five,” the half-blood answered.
“The youngest?”
“Yes, Mr. Egobar.”
Ardan cursed inwardly in the language of the Fae. So far, the man’s answers were not filling him with optimism.
“When did it begin?”
Nalail could no longer contain himself. He abruptly raised his weary gaze to Ardan and spoke with an unnecessary and somewhat misplaced sharpness:
“You already know, Mr. Egobar. It all began with the first frosts. My daughter started running outside while being practically naked. She dug into the earth at the site of an old grave. Cats attack her and dogs bark at her—even the ones she’s been friends with ever since she was born. Her room is always cold. It smells of sulfur. Of death. And everyone who stays near her begins to feel ill and suffer from an unbearable melancholy. The longer you stay, the stronger the thoughts of... of... ending the suffering become. Your own. Or hers. And you already know all of this! You know what is up there!”
Having finished his tirade, Nalail breathed deeply and, as though the monologue had spent the last reserves of strength that had held his spine rigid, he howled and clutched his head in both hands. Digging his fingers deep into his hair, he keened:
“But these are just tales... old tales... Old elven wives’ stories... They don’t exist... Homeless Fae don’t exist... They’re just bogeymen... only bogeymen... Tales... tales... tales...”
Ardan looked up at the frightened, pale, nearly weeping Mrs. Ail. She was frightened, but still ready to fight. And that was the most important thing.
Rising to his feet and approaching the elf lost in the thicket of his own terror, Ardan lifted his head by gripping the man’s chin and looked into eyes clouded with a gray film. He did not even need to intrude upon a foreign consciousness. The young man simply allowed the half-elf to grant himself the weakness he so desperately craved.
Mr. Nalail went limp, his arms hanging like lifeless ropes, and he quietly, peacefully, began to snore. The sleepless nights claimed their toll, sending his tormented consciousness down the paths of dreams. Had the desperate father not been fighting against something he truly didn’t understand for nearly a week, Ardan would have likely found it harder to put him to sleep.
“What are you-”
“He’s just sleeping,” Ardi quickly reassured the frightened woman. “Your husband did everything he could, Mrs. Ail.”
Nearly spent, she sank onto the armrest and embraced her husband’s head, pressing it to her belly. Mr. Nalail breathed evenly and gradually lost the former grayness in his face, and the trembling in his limbs, though the change was barely perceptible, began to ease.
If Ardi had understood things correctly, the one who had visited this family could not reach the half-blood in his sleep.
“I need your help, Mrs. Ail,” Ardan said, stepping closer.
Marina raised her gaze to him—a gaze that was all but drowning in both fear and that mad, almost primal resolve that only a mother can feel. A mother willing to do anything, even strike a bargain with the Fae, if it meant saving her child.
Ardan had seen such eyes before. Duchess Anorsky’s gaze had been similar on the night when the future Empress-Consort had agreed to a deal with Lady Senhi’Sha.
“What do I need to do?” She asked, her voice steady.
Holding her exhausted husband in her arms, and despite feeling fragile as well, she was nonetheless ready to keep fighting for the light she herself had brought into the world. Nature might’ve decreed that men should receive the strength of body, but Ardi had never seen anyone more terrifyingly desperate than a mother when her child was in danger.
“Simply don’t resist,” Ardan told her. “When you feel me—don’t resist.”
She didn’t understand. She even flinched at the rather ambiguous phrasing, but the moment Ardan caught her eye and released his Witch’s Gaze, Mrs. Ail relaxed. She went limp and would’ve toppled from the chair had Bazhen not caught her.
Ardan didn’t see what happened next in the parlor. For the first time, someone was willingly letting him into their consciousness, and also for the first time in his life, he was going to walk the paths of another’s mind with the care of an elderly ragman.
* * *
Her lower back ached, and the skin on her fingers squeaked faintly from the soap and the gnawing cold. Marina exhaled, straightened up, and pressed the back of her hand against her spine. Her mother had warned her that after her second or third child, her back might start to hurt.
Marina had only waved it off. She’d already carried three kids and had never once suffered from back pain, nor morning sickness, or even trouble with her milk—all the things her friends, who had given birth by that point, regularly complained about. Out of all her acquaintances, Marina had been the last in line for a “little one.”
She had been nineteen when she’d given birth to her first daughter. A considerably ripe age by local standards. It was perhaps not so old in the capital, where some women had their first child even at twenty, but not in the suburbs.
Even so, Marina was glad. As she rocked that warm, tiny bundle in her arms, as it quietly snuffled and sucked on its pacifier, she felt something she probably could never have described in words. It was as though, on a cold winter night, one where even the moon and stars had hidden behind heavy clouds, a light had suddenly kindled. So warm and bright. And it was somewhere inside her. Deeper than any doctor could see. And it didn’t burn her at all.
Nine years had passed since then, and she had borne three more kids. And only now, with her youngest daughter having just turned five, did Marina finally understand what her mother had warned her about. Sometimes, her back hurt so badly that Marina had to wrap it tightly in the morning with rags warmed over coals. She had to do it so tightly that she lost her appetite entirely.
To say nothing of the fact that problems with her milk had come to trouble her after all, and her once-high bosom now practically reached her navel without special undergarments to support it. And yet, she was still grateful to the Face of Light. Grateful for the fire He had bestowed upon their family. The fire that other mixed marriages sometimes never managed to kindle at all.
Not every union of humans and Firstborn succeeded in conceiving a child, after all.
And so, Marina did not complain. Maybe she did it occasionally, when she looked at herself in the mirror and saw that her waist was gone, she had stretch marks across her hips and belly, and she felt perpetually a bit tired and had jowls like a well-fed hound—then she would smile with a gentle sort of nostalgia for her youth. But she would not have traded even a fleeting moment of this life for her lost beauty.
Standing still for a moment to catch her breath, she reached out her hand:
“Nisa, hand me the pillowcase, would you?”
As her mother had taught her, Marina often brought her little ones outside, so their bodies would learn how to fight an illness. It was as the old women used to say: “The worst thing you can do with a child is shelter them from everything.”
“Nisa?” Marina turned around. The child was nowhere to be seen.
In any other situation, Marina would have laughed and chased after her child, who loved to hide among the laundry. But the wind was blowing. It rocked the freshly-washed sheets and duvet covers like leaves. And among them, there was no familiar silhouette, no familiar laugh to be found.
The mother’s heart skipped a beat. Then a second, a third, and it seemed as though all the air had been knocked from her lungs at once. Before she could even see anything, Marina knew that nothing good was happening. Something icy and cold seized her by the throat and, pressing down, began to caw hoarsely above her ear. It was laughing. Cackling out loud.
“Nisa!” Marina screamed, looking wildly in every direction. “Nisa!”
And all that answered her was the cackling. It was wet, pouring into her ears and trickling in a foul, sticky sludge down her neck and under her clothes.
Marina, like a drowning woman, tore at the laundry that had suddenly plastered itself to her from all sides. With invisible, rotting hands, it tried to hold her in place. It tangled around her legs and tightened in loops around her arms, leaving scarlet abrasions on her skin in the shape of gnarled, elongated fingers.
Marina tore free and, falling to the damp earth, spotted little Nisa in her blue dress. She was digging in the far corner of the garden that had gone to sleep for the winter. She was… frenzied, savage even. Scraping the skin from her hands until they bled and tearing the tiny nails from her fingers, she plunged her hands deeper and deeper into the soil.
Marina didn’t even feel the pain of the fall. She simply watched and watched as her baby scooped up enormous handfuls of earth and greedily licked at them. She was even chewing and swallowing them.
Marina didn’t even remember screaming. All her scorched mind could register was how slowly Nisa turned around, and how wide—nearly reaching her ears—her utterly inhuman smile was.
* * *
“Mama, I’m so hot,” the little girl said, shoving Marina aside with a strength that many grown men could not have matched as her mother tried to cover the child with a blanket. “I’m so very hot!”
In the room on the second floor, the candles had long since stopped burning. The window had been thrown wide open, and Nalail had shut off the valve from which the boiler’s heat flowed. In the room, amid scattered toys, torn clothing, and a tilting wardrobe, the child lay on a nearly broken bed. She was paler than the sheets and almost hidden beneath the stains made by excrement and pus, where only patches of the fabric’s original white were still visible.
Her lips had gone beyond blue—they had outright blackened. Her eyes rolled in different directions, and her voice kept breaking into a rasp.
“Nisa-”
“Shut up!” A voice that was not a child’s at all, but that of some ancient crone, rasped at her. “Monkey blood! Spreading your legs for a disgrace of the Forest Wind! Whore!”
“Nisa...”
“Mama...” The girl reached toward her mother’s face. “I’m so hot...”
Marina exhaled a cloud of vapor. The room might as well have had snow on the floor, and the pattern of blue frost on the ground had long since ceased to melt, its lines occasionally revealing shapes as disturbing as they were indistinct. It was sort of like glimpsing, amid the play of light and shadow, the silhouette of something that could not exist under the gaze of the Face of Light. But the moment you tried to focus on the image, the apparition would vanish.
“My darling, I-”
“Remember how you moaned when he took you?” The old woman’s voice asked, gurgling and choking on the stench of its own breath. “How sweet your juices smelled when they stained your sheets? When was the last time your nails scratched his back?”
“Be quiet...”
“Admit that you’ve grown old, and the only thing that can elevate your image is not a man’s desire, but his pity. You inspire pity even in yourself. You old hag! Ugly old hag!”
“Shut your mouth...”
“You don’t even touch yourself anymore. But remember how often you’d hide from your parents and the one you call God to secretly slip your hand between your thighs? Remember how good it felt? When was the last time you-”
She rasped. She spat out yellow mucus. She rasped and laughed. And Marina was strangling her, squeezing her neck tighter and tighter without understanding why.
“Mama...”
Marina recoiled and tumbled off the bed. The girl stared at her through tears, red marks on her neck. She sobbed and whimpered, and all Marina could hear was the old woman’s cackle. Dry and cawing, like paper rubbing against cardboard.
Marina, clawing at the wall, tried to rise on legs that had turned to jelly and would not obey her. She wanted to run to her child. To hold her. To say that everything would be fine, absolutely, certainly fine.
But she couldn’t move.
There, sitting on the windowsill, she saw something. Something that made Marina scream and hurl herself forward. She wanted to sink her nails into this creature, tear at it with her teeth—anything, if it would save Nisa.
Marina did not reach her. Nalail’s arms caught her in time. He was saying something. Begging her to come to her senses. And when Marina finally snapped out of it, she realized that she was standing on the ledge, and below her, there was nothing but the two-story void and the cold, frozen earth.
* * *
With the same tenderness as before, Ardan surfaced from another’s memories. Marina had gone completely limp in Bazhen’s arms, and Bazhen, jaw clenched, was trembling slightly under her weight. The future jurist was not exactly musclebound, after all. And that was further compounded by the fact that the General Physical and Military Preparedness examination at the Grand only involved an actually rigorous trial when it came to the Military Faculty. That had been the case before the recent reform, at least...
Ardan, setting his staff aside, caught Marina beneath her thighs, and then, taking care not to touch what a stranger’s hands should not touch (he also avoided looking at anything he shouldn’t), he and Bazhen carefully transferred the sleeping Marina to the armchair beside her husband.
Bazhen, breathing heavily, drew a handkerchief from his pocket. Large beads of sweat rolled down his forehead.
“If you ever get any ideas about going into my head, cowboy, know that I will sue you so hard that three generations of your family will end up suffering the consequences,” Bazhen declared with absolute seriousness, without even a hint that this was just a joke.
Ardan believed him. And, in all honesty, it was hard to imagine that any sane person would be comfortable with someone rummaging through their consciousness.
“So what’s up there?” Bazhen asked, gripping his staff tightly and nodding toward the staircase.
Ardan sighed and, after retrieving his own staff, looked around for anything that might help. The selection was not exactly vast...
“Do you know anything about herbs?”
“Maybe, big guy, but you could answer my question first?” Bazhen pressed.
Ardan sighed again.
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Try, cowboy. In case you’ve forgotten, I study at the Grand, too.”
Ah, yes... right... As though that, by the Sleeping Spirits, made any difference in this case.
“It’s a Cold Crone,” Ardan answered, and the moment the words left his lips, the room grew noticeably colder.
“Wonderful,” Bazhen nodded. “Now give me more details.”
“It’s a Homeless One. She was once a Fae of the Winter Court, but she renounced her essence and the laws of the Queens. In different myths, among different peoples and races, she goes by different names,” Ardan recalled everything he had committed to memory from Atta’nha’s scrolls and books. “She awakens with the first frosts, in places where generations of a family have died. She feeds on despair. That’s why she tries to make a parent kill their child. Or get them to commit suicide. It’s all nourishing despair to her.”
Bazhen stood motionless for several moments.
“You just explained a Snow Witch to me?”
Ardan shrugged.
“As I said,” he replied without particular excitement. “In different myths, she goes by different names. Her essence doesn’t change.”
Bazhen muttered something unintelligible.
“And what about her Hunters’ Guild classification?” The future Star Jurist asked.
Ard spent several seconds calculating how Anomaly Hunters would characterize this problem.
“Two Blue Mages, six rays each,” Ardan answered, and Bazhen threw up his hands and was about to say something, but Ardi beat him to it. “That’s if you try to fight it head-on, right now, while the temperature is still above zero. When winter truly comes, you’d need Mshisty’s team. However, it’s likely that neither the Major himself nor his hounds would have the slightest idea about what to do with a Homeless Fae like this.”
Bazhen buried his face in his hands.
“Where did a Homeless Fae even come from, cowboy? I heard the term exactly once, during my first year, in a History of Magic lecture. By the Eternal Angels, we were covering the myths and legends of the Firstborn!”
“Yes, Bazhen... that’s an excellent question,” Ardan said quietly, his gaze never leaving the staircase. “So then—do you know anything about herbs?”
“I can brew tea,” Bazhen grumbled. “A certain lady friend of mine is very fond of it. And when she and I are... spending time together, I make her tea.”
“Wonderful,” Ardan nodded, choosing not to delve into the romantic exploits of his lustful business partner. “Find whatever warming ingredients the kitchen has. Cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, rosemary, strawberries, rosehip—anything. Bring everything there is. And grab a cup as well. Put water in it.”
Bazhen stared at Ardi in silence for several moments, then, still not speaking, turned and headed for the kitchen.
Ardan, turning to Nisa’s sleeping parents, drew his father’s knife. First, he approached Mr. Nalail and cut off a lock of his hair. Wrapping it in his own handkerchief, Ardan moved to Marina. She twitched slightly in her sleep, as though trying to reach the staircase with her hand. Even being totally exhausted in both mind and body could not stop a mother from trying to save her child.
Remarkable...
Taking care not to cause more harm than was necessary, Ardan lifted the woman’s sweater, unfastened her vest, untied the laces of her dress, and, resolutely pushing up her undergarment, made a shallow cut in the skin above her heart.
“Damn it, cowboy! If I didn’t know about you and Baroness Orman, I’d be harboring some very unpleasant suspicions right now.”
“The cup,” Ardan said without turning around, extending his hand.
When his fingers found cold tin, the young man brought the half-filled vessel to the wound on Marina’s chest. Thick, scarlet blood dripped into it. Ten drops for every year of Nisa’s life.
After the blood had been collected, Ardan cut off a strip of Marina’s undergarment and bound the cut. He could not afford to spend even a single red ray on her, let alone cast a proper healing spell. Besides, this wasn’t even a real wound, but more of a shallow scratch.
“I found pepper, cinnamon powder, frozen strawberries, and dried rosehip blossoms.”
Bazhen laid them all out on the coffee table.
“Excellent,” Ardan nodded. “I’ll need a bit of time to make the potion.”
“Potion?” Bazhen echoed and turned toward the staircase. “And this creature—it won’t come down here? Something tells me it already knows we’re here.”
“It won’t,” Ardan shook his head and pointed with the bloodied blade of his knife at the floor. “The foundation here is old. It hasn’t fully frozen through yet. There’s warmth left in it. That warmth won’t let its memory fall asleep. It will protect us from the Crone.”
“The memory of an old foundation... is that why Mr. Nalail and Marina haven’t lost their minds?” Bazhen walked over to the woman and, without making any unnecessary or uncalled-for comments, untied the hastily-fashioned bandage Ard had made and set about crafting his own. He did so with far more care, even tenderness. “Because they took turns watching over their daughter and came back down here periodically?”
“That too,” Ardan nodded.
Ard did not elaborate on the intricacies of the art of the Aean’Hane, and Bazhen was in no hurry to ask more questions. Ardan was grateful to him for that.
Trying not to think about anything extraneous, Ardan took the ingredients Bazhen had found and the cup filled with blood and water and moved to the fireplace. The orange flames crackled merrily and without a care, dancing happily above the black-and-white logs.
Ardan set the cup down in the ash, and then, rolling up his sleeves, took a fistful of dried rosehip blossoms in his right hand. Stripped of their pink color, now scarlet and orange, they bore a certain resemblance to dried blood. The same blood that still dripped from his knife.
Ideally, Ard would have preferred to use Fire-Weed, Laughing Mustard, and fresh strawberries, but in the absence of the ideal, one made do with what one had. The potion would be far from the kind of potent brew described in the she-wolf’s scrolls, but Ardi was no longer the boy who’d used to run along the snowy trails of the Alcade.
Winter had not bestowed its power upon the Cold Crone alone...
Holding his fist above the fire, Ardan waited until the pain of keeping it there became unbearable, and only then did he open his hand above the cup. Stirring the blood, the water, and the warmed rosehip petals, he added a pinch of cinnamon on every odd turn, and on every even one, a pinch of black pepper. After thirty complete rotations, Ardan, still stirring the brew, took a handful of frozen berries in his free hand.
Coating them in ash, he listened to the whisper of the flames. To the crackling of the logs. To the snapping of the sparks. To the hissing of the superheated air carrying smoke higher and higher along the stone paths.
This was an old fireplace. It remembered distant times. It remembered the caring hands of the family’s forebears, who had laid its stones with the same tenderness they’d hoped to receive in return. And the fireplace had repaid them in kind.
Generation after generation, the old stone guardian had uncomplainingly sheltered the family that lived here from the cruelest frosts and the darkest of nights. And even after the family had installed an iron tank of water and run steel veins through the walls of the house, it had continued its service. Perhaps, instead of warmth, it now provided only joy and comfort with its gentle crackling. But it still remembered. It remembered what it meant to fight the blizzard and the savage cold. It remembered a time when the lives of all who’d warmed themselves in its glow had depended on it alone.
Ardan took that memory. He fanned it with his Will and wrapped the fragments of the Name the old fireplace had been given by generations of mortals around the ash. And using that ash, he coated the strawberries.
Dropping them into the brew and continuing to stir, Ardan watched intently as its color began to change. If it turned orange, the potion—weak though it might be—would work, and there was a chance. And if not, then...
Seconds turned to minutes, the stirring had long since passed the one hundred mark, and just as Ardan nearly lost hope, the fireplace flared and showered the cup with bright sparks. The young man turned to the extinguished flame and the thin thread of smoke rising from the split log.
“Thank you,” Ardan whispered in the language of the Fae. “Sleep peacefully, faithful fire.”
Lifting the cup with its bright orange brew, Ardan carried it to Bazhen, who had long since finished applying a rather well-crafted bandage.
“Why did you put out the fireplace, cowboy?” Bazhen shivered, exhaling a small cloud of vapor. “It’s like an icehouse in here now. We need to get it going again before we freeze.”
“That wasn’t me,” Ardan shook his head and, looking toward the darkened hearth, added: “And from now on, no matter what you do, it will never light again.”
“What? What kind of nonsense is that?”
“It’s not nonsense, Bazhen. The art of the Aean’Hane simply has its price.”
Ardan shifted his gaze from the thin thread of smoke to the orange brew in the plain tin cup, and then he looked toward the staircase.
They were already waiting for him...