Every time she thought she had the prince figured out, he surprised her.
She stayed awake until she heard the soft, steady rhythm of his breathing. Then she stood in the mouth of the cave, feeling protective for reasons she didn’t understand. Above her the blue needles wept and whispered. Through the gray fog of rain, she could just make out a slice of river far below. She thought she saw a blotch of green and gold.
She rubbed her eyes. They were not to be trusted. When she blinked, the blotch was gone.
Mia curled up on the rocks and hugged Quin’s jacket close. It smelled of fish and metal. She closed her eyes and conjured up the scent of orange peels sizzling on fresh-caught trout, baking bread, sweet milky cheeses, and hot coffee in a copper pot—the memory of pleasant childhood mornings when the Rose family piled into the du Zols’ cozy kitchen for tasty, steaming breakfasts. Small comforts, from a life that no longer seemed like hers.
Her hands made bony pillows as the clouds of sleep rolled in.
Chapter 23
A Piping Hot Mug of Butterfel
THEY WERE HUNGRY, AND they were cold.
Mia had witnessed three sunrises since they’d left the river, maybe four. It was hard to keep track. The farther into the mountains she and Quin climbed, the more the days and nights bled into one another, a mélange of whites and blues.
The rain had turned to sleet, then snow, clumping onto the azure swyn branches like hand-whipped cream. Mia padded the inside of their boots with dry moss and needles. Every day she and Quin refreshed the padding, though it was getting harder and harder to find any dry brush. They foraged what food they could—weeds and shrubs and berries—and when they grew weak, they dipped scalloped bark into the stream burbling up the mountain and let the icy water slake their thirst. Though the blood in their veins slowed and thickened, the Natha did not freeze.
“Where are we going, Mia?” Quin asked. “Where are you leading us?”
“To safe haven,” she said. She saw the question in his eyes, the suspicion, but on some level they both understood he had nowhere else to go.
They were getting closer. Mia’s frozen fingers hurt when she pried open the book, but every day more ink shimmered on the page. In the east, the isles of Fojo Kara??o had begun to reveal themselves, a cluster of landmasses bobbing on the Salted Sea.
Pace by pace, Mia and Quin climbed higher through the Twisted Forest. Once they summited the peak, they could begin their descent on the other side—if they survived long enough to get there.
She was determined to survive.
Even without her trusted sulfyr sticks, she’d had some luck striking the back of the sheath knife against a hunk of coarse jasper until it sparked. She coaxed an orange flame from the kindling, and once it caught, she shoved it under larger, thicker branches. On one fortuitous evening, Quin managed to boil a soup?on of water in a hollow stone to make chokecherry tea. It was the most pungent, sour, delicious thing Mia had ever tasted.
“We need more sustenance,” Quin said.
She nodded. Her lips were so cracked it was painful to speak. Her tendons quivered, her legs straining as the slopes plunged down into canyons and up tall cliffs. Mia had scratches on her arms from the twigs and branches. When the brush grew too thick, she took Quin’s sheath knife and hacked an improvised trail.
Silence stretched between them like a frozen black lake. Mia started inventing sounds to fill it. Her grip on sanity was fraying: one night she was sure she heard a hound baying at the lemon moon.
To keep her brain alert, she worried the fojuen wren between her fingers, mentally reciting everything she knew about ruby wrens. They were the only birds that hibernated in winter. They were indigenous to the snow kingdom. Their anatomy was unique: like mammals, they had a four-chambered heart. But whereas humans had two pulmonary veins, wrens had four, a more efficient circulatory system that allowed them to fly. The wren’s heart beat more quickly, too—its resting heartbeat was seven times that of a human—but when it went into hibernation, it could still its own heart for months on end.
Sometimes, when Mia held the ruby wren to her cheek, she thought she could hear her mother calling her home. My red raven. My little swan.
Every time Mia thought about her sister, a nameless fear gnawed at her chest. The Kaer was not a safe place, not with King Ronan, not with Tristan.
Perhaps the fear was not so nameless after all.
Quin kept pace by her side. He no longer sat sulking while she did all the work; he dug fire pits and lashed branches together. They each found ways to relieve themselves without drawing attention to it, little coded expressions they came to understand: “I’m going to forage for berries.” “Look, a stoat.”
But the less they ate, the less they needed to relieve themselves. They saw ermine and cwningen and majestic white stag, beautiful animals, probably very tasty. But every time Mia reached for her knife, her fingers were thick, her hands heavy.
As dusk fell on their fourth, possibly fifth night in the forest, Quin asked a question.
“If you could eat anything right now,” he said, teeth clacking against the cold, “what would it be?”
Was he a sadist? Mia’s stomach creaked and grumbled, an empty ship on a stormy sea.
“I’ll go first,” he said. “Black truffles. Succulent black truffles in crempog sauce with a little shaved friedhelm on top.”
Mia said, “A potato cake.”
“One potato cake?”
A memory came unbidden: a meal she’d shared with her family before her mother died. They’d gathered at their simple square table, laughing and swapping stories, tearing off chunks of warm potato cake and dipping them into a puckered tin of sweet brown mustard. Her mother had kissed her father that night, really kissed him. When Mia and Angelyne heckled her for it, she’d raised her pint of stonemalt and made a toast:
“To my kind and clever birdlings: may you both find the sort of love your father and I are lucky to have found ourselves.”
Mia shook her head to clear it. “I stand by my potato cake. With sweet mustard for dunking.”
“I see your potato cake and raise you a rabbit stew. And a piping hot mug of butterfel. And honey cake with caramel sauce and raspberry jam. And—”
The prince stopped short.
They’d come to a small dell where the rocks leveled out and the pale trees wreathed themselves into a circle of ghostly nymphs.
In the center of the glade, arranged neatly on the unblemished snow, was a hare.
A dead hare.
As if it had been left just for them.
Chapter 24
Dangerously Warm
A LINE OF SWEAT beaded on Mia’s forehead as Quin let out a war cry and pounced on the meat.
“It’s a fresh kill,” he said. “Some owl or wolf must have caught our scent and ran off. This is unbelievably lucky. I’ll make us a whole stew!”
The skin on her neck was prickling. “This doesn’t feel right, Quin.”
“Has the cold frozen your brain? This is the first real nourishment we’ve had in days. The hare doesn’t have much fat, as far as woodland creatures go, but it’s a million times better than all the purslane and tree nuts we’ve been eating.”
She took a closer look. “What killed it? I don’t see a wound.”
Exasperated, Quin picked the hare up by its ears, inspecting the length of it. “There.” He pointed to a mark on its neck, triumphant. “Something got it in the neck.”
“That’s a clean cut. It doesn’t look like the work of a predator.”
“You’re really going to quibble with how it died? It died! Now we can eat it. Knife, please.”
She drew the sheath knife from her boot, then hesitated before handing it over.
“I’m not sure we—”