I nod. “I need to know about her power.”
From the scrunched-up look on her face, I can tell she’s trying to translate my words. “Ice,” she says. “Fire. She has the two, the same.” Her accent is . . . round. And trilling. Even the Kupari language is soft and weak. I push down a swell of contempt even as I recall the witch’s black-robed minion grinding out those trilling words—just before he prepared to hurl fire at me.
“Ice and fire,” I say. “She controls both?”
“Both. Together and”—she spreads her hands—“apart. Many ways she has magic.”
“And she curses people.”
Hulda tilts her head. “Curse?”
“Yes,” I say through gritted teeth. “She sticks this ice and fire inside people.” I mimic the arc of the witch-made lightning that struck me six nights ago. “How might one break such a curse?”
Hulda blinks at me. “Curse?” she asks again. “Valtia has ice and fire, together and apart—”
“Yes, I know.” My frustration is already making me sweat, and I remind myself to stay calm. “But how do people get rid of it?”
She looks utterly baffled. “Get rid . . . of magic?”
“Sure, if that’s what you all call it. How do they do that, once she curses them with it?” An idea occurs to me. “If she were to be killed—”
Hulda tilts her head. “Some born with ice and fire, some not. But Valtia . . . her power comes from other Valtia.”
“You mean there’s two of them?” Thyra will need to know immediately.
“No, not two.”
My hands rise in irritation. “Then what in heaven are you talking about?”
The woman looks me over with curiosity, then touches her own coppery hair and points to mine. “First, Valtia is a Saadella,” she says, though I’ve never heard that word in my life. “Her hair is this color. Kupari.”
“My hair is not Kupari.”
“Copper,” she says slowly. Then she points to my eyes. “And her eyes is that color.” She lets out an amused grunt. “You could be Saadella.”
“What did you just call me?”
Hulda steps back in alarm as a frigid gust of wind swirls around us. Her gray eyes go round as the breeze whips her coppery hair from its braid, and her teeth chatter as she says, “Nothing! I said nothing!” She stumbles and falls backward, landing hard on her backside. Her eyes are bright with tears. “Please! Please!”
Her cries will draw attention to us, the last thing I want. Cold hatred for this stupid, cowardly slave rushes through me, especially when she screams again. She’s staring at the ground and inching back, pure horror etched into the lines of her face. I look down to see what on earth could be frightening her.
Thick, silver-white frost is creeping along the ground around me, edging closer to the hem of Hulda’s skirt, advancing like an army of ants. I gasp and clench my fists, trying to push the curse down, but when the ice keeps advancing, I rush forward, frantically shushing her. If she doesn’t shut up, the entire camp will come running, and then they’ll see the frost. They’ll know I’m cursed, and I’ll be stoned in the fight circle.
Hulda’s fingers are gray with cold, and she’s shivering violently as she points at me. She shrieks one word in her awful language over and over again, one that sounds like the hiss of a snake. The sound slithers into my ears, relentless and maddening, filling my head with memories of lullabies and fire and blood.
I drop to my knees and clamp my hand over her mouth.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I am so desperate to silence Hulda that at first I don’t notice that I have. My fingers, rigid with cold, freeze to the damp flesh of her face. Her hands scrabble along my arms. But I don’t feel it. I stare at her face, her coppery hair, and I hear her unfamiliar-yet-familiar language in my head, and suddenly her eyes are no longer gray. They’re blue and pleading and the light in them is fading, and there’s nothing I can do.
The distant whinny of a horse wrenches me back to the present, shivering and trembling, something hard tickling my palm. I look down, and with a cry, I throw myself backward, landing in a sprawl on damp, rotted leaves. Hulda does not move. Her gray eyes are clouded with frost, and her mouth is open. Her stiff fingers claw at empty air, as if she is begging heaven for mercy.
My breath fogging, I crawl forward and poke her arm. She is frozen solid.
I let out a wretched whimper as I wipe my palms on my breeches. “I didn’t mean it,” I whisper to her. And then I rise to my feet and kick her rigid body as my rage at the witch queen rises high enough to choke me. “I didn’t want to hurt you!”
“Hulda!” Gry is shouting for her slave from across the field, and the sound of her voice nearly makes my heart burst.