“Well, which is it?” He’s shivering in the dank air of this tunnel.
“I—I—wanted to ask him . . . about my . . .” I hold up my right hand.
He lifts the torch and peers at my palm. “The blisters?”
I pull my hand back and gaze at the torn skin and toughening calluses. “No.” The pain of them is satisfying. It means I’ve worked hard. “It’s actually—” I gesture at my scarred knuckles and say the first thing that comes to me. “You’d think, once they’d been cut off, that they’d really be gone. That I wouldn’t feel them anymore. But the opposite is true.” My voice has become a strangled squeak. “They hurt me more now than they ever did when they were part of me.”
I’m not just talking about my fingers, I realize. I’m talking about my life. Mim. Sofia. My future. My duty. All sheared away, all haunting me.
Oskar’s eyes are dark as he moves closer. He offers his embrace hesitantly, like he thinks I might shy away. But I’m so wretched that I accept it, leaning my head on his chest and grimacing, my eyes squeezed shut, the pain of all my ghosts overwhelming me. He strokes my long hair and shushes me as if I were a child. “I didn’t know you were in so much pain,” he says quietly. “You seemed to be doing so well.”
“I need Raimo.” My hands ball in Oskar’s tunic. I wish I could lay all of this across his broad shoulders, because I am so tired of carrying it alone. “Raimo sent me away too soon. He has answers that I need.”
“You won’t find him now, Elli. He disappears every winter, and has for as long as I’ve known him. If I thought it was possible to find him, I’d take you to him myself.”
I believe Oskar would do it. I can tell by the sorrow in his voice. I press my forehead to his firm shoulder, inhaling the scent of wood smoke and sweat and something cold and astringent. “I don’t know what to do,” I whisper. “Everything fell apart, and I can’t put it back together.”
Oskar’s heart kicks hard beneath my hand. I look up at him, but his face is tilted toward the tunnel’s ceiling. “I know what that’s like,” he murmurs.
His arm falls away from me, and I step back. “And what did you do?” I ask.
“I went on,” he says. “I kept living.” He offers his free hand, and when I take it, he looks down at me. “I’m sorry it hurts.”
It will always hurt. That’s what his eyes say.
But what can I do? Fall apart? Scream and cry? No. I am meant for something. I’m not ready to stop believing that yet.
I swipe my sleeve across my eyes and let out a long breath. “I suppose I’ll keep living, then,” I say, the words echoing down the tunnel.
Oskar squeezes my fingers. With my hand in his, he leads me back to the main cavern.
CHAPTER 12
As the days grow short and the darkness stretches long, I keep living. But Oskar seems to die a little every night. He stays up late and stares at the fire, but eventually he nods off and the ice begins his nightly torture. Though it’s painful to witness, I can’t leave him alone, even though he hasn’t spoken to me since that day in the tunnel. I don’t take it personally—he hasn’t spoken to anyone else, either. It’s as if his whole self is focused inward.
In the fortnight since Freya and Maarika put an end to my hiding, I’ve ventured out every day, eating lunch with the women around the community hearth, bringing Oskar tea as he plays cards by the big fire in the evenings. I meet people’s eyes. I smile. Our conversations are about now—the best ways to oil boots to keep the damp from seeping in, how to angle a knife to more efficiently scrape fur from flesh, how much water to add to the cornmeal to keep us satisfied while stretching what we have left.
But there’s a bigger now that won’t leave our minds. Every day we talk about whether the Saadella has been found, why her family hasn’t given her to the elders yet, how thick the ice on the Motherlake has become—and whether the Soturi would dare try to cross it on foot. I’m as hungry for answers as the rest, perhaps hungrier since I have so much to learn about this world and my place in it. But when the talk turns to the Valtia and why she’s abandoned us, I make my excuses and leave in desperate search of something else to do, my stomach churning with a bitter brew of failure and shame.