The Scribe loomed over me as I lay flat on a bitterly cold stone table. The air around him seemed warm, like on one of those rare sun-drenched autumn afternoons, yet I saw my own breath, and my body shivered violently against the frozen rock.
I couldn’t move. Leather bracers held down my arms and legs, and wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I tried to pull away. The Scribe leered, large and overbearing as he brandished the pointed tips of menacing brass instruments. Sticking out the back of the horrifying devices were long tubes of multicolored liquid, which pumped like living veins. He smiled a snarling grin and flicked a finger at a needle that protruded from one of the instruments. A strange blackish goo trickled from the tip, despite the array of colorful liquid that had been pumping into the device. I’d never seen a shade like that before, darker than night, absorbing the other colors around it with a blurred haze, like I had been gazing into the sun for too long.
He gave the needle a final tap and rather than poking me with it gingerly, he lifted the brass instrument into the air, and brought it down like an ax or a sword.
I screamed as the needle pierced my arm and he pressed a button on the end of the device. I thrashed as the multicolored fluid pumped into the needle. It poured and pushed itself into my skin. I glanced over at the braces that held down my body and watched terrified as the Ink crept its way through my skin. It swirled and morphed, changing shapes and patterns and strange runic symbols that only a Scribe could understand.
Suddenly, the smile faded from his face, curled into a bitter frown, and then, slowly, morphed into a look of terror. He ran out of the room and yelled something I couldn’t quite make out, then returned with Citadel Guards. He pointed at my Ink, which had grown thicker and darker. The patterns disappeared and congealed into a solid mass, my skin turning to onyx. I tried to move my legs, and discovered they were impossibly heavy.
The guards drew their swords. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. The Citadel Guards took their weapons up—their blades were upon me . . .
“Caenum! Caenum, wake up! Are you all right?”
I awoke in a cold sweat, my breath short and choked. Dreya sat next to me, her hands gripping my shoulder. She shook me hard, her eyes awash in concern.
“Yeah just . . . just another dream,” I said, and wiped my forehead. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the sweat pressing against my back and under my knees on the straw mat Dreya had laid out for me on her living room floor. My tunic and pants were balled up next to me, and I pulled a fraying blanket up around me, feeling awkward in my pants-less state as Dreya crouched next to me. My wrists ached, and I could have sworn there was a light red bruising on my arms. Everything felt far too real.
“Didn’t I come here last night so I could avoid this kind of stuff? Can we just relax and forget about it, please?”
“Relax?” Dreya asked, a singular eyebrow arching as she stood. “I don’t think so, buddy. I didn’t sneak you in here under my parents’ noses for nothing.” She winked and walked out of her living room and toward her bedroom, a small open door that I could see from my place on the floor. “Get ready. You’re coming with me to gather herbs and flowers.”
“I don’t really think I’m up for it, Dreya.” I protested, rolling over onto my side on the mat as she started to get ready for the day.
“I let you stay here last night, didn’t I?” she asked, and peeked at me from her bedroom as she fussed with her clothes.
“Sure, but I slept on the floor! My back is killing me!” I exclaimed.
“All right look,” she said, disappearing into her room again. “Maybe we can take a nap by the woods, as long as you promise not to have any more scary dreams. We can pack you a stuffed animal if you need it. I think I have a rabbit around here somewhere. Maybe a sheep?”
“Hey!”
“Now, you either come with me,” she continued, “or I’m not talking to you until after the winter.”
“What? That lasts for months. We live next door to each other. Who will you talk to?”
Dreya stepped out of her room, wearing a dark-green tunic. “There’s always Weir down at the stables on the edge of the valley,” she said with a mischievous smile.
My face flushed. Weir had long chestnut hair that matched the manes of the horses he tamed. His Ink was lined with dark silhouettes of stallions, rampaging through meadows, fields, forests, all wild with puffs of steam pushing out of their nostrils. Last time we saw him, he was trotting by to visit the farm to pick up some old apples from my grandmother for his horses. He stopped and nodded to Dreya and me and pulled out a canteen. Opening it, he doused his body, shaking his hair back and forth, the water streaming over his muscular chest, as steam rose off of his skin.
Steam.
Dreya’s mouth went slack, her pupils dilated.
I’ve hated him ever since.
And she knew it.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “When do you want to go?”
“Right now!” She stormed off into the depths of her house, and returned with a beaten up fabric satchel that clinked as she swung it to and fro from the thick glass jars for transporting her flowers.
With only two days left until my Inking I was not in the mood for any sort of adventure. I was busy brooding, and I was getting good at it.
She walked towards the front door and pushed it all the way open, and turned around, fixing her eyes on me. “So are you coming or what?”
I scowled at her. “Can I finish putting my pants on?”
“I love it here in the fall,” Dreya said as we approached the end of my grandmother’s farm. “The colors . . .” She sighed and ran her fingers along her arm, up and around her own neck. I reached for her hands, bringing us to a stop, and smiled. I knew what she was thinking. Soon her Inked flowers would wither and fade. Glacialis was almost here.
I lifted our entwined hands and held them up to my face, and peered over them to look directly at her.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “You made it last time, with the roses.” Dreya winced a little at the mention of the roses. A full year had almost gone by, and it was still too soon. Why did it hurt so much to watch a couple of images fade away? Maybe if I got my Ink, I’d understand her a little better.
“Look,” I tried to reassure her, “you’ll pull through again.”
She looked up at me from behind her impossibly long eyelashes, her eyes watering, and smiled softly.
We sat down at the edge of the farm, the singing of the trees all around us. Dreya fiddled with something in her pack and slowly revealed some bread, cheese, and crackers stashed away in a small fabric satchel. I looked at her and grinned, about to say something.
“Wait. I’m not done,” she said with a smirk.
With that, she plucked out a small canteen, fashioned out of some sort of animal hide, brown with white spots. She loosened the top and tossed it over to me. I caught it and took a sip.
Wine.
I looked at the canteen quizzically. “What’s with the picnic?”
She snatched the canteen out of my hand and took a swig, splashes of red dripping from the corners of her mouth.
“Oh, shut it, Caenum. I just wanted to get you away from all . . .” she made a sweeping gesture with the canteen, “all that. I was planning on dragging you out, even before our run-in with that jerk in the wagon.”
She threw the canteen back to me. I took another careful sip, the wine sweet and strangely floral. It was different from anything Dreya and I had ever stolen a swig of at a party in the town square. I looked at her questioningly.
“Rose wine,” Dreya said. “Something new my mother and father have been brewing up. With Glacialis approaching and all the leftover dried roses in storage we’ve got from last season . . . well, we’re going to need something to trade. Dried flowers are great when people still want decorations and are concerned with their homes smelling nice, but you know how it gets in the last months. Thought I’d take a little, see what you thought.”
“It’s really good.” I held out the canteen and she put a hand up, shook her head, and started slicing up the bread and cheese. I sighed and fell back onto the grass, feeling content. But still, something stirred inside my chest. “Dreya, what if I get Inked with something that takes me away from here?”
“Didn’t I just tell you to shut it?” she asked, giving me a shove.
“Seriously,” I said, looking up at the tall, ancient trees.
“Caenum—” Dreya started. I could tell she knew where this was going.
“Away from you?” I interrupted.
There it was. The mix-up with the Scribe, the panic over what my future would hold, where my destiny would take me—none of that really mattered if it kept me in Frosthaven. If my Ink could keep me here, then maybe, just maybe, I’d get it instead of running away.
We sat there quietly for a while until I broke the silence. “Dreya?”
Dreya stood up without a word and darted off toward the farm, to the soft golden fields.
“What are you doing?” I called after her. “I was asking you a—”
“You think too much!” she hollered back, her hand hovering above the strands of grain as they rustled in the wind. I bolted after her, and as I approached, she took off again, making me chase her through the thin golden wisps.
Growing up, I couldn’t be bothered with any other friends, and whenever I saw Dreya out running through town or in the fields with someone else . . . well, it was the only time I ever wrestled with what had to be jealousy. She’d call me over, invite me to play along, and I’d retreat back into my grandmother’s cottage or hide somewhere in the strands of wheat. I’d rather be alone, than share her with anyone else.
A silly thing, really. Just because I wanted to be alone didn’t mean she had to be.
I chased after her, careful not to trample the thin stalks of grain, zigzagging along the short, narrow rows my grandmother and I had made in the fields. It was actually kind of impossible to catch someone while running through the grain, without running through all of it and crushing the plants, that is. Unless one of us stopped or jumped though, you just couldn’t catch up.
So I ducked down.
I sat, hidden among the tall stalks of grain, their thin beige stems jutting up toward the sky, and I listened. Mixed in with the sounds of the wind rustling the grain and the autumn leaves skittering across the ground, I could hear Dreya’s footfalls as she ran about.
“Caenum!” I heard Dreya shout from somewhere in the fields. I stifled a laugh. “Caenum? Oh, come on, where did you go?”
I held myself still, alone with the soil and the plants.
“Where are you?” Dreya asked out loud.
And suddenly, her searching and her questions weren’t funny anymore.
How would it be, when I was really gone?
I jumped to my feet, just in time for Dreya to run right into me, sending us tumbling into the wheat.
“You all right?” I asked, looking her up and down, brushing the dirt from my shirt.
“I’m fine, I . . .”
Her arms wrapped around me, and I decided, then and there, that I couldn’t leave.
“Dreya . . . ,” I started, placing a hand on her cheek. “You know I—”
“No.” She stopped me, and reached her arm up around my neck. “You know you don’t have to say it. I know.”
“But I—”
“I know, Caenum.”
Her amber eyes wide, we leaned in toward one another, my hand on her cheek, her hand grasping the back of my head.
And then a flash of light nearly blinded us. The whole world went solid white. A loud, angry, roaring crash sounded with it, then everything was a blank canvas, stark, empty.
We jerked back from one another, startled.
“What was that!” I exclaimed. I shook my head, quickly blinking my eyes and rubbing at them. I couldn’t shake the phosphorescent spots that darted in and out of my vision as the world came back into focus.
“I don’t know,” Dreya said, rubbing her eyes.
And that’s when we heard the screaming.