UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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WEEKS PASS. EVERY morning I spend a few horrific minutes wondering if today is the day Angra will send for me, but he doesn’t, and the soldiers lump me with the workers bound for the wall. I work without water until sundown, gulp down cold stew, and collapse in the cage. And every day, through the working, through the waiting, I ask myself the same question, over and over.
What can I do to help us?
I keep this question to myself, tucked carefully in the back of my mind so no one else can get punished for plotting an escape. But every answer I come up with is flimsy and weak. Take down one of the guards—to what end? Shove a few of the soldiers on the ramps to their deaths—and get pulled down myself? There has to be something.
My muscles never get used to the up and down of the ramps, and my legs convulse each night until I pass into restless fits of dreams, dark and scattered flashes that make no sense. Sir and Noam arguing in the Rania Plains, golden prairie grass lashing around them as storm clouds roil above. Mather standing over a dead Spring soldier, eyes on the locket as he holds it out like he wants to drop it into the earth. And Theron caught in a place as black as night, tearing with bloody fingers at shadowy beasts.
Will I ever know what happened to them? Will I ever get to pay my respects to Sir, to stand over his grave and say a final good-bye?
My other dreams, the ones Hannah showed me, are the ones I cling to. The history of magic, the true reason for making the Royal Conduits. Even the flash I saw when I touched Angra, of him meeting Hannah in Winter’s fields, whispering of a deal being struck. There’s something in all this, some solution Hannah was trying to get me to piece together, but all I can come up with are more unanswerable questions.
She said the Decay used people as its conduit. Dark magic chose its host. If dark magic could choose its host—then what about our magic? Where did Winter’s magic go when Angra broke our locket? Did it choose to go somewhere else? Those are questions no one dared asked for sixteen years, because it hurt to consider any alternative—or to think that the magic was gone. So we just plastered on fake smiles and assured each other that it was waiting for us to reunite our conduit’s halves, waiting for us to reconstruct its host.
But what if it went somewhere else? Found another host?
Or what if it’s really gone?
Those questions are too long-term for me, though. I need something to help me now—so I carry the dreams around with me, poking at them from every angle as I traipse up and down the ramps. It all has to fit together.
But I have no idea how.
At night, Nessa tells me about her life. She’s my age, sixteen. Her father was a cobbler who made the best shoes in Jannuari, and her mother was one of Hannah’s seamstresses. So fierce was her parents’ dedication to Winter that when Angra attacked, they ordered Conall, seventeen at the time, to protect Garrigan, twelve, and newborn Nessa while they went to help the fight. They died that night, and both Conall and Garrigan have spent the past sixteen years fighting to stay alive for her.
Nessa talks about these memories as if they’re hers, the same way I would repeat stories to myself until I was positive I had been in Hannah’s court too, and could remember a kingdom locked in snow.
“How do you know all this?” I ask Nessa one night when I can’t take it anymore. When staring at her becomes too unbearable, like looking in a mirror of what my life should have been. Raised in a work camp, forced to build Abril as soon as she was old enough to stand. Surrounded by the remains of a family and the even more scattered pieces of a kingdom, every shattered soul clinging to memories that aren’t Nessa’s or mine.
“My brothers, and the memory cave,” she tells me simply. Like it’s enough to hear passed-down stories and read about our history from hastily scribbled lines on jagged walls of rock. Like those minuscule bits of information are enough for her, just to have something.
Nessa dives back into her story, about a gown her mother made. It had been intended to be a simple state gown, but the stitching was so intricate that Hannah had opted to wear it for her wedding to Duncan, Mather’s father. Nessa lays the words out before me in a carefully woven tapestry of a past that doesn’t belong to either of us. That will someday.
I lean against the wall, knees to my chest. I can’t help but think she’s right—any small bit of information is enough. But we deserve more than that.
And I’m tired of waiting for someday.
Someday we will be more than words in the dark.
That night stays with me through the next few days as I trek up and down the ramps. The swirling memory cave, the words etched in stone, and Nessa’s hopeful sigh.
“These tunnels offer their own type of escape.”
And I realize through all these flickers of desire, these pulses of what could be, that what the Winterians need above all is just what that cave offers, but on a grander scale: hope. Hope to make their lives brighter; hope to help them endure. I have to believe that Mather is still out there, rallying support and preparing an army to march on Spring, and that someday, he’ll tear down Abril’s walls. But whether or not I live to see that day, I will go down in a vicious swirl that will make Angra rue the moment he let Herod put me in here—and that will prove to the Winterians that hope still exists.
Excitement fills me up, makes me jittery and ready to put a plan, any plan, into action. I regret that I let myself wallow so long before I actually tried to do anything. I spent far too long being selfish.
And, one day, a plan forms in my mind. A plan to bring down more than just one or two soldiers—a plan to bring down enough of them that the Winterians have to take notice, have to feel the weight lift. Not freedom, but the first step in a longer journey. A boost in morale.
The city runs with the efficiency and order of a carefully controlled machine—every soldier in his place, every door tightly bolted. This means that schedules are the norm, and weeks of the same routine embed the soldiers’ routines into my mind as well. When they get us every morning; when they dismiss us every night; when they change shifts. The repetition makes them efficient, yes, but it also gives them a huge weakness: it makes them predictable.
I can predict, for instance, that the soldiers stationed on the ramps will change shift every day at noon and that the ramps will clear of Winterians, who gather around the children and their jars of water. For the briefest moment, not only are the ramps clear of Winterians, they’re also packed with double the number of Spring soldiers—those leaving and those taking up their new posts.
And though Herod stripped me of weapons long before we reached Abril, I still have the smallest piece of metal on me—the buckle holding my belt around my pants. So after another endless day working at the wall, I crawl into the cage with Nessa, Conall, and Garrigan, wait for the soldiers to lock us up, and carefully work the buckle out of the leather strap.
Nessa and her brothers eye me as I hunch in the corner, wiggling apart the buckle and using one piece to whittle the other. Scraping metal on metal, so focused I don’t know if Nessa tries to say anything to me before she falls asleep, and by morning, I have a beautiful little knife in my palm. As long as my index finger, one edge worn into a blade. I squeeze it so tightly that the edge bites into my skin as I join the rest bound for the wall.
The routine at the wall is unchanged. Holsters, rocks on our backs, trekking up and down, up and down the creaking wood. Before I head up the ramps, I eye the structure, a quick glance that goes unnoticed. The first plank of wood slopes up from the right side of the structure, connected to the ramps above with posts of wood at every corner. But if the other posts were weakened and the bottom one were to snap as the Spring soldiers changed their shift midday …
If it brings even the smallest blip of hope to the Winterians, it will be worth it.
I twist the makeshift blade in my hand, keeping it poised between my fingers, and with every back and forth, back and forth repetition up the wood planks, I reach out and slide the blade against the posts that hold us in the air. The posts are as thin as my wrist, the wood already warped and brittle under the sun, and it doesn’t take much effort to make small nicks. But only on all the right-side posts, and only enough to slowly, imperceptibly, break it down over the next few days.
Back and forth. Chip.
Back and forth. Chip.
Three days of this, and I’m making progress. I can see thin lines developing on the posts, inconspicuous enough that everyone else brushes right by, mistaking them for the wood’s natural wear. And as the sun stretches higher in the sky that third day, scooting closer and closer to noon, my heart thumps harder and harder in my chest. It’s nearly ready, nearly brittle enough. But what if I miscalculated, and the whole thing comes down too soon? What if I send dozens of Winterians tumbling to their deaths? I don’t have time to answer my own worries. I didn’t miscalculate. I won’t kill anyone but Spring soldiers, and the Winterians will see that fighting back is still possible.
This will work.
Noon comes with the creaking of the gate. Its echoes over the yard, a screeching wail that makes adrenaline burst within me. I take a deep breath and slow my pace on the ramps, falling to the back of the line of Winterians heading down for their noon water break.
I exhale, dragging my feet, watching the last Winterian trudge into the dirt.
Now.
Spring soldiers file past me, stomping up the ramp to their posts. I count them, adding their numbers to the ones already above me. Twenty-four.
Now.
I swipe the knife through the final post one last time, deepening the gouge I’ve been making for the past three days.
NOW.
With a sharp bump, my shoulder connects to the post, snapping the weak thing in half. I keep walking, my eyes on the people ahead of me, the Winterians sipping water out of clay ladles. Not on the ramps, the other right-side posts breaking, one after another, all the way up.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Everything holds for one moment, the intake of breath before the agonizing wail of terror. Then, as if they all realized what was happening at the same time, every Spring soldier shouts, the planks disintegrating under their feet in one great crack of splintering wood.
The Winterians gape at the collapsing structure. Other Spring soldiers dash forward like they might be able to help, like they might be able to stop it. And I swing around on my heels to watch it fall, to watch it all crumble, unable to get rid of the wicked grin on my face.
I hope you feel them die, Angra, I think, my nose flaring in a growl. I hope you feel their bodies break.
“You!”
In the chaos of the structure falling, in the cloud of dust that explodes up around the shattered wood, a soldier looks at me. His face scrunches in a livid rage, one hand pointing toward me.
“You did this!” he snarls.
I don’t know how he knows. Maybe he saw me bump the post; maybe he saw my smile. However he knows, I confirm it by grinning and holding up the wonderful little knife. I don’t care anymore. I showed the Winterians that fighting back is still possible. I don’t need to look behind me to see what emotion cloaks them—wonder or relief or fear. Whatever it is, it’ll eventually turn to hope. It will eventually start their blizzard.
And I would have been able to go numb in that thought, to let whatever fate descend upon me like a deluge of rain, if not for the sudden cry that pierces the air.
“Don’t hurt her!”
The little boy. The one who got scolded for offering me water that first day, the one who has watched me every day since, his round blue eyes apologetic and curious and determined all at once. Every day he looks at me, his fingers tight on his ladle of water. And every day he twitches toward me half a step, like he wants to break the rules, wants to help me, but always gives in to his fear before he gets farther.
But today he casts off his fear, slamming his ladle on the ground in a shatter of clay. He races across the yard toward me, flying around the dozens of slack-jawed Winterians who stare at the still-settling mess of wood and dust and rocks, the debris interspersed with the bodies of Spring soldiers.
All attention sucks to the boy, his little legs pumping over the ground, shouting as he goes, “Don’t hurt her! I want her to live—don’t hurt her! STOP HURTING US!”
His voice rips into me, sharper than the knife in my hand, deadlier than the structure that just collapsed. I grip my chest, my fingers digging into the space over my heart.
He’s going to get himself killed. Because of me.
The soldier whirls as the boy stumbles to a halt in front of him. The boy’s round face pulses red in his anger, his hands in tight little fists, his eyes alive with fury. He snarls up at the soldier like that’s all it takes to stop an attack, and stands there, holding his ground.
The soldier blinks in surprise before he reacts. I see it all happen in a flash of terror and I scream, a single word bursting through my confidence, through my satisfaction at killing so many of Angra’s men all at once, through any excitement I had in coming up with this plan.
“STOP!”
Nothing stops, though. Not the soldier, not the men beyond him, scrambling to pick through the rubble, dragging out a few still-alive comrades. Not comprehension creeping over me, showing me what I just did, what’s happening around me.
I could have killed my own people. And now the boy will suffer for it.
“Winterian scum,” the soldier hisses, yanks a whip off of a hook on his belt, and unwinds it in a single crack that sends the boy crumbling to his knees, ripping flesh from his brittle bones.
“Stop!” I cry again, and lunge forward, but cold hands pull me back and the small knife flies from my grip, scattering into the dust. I yank on two Winterian men who hold me but they don’t relent, their faces set in determined glares.
“You’re making it worse,” one grunts, and shakes me back. Even farther from the boy, who screams again, the whip’s cracking the only other sound to break his pain.
“I can’t just stand here,” I bite back. “I can’t do nothing anymore.”
I don’t regret bringing the ramps down. I don’t regret taking action. But I will always regret letting any Winterian hurt when I could help them, when I could have saved them. I’ve been selfish for far too long, and too many people have died.
Tears spring to my eyes, blurring everything. The men release me when I shove them off and fling myself toward the boy. His back is a bloody mess now, thick lines of maroon running through a smear of scarlet red. I slide to my knees in front of him, cradling his white head as he holds himself in a ball on the dirt. Grabbing on to him like I should have grabbed the man, his heavy black rock pulling him off the platform, rolling through the air like a magnet getting dragged to its mate. Helpless and alone, falling and falling, left to die while a battle rages on around him, while I get thrown through the air by a cannon and Mather gets dragged to Bithai …
The whip pops but I catch it this time, the leather licking around my arm and holding tight. I grab the thicker end and yank, pulling it out of the soldier’s hand in one flesh-biting jerk. The soldier’s eyes flash wide before he barks for help from nearby men, from other soldiers struggling between saving their comrades and the growing panic around the boy and me.
I pivot to the boy, the whip still around my forearm. “You’ll be all right—” I start, but see his back. Blood pours down his sides from the ripped flesh, his ribs sticking out as white islands in a blood red sea. He doesn’t move, doesn’t cry, doesn’t do anything but stay curled on the dirt.
My hands go to his head. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, my forehead pressed to his matted hair. He squirms, a flicker of life in my palms. “I’ll make this better, somehow, I’ll save you.”
This is so wrong. And I can’t change it, couldn’t stop it, made it worse—I did this to him.
A chill turns my limbs to ice, makes my lungs freeze so much I’m sure frost puffs out with my breath. Everything about me turns to snowy chill, my hands freezing in a cage around the boy’s head. So wondrously cold, every fiber in me twisting like ice-covered branches in a forest—am I slipping away now? Is the horror of this pushing me to death?
This is how I felt when Sir died. This uncontainable chill, everything in me going numb. This is how death feels.
Soldiers break through the snowy vortex of my panic, their rough fingers grabbing me and hauling me up, yanking the whip off my arm and tearing me away from the boy. I pull against their grip, kicking out at them, fighting to get back to the child.
The boy peeks at me from between his fingers, his blue eyes rimmed with tears and …
Relief.
He’s relieved. I gawk, not sure if what I’m seeing is real or some distorted image I want to be real with all my heart. My eyes travel past his face to his back, his back that should be bloody and gruesome, but … isn’t now. His torn shirt shows clean white skin gleaming in the hot sun, not a scar or a scrape or a single lingering cut. Like he was never whipped at all.
The soldiers holding me notice it too. Everyone feels it, this moment, echoing through the Winterians as they’re filled with the same relief. He’s healed.
A wave of cold slides through me, and I want to bask in it forever, let icy flakes coat my body, whisk me away to somewhere peaceful and safe. No one else around me seems aware of the sudden cold I feel, and I wonder if I’m hallucinating.
The soldiers wake from their stupors before I do. Their hands tighten on my arms, fingers slipping in the blood that cakes my skin from where the whip bit into my forearm. They drag me away, through the crowd of Winterians who gape as I pass.
She brought the ramps down. She healed the boy.
A Winterian man steps forward. One of the many who looked at me with suspicion and hatred, who echoed Conall’s distrust of me. His face relaxes in a smile so genuine and pure I expect the entire foundation of Abril to shatter in two, and he lifts his arms into the air, tips his head back, and screams. His cry of joy is the shock wave that sets off the rest, the screams and cries rippling through the Winterians like their excitement had been building since the first post snapped. Spring soldiers look up from the bodies of their dead comrades, their fallen ramps. Their prisoners have never had such joy before. How do they stop it?
I’m so lost in the euphoria around me that I don’t notice the guards dragging me back into Abril until the gate closes behind me. But even as the heavy iron bars drop into place, the cold in my body doesn’t dissipate. The Winterians’ cheers don’t fade.
Angra can hear it, I’m sure. He can feel the shift in the air, the joy spreading like wafting flurries of snow through the Abril work camp. My grin returns, bursting across my face.
Soon he’ll know the blizzard started with me.