“Thank you,” I said, and sliced the stem. As soon as the stalk was cut, the spark in the center of the flower fizzled out. Even without the flame at its heart, the blossom remained more vibrant than anything that bloomed outside the cave—the purple as rich as the indigo sky just after a summer sunset. I tucked the flower into my basket and smeared a bit of balm over the severed stem.
I asked for a few blossoms of each color, harvesting them and then tucking them into the narrow wooden boxes in my satchel. I took my time, making sure all the plants were healthy and strong. A soft peace came over me with the ritual. Sometimes I felt more kinship with the fire flowers than people. Like me, these flowers lived in seclusion, hidden away from the world. To help mortals, their lives ended sooner—as would mine if I used my true gift.
After emerging from the cave, I shivered in the cooler air and whispered the crack in the mountain closed again. I should have taken advantage of the warmer weather to go to the lake for the water I needed to complete my tinctures, but I still had time. Waiting a few more days or even a week would ensure that the ice had begun to melt. Instead, I hiked back to the south. I couldn’t resist checking for signs that the path to the village had begun to clear.
Farther down the mountain, the trees grew closer together and the snow deeper in the shadows beneath them. I slogged through until I reached the vista, a rocky outcropping that ended in a cliff. Thin clouds hung in the trees like veils on either side of the valley. I froze at the tree line, caught between hope and fear.
A person stood with their back to me, looking down at the valley, waiting.
CHAPTER 2
NO ONE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO MAKE IT UP THE mountain so early. Last time I checked, the path had been buried in snow so thick as to make it invisible, the bridge near the waterfall still encased in ice. But one sole person might have tried to reach me, and this was where I’d told her to meet me when spring came.
“Ina?” I asked.
She turned as I emerged from the trees, pulling down the hood of an indigo cloak that fluttered around her boots in the breeze.
“Asra,” she said, her face lighting up.
Feelings that had lain dormant in me all winter rose as though they had wings.
“You’re back!” I rushed over to throw my arms around her.
We hugged and laughed breathlessly for a few moments, and when we pulled apart, I finally let myself look at her. Ina had changed since last summer. She was taller and a little more chiseled in the cheekbones, even more beautiful. The memories of her I’d held close for moons didn’t do justice to the sight of her straight nose, long flat eyebrows, and the barest hint of a cleft in her chin—the place I used to sometimes put my thumb before I pulled her in for a kiss. Her eyes were the same bottomless blue I remembered, and I never wanted to come up for air.
“Hello, you,” she said. The gentle tone of her voice made a flush rise into my cheeks.
Before I could speak, she pressed a kiss to my lips. Suddenly my insides were in my toes and my head was lost among the stars, all the words I’d saved for her through the dark nights of winter forgotten.
“I came as soon as I could,” she said. “I’ve hardly been able to think of anything else.”
“Me either,” I said, and fell into her arms again. My stomach fluttered like the wings of a butterfly. With the way she made me feel, sometimes I thought she was as magical as the fire flowers. All winter I’d been incomplete, and now I was whole. She gave me hope that I didn’t have to be alone forever, that maybe I could have a place in the community by her side now that Miriel was no longer here to forbid it.
“Why did you come so early? It can’t have been safe.” I examined her for any signs of harm, but she looked as radiant as ever.
“It was a hard winter.” She gestured to the valley.
Far below us, dozens of snow-covered A-frame rooftops poked up on either side of the river, barely visible but for the wisps of smoke rising from their chimneys. On the opposite side of the valley, where the hills were gentler than the sheer cliffs we stood upon, spots of scorched earth dotted the hillside like a disease.
Funeral pyres. Sorrow made a lump rise in my throat. Through the winter I had occasionally smelled smoke, and I had seen one or two pyres on my other trips down to the vista. A few funerals was a normal number for a village of Amalska’s size, but with fog hovering in the valley most mornings, I hadn’t been able to see how many there were until now. What made it worse was that more probably lingered under the most recent dusting of snow.
“There are so many,” I said, my voice nearly breaking. Those were people whose care had been entrusted to me. Unknowingly, I had failed them.
“We lost half the village to fever in the last two moons,” Ina said softly. The strained expression on her face gave away how keenly she felt the deaths.
“No!” That had to be as many as a hundred people. She must have lost friends. Maybe even relatives. A wave of guilt followed. “Is your family all right?”
“For now. They’ve been helping tend the sick, though, so who knows how much longer their luck will hold. We ran out of your tinctures almost eight weeks ago. And of course it’s been impossible to get up here until now. We tried, but one climber broke his leg and another fell to his death near the ice falls. We gave up after that.” Ina’s shoulders sagged.
“Eight weeks?” I was horrified. Even in the case of disease, the villagers should have had plenty of medicines to last the winter. Miriel and I had never left them undersupplied, even in years of weak harvest when they had little to offer in trade.
Guilt tasted bitter in my mouth. I should have moved to the valley last summer, but memories of Miriel’s warnings had held me back. When her time to meet the shadow god had drawn near, I’d pleaded with Miriel to give her blessing for me to join the villagers. If I moved there, I could help deliver babies born out of season, or get access to herbs that bloomed earlier down there than on our mountain. She refused to hear of it, reminding me that the gods had ordained my place in the world and that I needed to be wary of mortals. They would discover my gifts, she said. They would hurt me to help themselves.
But now all I knew was that my obedience had led to the death of half the village.
Ina nodded. “As if that wasn’t bad enough, half a moon ago we received a messenger pigeon from farther south with a report of bandits. Raiders barely waited for the ground to thaw before they attacked one of the villages north of Kartasha.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. Bandits were a summer problem. They traveled when the roads were clear and produce or livestock was easy to steal, not when the snow had barely melted and the nanny goats hadn’t even birthed their kids.
“My parents released a pigeon to the king in hopes of getting some support to fend them off if they come north. His reply said, ‘The crown does not currently have enough resources to support communities not in immediate danger.’” Her expression darkened. “I suppose the fact that our village is on a trade route only open in summer makes us less important. Or worse, dispensable.”
I squeezed her arm gently. “All communities matter. No one is dispensable.”
“You may believe that, but apparently the king doesn’t. The crown has done very little to quell banditry in the south these last few years. It’s gotten bad enough that I’ve been working on my own plans to do something about it if I’m elected elder.”
Her words worried me. Last year’s harvest had been a good one. Oversupplied with food and short on fighting bodies, a village decimated by fever would make a tempting target. If Ina’s parents had told him the whole story, why hadn’t he sent help?
“I can at least give you some potions for any who are still ill. Come home with me?” I extended my arm.