Winter, White and Wicked - Shannon Dittemore Page 0,54
harder.
Three prongs free, and then four!
But I’m too tired to rejoice. I drop the pliers to the ground and yank the mallet from my belt.
I have to pull myself upright in order to reach the back of the harpoon. Have to sit on the edge of the trailer. I lean out as far as I can and whack the end of the projectile with the mallet. Again and again.
The projectile shifts forward with each strike and still I swing harder.
I pull it back one last time and the mallet flies from my hand. I wheel around and find myself looking up at Hyla standing behind me on the trailer.
“Mars is asking for you,” she says, my mallet held aloft.
“Kyn needs kol,” I say. “Can’t you hear him?”
And then I realize there’s nothing to hear. The sky has gone quiet. Kyn’s wails are gone and there’s nothing but a deadly silence glistening on the snow.
CHAPTER 13
“He’s not dead, Miss Quine.”
He’s not. Kyn’s not dead. He’s been ghosted up and into the trailer, into the sleeper cab. The mess has been shoved to the far corner and, despite the cross-hatching of red slashes across his chest and neck, Kyn looks almost peaceful against the mismatched blankets and pillows that make up my bed.
“He looks . . . better,” I say. The blood has been dabbed away and something shimmers on Kyn’s wounds, something wet.
I’m sitting next to him on the bed, my hands clasped, not quite resting in my lap, not quite reaching for his softly curled fingers. My heart bangs about in my rib cage, its edges sharp, its corners jagged. Every beat stabs and slices and I know my insides will never be the same again.
I’ve never felt what I’m feeling right now.
“You had kol,” I say, surprised by my own surprise. Mars has it running through his veins. Should I be shocked that he carries some on his person? “What did you mix it with? Snow?”
“We don’t mix kol with her magic. It’s blasphemous.”
I knew that. Somewhere in the back of my mind I did. I’d been taught the Kerce beliefs about Winter’s magic and kol.
“You need to stay with him,” Mars says. There’s something in his voice. It sounds a lot like guilt.
I turn to face him. “We need to go.”
“We will,” Mars says.
“We can’t linger here. Not in the pass. There shouldn’t be another squad of Rangers nearby, but there’s no knowing what Winter will conjure next. She’s strongest here. We need to go.”
“We will. But not before we’ve gathered what twyl we can.”
“Twyl?”
“Dove foxes ravaged our store. Adorable little lovers, aren’t they?” He closes his eyes, rubs a heavy hand over his neck muscles.
We really need to go.
“How much twyl do you think we need?”
“We’ve still got the Seacliff Road ahead of us, Miss Quine. I know from my experience on the Kol Sea that we can’t navigate that without a decent store of it.”
I go still, fighting to keep my face clear. Maybe he trusts me now. Maybe it isn’t just fatigue that has him spilling his secrets, but he’s given me a lot of information in very few words and my mind spins, looking for answers. Looking for the rebel camp.
The Seacliff Road.
That means we’re taking the Shiv Road all the way to the mines at North Bend.
From there, you can’t turn west along the northern coast, not in a rig. The road turns east on a roughly cut stretch of rock called the Seacliff Road.
But that road was abandoned years ago—the waters in the surrounding seas have the highest concentration of kol anywhere on or near Layce, and it is prime hunting grounds for the Abaki.
“Abaki” loosely translates to abomination in the common tongue. Few on the island have ever seen one and lived to share much about the encounter. Everything I know about that stretch of road says there’s no safe place for a camp. Which really only leaves one option for a legitimately hidden location.
Queen’s Point, the tip of Layce’s northeast wing. A mountainous peninsula that could combat some of the kol blowing in off the sea. Anything beyond that and we would have turned south after High Pass, approached the eastern shore from the other direction.
And Kyn. Kyn’s never taken the Shiv Road—he said as much—but he has been to the camp. And if Mars has spent time on the Kol Sea, that means there has to be a hidden port somewhere along the northern coast.