Wicked As You Wish (A Hundred Names for Magic #1) - Rin Chupeco Page 0,87
you gotta learn to give people their privacy.”
Alex was still nursing his hand, glaring at the tree like it had punched him first when Tala approached. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I lost my head back there.”
“Yeah, and you’ll be losing more things if you don’t rein in your temper. Let me see if you broke it.”
“It’s not,” he muttered, but allowed her a look. The knuckles were tinged blue, the rest of his fist reddened, but that seemed the extent of it. Alex was still staring out into the distance, at the faint silhouette of the village up ahead.
“Do you really want to go and see what’s happened to it?” Tala asked gently.
Alex’s lips twisted. “I do and I don’t. The count’s right. I…don’t know what I’m going to find there. I don’t want to be here, Tally.”
“But I thought the whole purpose was to come back?”
“Not like this. I wanted to come back as a liberator, leading an army with a bag full of spells that could beat back the frost and lift the curse. Not like this. Not like some vagabond who got past the barrier because of some unexpected fluke.” Alex’s tone was desperate. “How can I face any survivors here and tell them I still don’t have the answers?”
Tala squeezed his arm. “I don’t know as much about this as you or my parents or Lola Urduja do, but they’re a lot cleverer than us. If they or the Cheshire had gone years without knowing how to break the curse, then I think liberation is gonna take a lot longer than you think. It could be decades before we would have found a way in. Maybe the firebird brought us here for a reason. Maybe this is how we get to free them.”
Alex looked down at his hand. “Wanna know the irony? I’ve never met the Cheshire. All our communications have been through encrypted, untraceable software he’s given me. He’s been responsible for keeping me alive for this long. I don’t know if I can do this on my own without his advice.”
“We’re not exactly the Cheshire, but if it’s any consolation, you’ve got us.”
“Yeah. I’ve got you. I want to get to Maidenkeep. That’s it. Once we get to Maidenkeep, I can fix everything.”
“How?”
“Just trust me on this, okay?” A pause. “You know, there was an ancestor of mine, Queen Talia, that was hit by a death curse once. Her priestesses couldn’t undo it, so they mitigated it instead, changed it into a sleeping curse to buy them enough time to find a cure. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do, trying to mitigate all the damage here that I can see.”
“You also have to accept that you might not be able to, though.”
“I know.” He hesitated again. “Sorry. I’m gonna go apologize. But we’re going to that village. If I have to be here, then at least let me see with my own eyes what the people here had suffered through for my family.”
* * *
They didn’t stay long. What few houses had survived the storm were locked inside blocks of ice, frozen completely solid.
It was so cold that it looked like the people were only sleeping. The frost had come upon them almost a dozen years ago, Tala thought, but it could have just been yesterday.
Zoe stifled a sob. “She’s going to pay,” Ken said tersely, fiercely. “She has to.”
Carefully, Alex stepped past the fallen bodies. He stopped before a young girl who couldn’t have been more than three years old, layers of snow piling around her like a shroud. He bent down and gently brushed a wayward lock of hair from her forehead. When he took his hand away and stood again, something sparkled down his fingers and traced their way down the young girl’s face, like tiny snowflakes.
“Is there anything around,” he said, “that could be used as a shovel?”
It took a few hours. Alex had refused to bury them completely, insisted on leaving their faces and chests exposed. It was an odd request, but as it wouldn’t change anything, nobody protested. When Cole was done hefting the last of the snow into place, Alex glanced wearily at the unmoving figures on the ground, carefully tucked into the layers of snow. The firebird folded itself onto his shoulder and watched him, cooing softly. Alex reached up without thinking and patted it on the neck.
“It was quick,” Loki said somberly. “No pain. They didn’t spend years slowly starving to death.”