Weavers (The Frost Chronicles) (2 page)

Adam’s hand brushed my shoulder—a single, light touch. A question. Was I ready? The moonlight glinted off his eyes. In response to his unspoken words, I stepped forward into the field toward the road. I was ready.

We reached the river. Here, the sky loomed over us, steel gray and too big, and I shivered. I couldn’t feel safe under such a large sky after a life beneath the trees. The water glittered like ink as it glided past, smooth and unstoppable. Once this river had formed the boundary between the Frost and Aeralis, the place the Farthers would not cross. But no longer. Now, they had spilled over into our land, bringing with them their oiled weapons, their crude mechanical technology, their glove-clad cruelty.

Adam crouched beside the water and dug another small hole. He filled it with supplies and marked the place by drawing the Thorns symbol on the trunk of a sapling above it.

I stared across the river at the road as he worked. The sense of danger I felt looking at it mingled with a sudden, intense need to stand in the place where so many others had made their escape. I turned and scanned the bank of the river.

There—a fallen tree stretched across a shallow point like a bridge. I jogged down the bank and scrambled up the roots. My heart galloped. My mouth was dry. I grasped the rough bark of the tree and hauled myself up.

Adam followed at my back like a shadow. I expected him to grab my arm, hiss in my ear to stop, to tell me to wait for him while he crossed alone. But he didn’t.

The tree trembled as I crossed it, but it bore my weight easily. I reached the other side and jumped down. The Frost was at my back. Aeralis’s border was before me. A shiver spread over my skin. I tingled from my scalp to my fingertips. I’d never been on this side of the river.

Adam landed beside me. I caught the flash of his quick smile in the blackness.

“I just wanted—” I began.

His voice was just a tickle in my ear. “You’ve never been across the river, have you?”

The warmth of his breath against my skin made me flush. I nodded and moved away an inch. There was tension between us now, a dance of avoided topics and guarded looks. Perhaps the unlikely attraction had always been there, lurking just beneath the surface. But since I’d almost kissed him in the barn a few weeks ago, the feelings had grown into a thrumming heat that filled every word, every look, every interaction. I didn’t know how to deal with it. He’d become woven into the fabric of my existence, mingled with the air I breathed. If I reached out, he was there. If I spoke, he answered.

Still, we were separated by a gulf of unspoken feeling that neither of us would express.

Adam noticed when I pulled away slightly, of course, because he noticed everything. He didn’t comment, and his face kept the same neutral expression. But his shoulders stiffened, and when he spoke again, his voice was carefully controlled.

“We should bury the last one by the road.”

He’d been the one to rebuff my advances, but still I caught him staring at me sometimes, his gaze wounded before he hid it behind his careful mask of studied indifference.

Perhaps he was right. I had cared deeply for Gabe, but I’d thought I’d never see him again, so I’d been prepared to relinquish any hope of that love. But now…now there was a chance that I would, and Adam seemed convinced that I would want to rekindle the romance I’d barely had time to explore. So we danced on, our lives in tension and harmony simultaneously as we skirted our feelings and masked our hurt. We’d become a team, working in tandem. We had no time for this attraction and so we didn’t address it. But I still felt the heat simmering in my blood, and judging from the way he was holding himself slightly apart from me now, so did he.

We climbed the bank to the road, and I breathed deeply. Faint light from the horizon glanced off ridges of frozen dirt. Snow lay in the deep places where the wheels had ground into the earth, frothy and white like puss in an infected wound. The road lacerated the land and marred the beauty of the landscape. It was a Farther invention through and through, as ugly as a gun and just as chilling to look upon.

Adam touched my elbow to get my attention. He pointed across the road toward Aeralis. “Do you see it?” A light glimmered in the far darkness as it shot across the sky like a fallen star. I nodded.

“Airship,” he said simply.

I watched as the light traced an arc across the sky and vanished. Wonder and fear swirled in me. What must it be like to fly through the night like that?

We dug the final hole beside the road, on the shoulder where the prisoners might stop to stretch their legs as the soldiers smoked. I pressed a line of stones into the packed clay, forming the symbol that would be so easily overlooked if one didn’t know what to see.

When we’d finished, we stood and stared together down the road.

“I’ve never been this far south,” I said. “This is the first time I’ve crossed the river.”

Adam watched me, not saying anything, just letting me talk.

I wanted to say more—I wanted to verbalize the feelings swelling inside me, the anxiety and frustration and longing—but I couldn’t frame them into words. They slipped away from me, dissolving into unnamable emotions whenever I tried to speak them. So instead, I watched the sun begin to rise against the horizon, where the Aeralian fields stretched into a smudge of black that would eventually become Astralux if we walked far enough. The wind whipped my hair and teased the edges of my cloak. I felt so empty, so fragile, like a glass just waiting to be filled.

“We should get back,” Adam said finally. “We’ve done enough for one trip.”

We climbed back down the bank and crept across the tree stretched over the river. Adam assisted me as I scrambled down to the bank, and his fingers were just as cold as mine. I noticed he winced as he handed me down. Then, I saw the dark stain on his sleeve.

“You’re bleeding.”

He glanced at the place and shrugged. “Just a scratch.”

I remembered the sound whooshing past my head when we were running. The monster had mauled him? A fresh shudder ran over my skin. “Adam...”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. He wiggled his fingers to demonstrate the functionality of the arm and gave me a tense smile. “It’s just a scratch,” he repeated.

Only when we’d stepped back into the shadows of forest did I breath easily again. It was ironic that I felt safe now, here in the Frost, but... Some things were less frightening only because they were familiar.

Picking up our feet, we hurried toward the farm.

WE RETRACED OUR steps through the snow, hurrying because of the growing light. Despite the dangers, there were Huntsmen and Trappers who would venture into the outskirts of the Frost by daylight, and we could not let them find us here. Our presence would cause questions, suspicions. Perhaps even accusations. The reward for captured Thorns agents was great.

Slowly, the world around us turned white with sunrise. When we reached the edge of my family’s farmyard, I took the last few steps alone. I turned once and looked over my shoulder at Adam. He leaned against a tree, not looking at me, probing his wound with his long fingers. His forehead was knit with mild concern, but he hid it when he realized I was watching.

“Are you going to come in?” I asked. “I can clean that.”

He straightened, adjusting his sleeve again. He frowned as if he was weighing the pros and cons of agreeing, and finally he nodded.

My twin brother, Jonn, looked up from the kitchen table as Adam and I entered the house. Papers and charts were piled on the table around him, and bags lined his eyes. He blanched as he saw the blood on Adam’s sleeve, but his voice was calm and cool as if we were discussing the cow. “Watchers?”

I nodded. No need to elaborate—the single word sufficed. It told the whole story in one succinct bite.

Jonn frowned and leaned back over his work as I fetched a bottle of medicinal whiskey and some clean rags to use for bandages from the pantry. Adam leaned against the wall with a sigh and pulled back his sleeve to better see the cut while he waited. “Progress?” he asked Jonn quietly, indicating the papers with a flick of his eyebrows.

I took note of their exchange quietly. Adam and Jonn had experienced some conflict in the past, but they were getting along better now that they were working together on Thorns business, a fact I had observed with pleasure and relief.

“Some,” my brother said, dragging his fingers through his hair and rolling his eyes in exasperation. “I’ve figured out how to ignite the power source, but not much else.” He indicated a diagram spread before him, where a sketch of scribbled ink depicted the mysterious device Adam and I had discovered a few weeks earlier. The PLD, or Portable Locomotion Device. It had originally come from Echlos, the ruined remnant of the Ancient Ones’ laboratory hidden deep in the Frost and guarded by the Watchers. Our father’s family had hidden it away and passed down the secret for generations.

I had many, many questions—we still didn’t know why the Weavers had been entrusted with such a task yet, for instance. It was just one part of an ever-expanding puzzle, one that perhaps went all the way back to the Ancient Days. But we were slowly working through my father’s journals, unearthing the tidbits about our past that gave clues to why our family was linked to Echlos and this device. Jonn in particular had taken to deciphering the bewildering PLD documents as easily as if he’d been doing it his whole life.

I found the supplies to tend to Adam’s arm, but I hesitated a moment in the doorway. My chest ached with sudden pride as I watched my brother conversing with Adam Brewer as an equal. His cheeks were flushed with exhaustion, and his eyes were glassy from pouring over documents by firelight, but he held his head high and his shoulders back with confidence. For most of his life, Jonn had been relegated to the corner or his bed. His twisted leg and bouts of headaches and seizures—the price of a childhood injury—disqualified him from being a fully functioning member of the Iceliss community. In our village, Jonn was viewed with either pity or scorn. But now, working with the Thorns, he pulled his own weight and received the respect that his contribution demanded. And he’d blossomed because of it.

“Does your father mention anything about the PLD in his journals?” Adam asked Jonn as I drew him to a chair and uncorked the whiskey bottle. I splashed some of the drink onto a rag and rolled back his sleeve. It was a clean cut—almost as clean as a knife. The blood had already begun to clot in a dark red line.

Jonn frowned thoughtfully as he considered the question. “Yes—but only bits and pieces, and in such a way that I almost always miss the reference the first time. Everything is coded or cleverly disguised. I think he worried his journals might fall into the wrong hands, so he hid everything important. I’m sure I’m missing something else—a vital piece that will bring it all together.”

Adam shut his eyes as I dabbed whiskey on his cut. He shuddered but didn’t make a sound.

“Maybe we should check the rest of the blankets,” I joked, because the information about the secret location of the PLD had been cleverly hidden in my mother’s Frost quilt, a “woven secret that kept us warm,” as my father had always told us. We’d never realized the full extent of those words until we’d found the map stitched in the quilt. The secret location Adam and I had been searching for had been hidden right beneath my nose the entire time.

Who knew what else my parents had hidden away in this house, among our things?

Jonn snorted and shook his head in a way that told me he’d already examined them all. He leaned back over the papers and scowled at them.

“Where’s Everiss?” I asked, glancing around. Like the predictable gentleman that he was, Jonn had insisted that she take my parents’ old bed, the one he used to sleep in, while he slept by the fire. Usually, she was awake and up by daybreak, anxious to pull her weight around the house.

The tips of my brother’s ears flushed pink as they always did at mention of the newest fugitive to take refuge in our house. “She’s still sleeping. She was up late helping me with the journals.”

“What?” I slammed the whiskey bottle down so hard it sloshed. “What are you thinking? Helping you with Thorns business? She’s a
Blackcoat
. We can’t trust her!”

His eyes blazed. “She brought us the PLD. I don’t see why she can’t know more about it. And even if she still had Blackcoat sympathies—and she doesn’t—who’s she going to tell? She’s stuck here with us. Everyone else thinks she’s dead.”

I looked to Adam for help.

He met my eyes, but I couldn’t read his thoughts in his expression. “He has a point—she
is
injured, sequestered, and totally at our mercy.”

“For now,” I said. “But what about when she’s fully recovered? What if she runs off and tells the Blackcoats everything?”

“She’s not going to do that,” Jonn snapped. “She came to us. She brought the device to us. She could have given the PLD to them—to the Blackcoats—but she didn’t. She brought it here.”

I wasn’t convinced. We’d simply been Everiss’s best bet for survival—nothing more. It wasn’t loyalty or goodwill that had led her to the farm. It was pure, unadulterated self-interest. “I don’t trust her.”

A small cough came from the doorway of my parents’ bedroom. We all turned.

Everiss smoothed a hand over her sleep-rumpled curls and bit her lip. The rims of her eyes were red, but she gave us a smile as if she’d heard nothing. And perhaps she hadn’t. “I was just going to start breakfast…but I seem to have interrupted a discussion. I’ll just work on my weaving until you’re ready for me to join you—”

“We’re done talking,” Jonn said firmly, shooting me a look that could have singed the hair off a horse. “Please stay.”

I clamped my mouth shut and turned away. I would continue this discussion with him later.

Everiss ducked into the bedroom again and reappeared with a basket of yarn. Her gaze drifted over Adam and his injured arm. Her eyebrows lifted, but she didn’t ask any questions. She knew better than that. Taking one look at my face, she moved to Jonn’s side, where she slid into a chair and bent over the basket.