Weavers (The Frost Chronicles) (25 page)

“Is everyone assembled?” Jacob asked. He swept the crowd with his gaze as the travelers muttered and looked around. It was less than a third of the fugitives.

I checked the clock. We had five more minutes until we left.

A few more people trickled in and joined us.

And then, it was time.

I activated the gate. The light peeled back like the widening of a pupil in the middle of a vibrant green eye. The blackness in the middle writhed and breathed.

I pointed at Jacob. “Go.”

He sucked in a breath, lifted a pack to his shoulders, and stepped into the space. And he was gone.

One by one, the travelers followed. And one by one they vanished, until only Gabe and I were left. We looked at each other.

“You first,” I said, and he nodded.

When he vanished, tears flooded my eyes. It was the same and yet it was so wholly different. I dragged in a final lungful of the hot, moist air of this younger place and prepared to step forward.

The door banged behind me. Claire burst into the room, and her eyes widened as she saw the vortex. She darted past me and through the gate before I could stop her.

The door opened again, and Doctor Borde stumbled into the room. His mouth dropped open in wonder at the glow of the gate. “Wait—Lia!”

I had no time. The gate was closing.

His face was the last thing I saw before the darkness took me.

BLACKNESS FADED TO gray, and the gray bleached to white. A rushing filled my ears. My limbs tingled. I was cold.

So cold.

Hands found mine and squeezed. Pain lanced my eyes as I tried to open them. A tremble shot through my limbs, and I rolled over and coughed. My hands scrabbled across something slick and hard and cold. Dampness seeped through my knees. Ice.

“Lia.” It was Gabe’s voice.

He helped me stand. I cracked open my eyelids against the light and sucked in a ragged breath. The air was so cold and dry that it burned my lungs.

“We made it.”

I opened my eyes.

The gate stretched above us, cold and impotent, sleeping. Travelers lay scattered across the room in various poses of lying, sitting, and crouching. A few people had vomited. Some were moaning. I spotted Juniper climbing to his feet. He hissed through his teeth and shook his head.

“I’d forgotten how much I hate that trip,” he muttered, wiping sweat from his face with one hand.

“Claire...” I growled, and Gabe shook his head.

“She went that way.” He pointed at one of the dark holes that led into the depths of lower Echlos.

I scrubbed both hands over my eyes and sighed. I had far more to worry about right now besides that traitor.

Gabe helped me limp across the room to where Jacob sat with his back to the wall and his head in his heads. He groaned and lifted it as I reached him. “What now?” he asked.

I glanced around the room. “I need to get you to Atticus soon. He needs to speak with you at once.”

“And them?” Jacob gestured at the fugitives.

I ran my eye over the group, counting them. Almost twenty people. We could never house them all at the farm or at Adam’s property. They could not go to the village, of course, not all of them, and certainly not all at once. If we wanted to try to integrate them, it would have to happen slowly so as not to attract Raine’s—or Korr’s—attention.

Korr
.
Gabe
. I inhaled sharply as I realized that could be a potentially difficult situation. What if someone saw Gabe and recognized the resemblance? What would Korr do if he found out Gabe was here in the Frost again?

We needed a secure place to hide.

I remembered. Some of the lower rooms, in the lower levels—they were warmer, more sheltered than this one.

It was so simple and so brilliant.

“We’ll stay here for now,” I said. “There are lower levels that provide more shelter.”

“Here?” Gabe said sharply. “But the Watchers—”

The Watchers. He was right. I shut my eyes. I was safe as a Weaver, as a descendent of Borde, and so was my family. But the rest of these people...

We’d have to be careful.

~

I left the fugitives in the room where Adam and I had first discovered papers about the PLD and then I plunged into the woods surrounding Echlos with Jacob at my side and the sack of my things in my hand. The snow crunched beneath my feet. The air made my cheeks numb and my mouth ache as I breathed, but I relished the icy wind on my tongue. It tasted like home.

We wove around rocks and past frozen streams beginning to thaw. Through breaks in the foliage above our heads, I could see the beginning of a storm brewing. Good. The snow would cover any tracks we left today. Jacob said nothing, but he kept up with my pace and didn’t falter even when a pack of mothkats rushed up from a rotted stump as we passed.

Finally, we reached my home. I stepped through the branches and into the clearing. A tendril of smoke curled from the chimney and light glowed in the windows. A knot in my chest eased. I exhaled and started forward.

“Is this where we’ll find Atticus?” Jacob asked, following. He looked from my face to my family’s farm.

“Soon,” I promised. “But I just have to do one thing first. Wait in the barn and I’ll join you again in a few minutes.”

I ran for the house. The Watcher Ward clanged above my head as I wrenched open the door, and then Jonn and Ivy and Everiss were staring up, startled, as I stumbled inside.

“Lia!”

Ivy almost knocked me over with her hug before Jonn reached me, wheezing and limping on his crutches. He almost fell into my arms, and he wrapped both arms tight around my neck and buried his face in my shoulder. Everiss hovered a safe distance away, but her eyes gleamed with relief.

“There’s no time,” I breathed finally, smoothing my siblings’ hair with my hands as I relished their warmth, their solidness. Hugging them had convinced me that they were real, that they were whole, and that they were truly alive and safe. That was all I’d needed before facing Atticus. “I have one more thing to do now before the mission is finished. I just had to make sure you were safe.”

“We are well,” Jonn assured me, lurching back a little and leaning heavily against the table. “I’m just so glad to see you alive.”

I hugged him again. “I found Borde. I brought what you asked,” I whispered in his ear, and he pulled back and stared in my face.

I handed him my sack of things without saying anything else. Wordlessly, he reached in and found the sealed box from Borde. A vein in his throat pulsed as he gazed at it.

I wanted to ask him what it was, but I had other things to worry about now.

“I must go,” I said, although the words filled me with an ache. “I have a friend waiting. But—” My stomach tightened, but regardless of the mixed emotions I felt, I had to ask. “Have Adam or Ann been here lately? Have they returned? I want to know that they are safe, too.”

“Oh,” Ivy said, and when Jonn shot her an angry look she turned red.

“What?” I demanded.

Jonn sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Finish your mission, Lia. Then we can talk.”

“No,” I said. “Let’s talk now. What is it?”

He scowled but knew better than to argue. “Ann is...in Aeralis.”

“I know,” I said. “She hasn’t returned?”

“She is there indefinitely,” he said.

My stomach fell. My mind spiraled. I stared at him.

“Indefinitely?”

“Yes...Thorns business, I’ve been told.” He cut a glance away and then raised his eyes back to mine. “Adam, too.”

I couldn’t breathe.

They were gone? Forever?

“Are you sure? How do you know?”

“Atticus told us.”

Atticus
. I had kept that secret from them. What had happened in my absence? “How do you know him?”

Jonn and Ivy looked at each other. Jonn opened his mouth to speak.

“Wait. Didn’t you say you had someone waiting in the barn?” Everiss interrupted.

We all turned to look at her.

“Atticus is in the barn,” she said. “Waiting for Lia. He said he expected her back.”

“What?” I shouted.

~

I yanked open the barn door. “Atticus!”

The shadows shifted and I saw them both. Jacob’s expression was unreadable. Atticus’s was pleased. I decided he must not yet know about the fugitives that had returned with us.

“Lia Weaver,” he greeted me. “You were successful, I see.”

“Why did you involve my siblings in this? I wanted them kept out of it!”

“My dear,” he said. “I am rapidly running out of agents. With you gone through the gate, and Adam and the Mayor’s daughter otherwise occupied, I had no choice.”

“Jonn said Ann and Adam have gone to Aeralis indefinitely,” I spat. “On
your orders
. How can you say you had no choice?”

“They have gone away and I don’t know if or when either will return,” he drawled. “But I had nothing to do with it. Your former leader has gotten himself captured by the enemy while he was on a mission for the Thorns that he involved himself in independently of me, against my orders I might add, and he is currently on his way to a prison cell. And your friend has been summoned under suspicion of involvement with enemy combatants. She aroused the notice of that man Korr. But she’s making the most of an unfortunate situation by gathering information for us.”

Shock sizzled through me, but I fought to keep my mind clear of it. Captured? Summoned under suspicion of involvement with... “Enemy combatants?” I demanded.

“Adam Brewer,” he said. “And...you.”

My eyebrows shot up.

“I’m here to warn you, actually,” he said. “Don’t go into the village. They think you’ve fled, you know. They know you aren’t here, but you can’t come back.”

“What?” Blood rushed to my ears. A hole of dread opened beneath my boots, and I was falling hard as I stared at his emotionless face and absorbed what he was telling me.

“Gather your things,” he continued. “I heard just an hour ago that Raine is sending soldiers to confiscate this farm, and I came to warn your siblings. There is little time. You will have to run.”

“Where?” But my mind was already working. Echlos. We could run to Echlos. Our blood would keep us safe. It was our secret. The Weaver’s secret.

“Hurry, girl,” Atticus snapped, and I whirled and ran for the house.

“I CAN’T GO with you,” Ivy blurted out after I’d delivered the news.

“What are you talking about?” I stared at her, aghast.

“I can’t go with you. I have to stay here.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” I wanted to shake her. “Soldiers are coming. They might already be on their way. We have to go now.”

“I know,” she said. “I will stay here and let them find me. I can say Jonn ran away, too. I’m just a child in their eyes, so they’ll reassign me to a new family. They won’t lock me up. I’m in the school. As far as they know, I’m already in their clutches.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“She makes a good point,” Atticus interjected.

I shot him a murderous look. “I’m not leaving my baby sister for Raine’s soldiers to arrest. I won’t leave her behind.”

“Lia,” Ivy said. She put her hand on my arm. “I’ll be all right. I can do this.”

“
No
.” I looked to my twin brother for support, but he was gazing at the ground as if deep in thought. His lips were pressed in a firm line, and a wrinkle formed between his eyebrows.

“Listen to me, Lia,” Ivy said. “I already have a place in the town. I attend the Farther school now, and they think I’m turning into a perfect little model Farther citizen. When they reassign me to a foster family after you’re gone, I can begin learning another trade. I’ll be in a perfect position to help the Thorns. I can sneak out to visit you and bring you some of the food I earn from attending the school. And I can help you! They’ll believe me when I tell them I’m not with the Thorns. They won’t arrest me...I’m just a child to them. They might watch me closely, but I’m already enrolled in their school. They won’t torture me or lock me up.”

I gazed at her, amazed. She stood confident, firm, tall, and my heart tore into pieces as I looked at her and knew that she spoke sense. I wanted her to run to the uncertainty of a broken ruin and a cold, wintery forest populated by monsters. What was wrong with me?

“I have to pack,” I managed to say, and I fled to my parents’ bedroom.

Jonn hobbled in a few minutes later to find me wrapping up pots and pans in some of my mother’s quilts and tying them shut with rope.

“Lia,” he said, gently.

I shook my head and kept working.

He sank on the bed beside me, and I leaned into him and put my face in his shoulder just as he’d once done with me. Had that been only two weeks ago? It felt like years.

“How can we leave her behind?” I gasped, my voice muffled.

“She isn’t a little girl anymore,” he said, stroking my hair. “She’s growing up. And she’s right. It makes more sense for her to stay. They won’t arrest her, and she can continue attending the school and earning food. She’ll be safer here than in the forest, where everything is so uncertain, so dangerous. The Watchers—”

“We don’t have to be afraid of Watchers anymore, Jonn.”

He was silent. “You know things,” he said finally. “You learned them there, I can tell. What is it?”

“There’s...there’s too much. There’s not enough time. We have to hurry.” I drew back and rubbed my forehead. “You are right. She is right. This is the safest option for her. And...the best option for the Thorns.”

Jonn grinned ruefully. “You can’t keep her from it forever.”

“I know.”

“But if things get dangerous, she can leave and come with us. We won’t be too far. Will we?”

“Yes,” he agreed. “We won’t be too far.”

~

We took the horses with us, along with everything we could carry or stuff into bags. My mother’s quilts. Extra sets of clothing. Pots and pans, books, socks, our remaining bags of precious grain. The chickens, the cow, soap, mirrors, and combs. Everything we could carry or load on the animals, we brought, because we’d need all these things and more if we were going to live in the Echlos ruins. Jacob and Atticus helped, carrying what they could from the house to the tethered horses. Jacob was the one who lifted Jonn in his arms and helped him climb astride the gelding.