Weavers (The Frost Chronicles) (4 page)

She frowned. “You should probably stay far away from Korr.”

I couldn’t do that. “Where, Ann?”

She bit her lip. “He has his office in the new Farther building...you’ve been there.”

An uncomfortable silence wrapped its tendrils around us. I’d been interrogated by Korr after Ann had given him my name—something I’d only later learned was due to her being an agent and under orders. It had not been the brightest moment in our friendship.

“All right,” I said. “But is there anywhere else where you think he might keep something important?”

“In his room here, perhaps,” she said. She shifted uncomfortably and averted her eyes. “But I really don’t—”

“Show me?”

Reluctantly, she motioned for me to follow her. I put the bread down and together we went through the kitchen door and into the hall. Sunlight glanced off polished wooden floors and glittered on lamps and chandeliers. It seemed even more opulent than I remembered.

“Raine had things brought in from Aeralis,” Ann explained in a whisper.

We crept up the staircase to the second floor and went left, into the guest wing. Ann stopped at the third door and touched the knob with her finger. “This is his room,” she mouthed, and then she gestured for me to head back downstairs.

I hesitated. I put my hand on the knob. Surely it would be locked...

“Lia,” Ann hissed, and I dropped my hand and followed her.

But a plan was already brewing in my head.

~

I checked the traps on the way home. One gaunt, half-starved squirrel. It was pitifully inadequate to feed four people, but we’d have to make do. I trudged for the farm, mulling over the things I’d seen and heard in the village.

Jonn worked at the table while the meat cooked. He had pages of notes spread around him, and stacks of my father’s journals formed a wall at the far side of the table. He scribbled and sketched and occasionally stopped to turn the PLD from side to side, staring at it with a scowl of concentration before bending over the journal in front of him once more.

“Making any progress?” I asked, joining him at the table.

He didn’t look up from the page he was scribbling words onto. “Some.”

So he was still angry with me. I suppressed a sigh. “Jonn…”

“I’m working, Lia.”

I left the table and went to check on the meat. I was boiling it into a stew. At least that way it might stretch a little further.

Everiss watched me as I stirred the pot. Her eyes reflected the fire, and she held her injured shoulder stiffly as she worked. It would probably always bother her now, just like Jonn’s leg always pained him.

Maybe they had more in common than I thought.

I chased that thought away quickly. The idea of Everiss and my brother was utterly nonsensical. And how could we continue to hide and feed her for the rest of our lives? It was not a sustainable plan, not in the long run.

The stew wasn’t finished cooking. I sat back on my heels and looked around. I didn’t see Ivy anywhere. Jonn was still working steadily. Everiss sat quietly, yarn in her lap. She didn’t look at me.

“I need to talk to you,” I said, stealing a glance over my shoulder at Jonn’s back.

He didn’t raise his head to look at us. He hadn’t heard.

Everiss’s fingers went still in a way that suggested she’d been expecting this. She set the yarn aside and clasped her hands together in her lap. “Yes?”

“In private. Perhaps in the bedroom?”

She followed me. I shut the door and leaned against it. She sank onto the bed, her face carefully neutral and her mouth pressed in a determined line.

A shiver of apprehension ran through me. At the moment, I would rather run through the Frost without snow blossoms than have this conversation.

“Adam tells me you are interested in joining the Thorns,” I began.

She rubbed her injured arm and avoided my gaze. “Yes, if they’ll have me.”

“Why?”

Her eyebrows drew together, and she lifted her chin with a defiant jerk. “Well, everyone else thinks I’m dead. I have nowhere to go. And in case you forgot, the Farthers destroyed my father’s life and scattered my family. I have reason to want them all gone.”

“We help
Farther
fugitives,” I said. “And you Blackcoats hate all Farthers. Don’t you think it’s a conflict of interest?”

“Our greatest interest was justice,” she said. “It always was.”

“That’s utter nonsense.”

Her eyes blazed. “You don’t know anything about it. You refused to join.”

“I refused to join because it was utter nonsense.”

“Jonn says—”

“That’s another thing we need to discuss,” I interrupted. “My brother.”

Everiss winced. Clearly, I’d hit a sore spot. She knew she was leading him on. I felt equal parts vindication and dismay. Poor, lovesick Jonn. She was going to break him.

“It’s not like that,” she said, clasping and unclasping her hands. “I care about him. We wrote letters for years. He’s—he’s my friend.”

I wasn’t backing down. “Does he know that your feelings tend toward friendship only?”

She bit her lip and didn’t reply, but guilt shone in her eyes.

I scowled. Well, I wasn’t surprised. Jonn was about as subtle in love as a yelping puppy. But still…frustration rose in me like a wave, threatening to spill from my mouth in the form of angry words. Ignorance of his feelings might have induced me to forgive her. Now, my dislike was even stronger. She knew, and she did nothing to stop it. At best, she was being careless. At worst, malicious or manipulative.

“You’re going to break his heart, Everiss.”

“I’ve been meaning to speak with him,” she mumbled, fidgeting with the edge of her dress and avoiding my eyes. “There hasn’t been a good time. I don’t know what to say.”

Suddenly, I felt bone-weary. She wanted me to give her an answer, a plan. A command, even. “I’m not your Ma,” I said, standing to my feet and crossing my arms. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. But know this—if you hurt my brother, you’ll answer to me.”

I left her sitting on the bed and returned to the fire to check the stew. It was bubbling and hot. I went to fetch the wooden bowls from the kitchen.

Jonn lifted his head from his papers as I crossed the main room for the kitchen. His eyebrows pinched together. “You and Everiss are talking again?”

“It wasn’t a friendly chat,” I said, instantly annoyed at the hope springing into his eyes. Was he imagining some storybook happy ending where Everiss and I became best friends again, and then she fell into his arms with protestations of love? He was sharp-witted, my brother. Surely he knew how silly such a fantasy was?

But on the heels of my anger came sadness. With his seizures and withered leg, he’d had a hard life. Was it so foolish of him to want a little happiness, as unlikely as that might be?

I was angry, but not at him. I was angry at the way things were. The Frost, the snow, the hunger, the never-ending work making quota and fearing Farthers and hanging out our blossoms to protect us from the monsters in the night. We were like fish holding our places in a fierce-flowing stream, ever swimming against the current but never going anywhere. I blinked and saw my life in a flash before me, unspooling like so much thread, cycles of frost and thaw and work and weariness that culminated in a misplaced snow blossom or a misguided word to a Farther soldier. Blood on the snow. A quick, brutal ending to a quick, brutal life.

For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

“Lia?” Jonn said, reaching for his crutch.

I shook off the paralyzing melancholy and turned for the kitchen. “Where is Ivy? It’s time to eat.” I practically growled the words.

The door banged open before I even finished my sentence. My sister was on the stoop, slinging off her snow-covered cloak and stamping her feet to warm them as she stripped off her mittens.

“Ivy,” I snapped. “Where have you been?”

She held out her mitten-clad hands. “Gathering winterberries. I thought we could eat them fresh for dessert.”

Berries would stretch this pathetic meal a little farther. “Fine,” I said. “Put them in a bowl and grab the bread.”

She hurried to comply. “Is there any milk?”

Milk
. That reminded me. “Have you seen to the animals this evening?”

Her mouth opened and closed. I took that as a no. “I’ll do it,” she said quickly.

That was the moment Everiss chose to emerge from the bedroom. I crossed to the door. “No, I’ll go. You bring the scraps for the chickens.”

She nodded and looked down at the berries in her hands. My gaze slid past her to Jonn and Everiss, and I saw them lock eyes. His ears warmed. She looked away.

Frowning, I went out into the snow.

The barn door squeaked as I shoved it open. I took a few steps inside, humming tunelessly under my breath. As I reached for the grain bucket, a sound like a shoe against stone scraped in the near-darkness by the horses’ stalls.

“Ivy?”

But something about the thick silence that followed made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I pushed myself up and fumbled for the snow shovel leaning beside the door. I raised it in the air like a weapon. “Who’s there?”

The shadows shifted, and my blood froze in my veins.

A figure stepped out from behind a support beam, and my fingers curled around the handle of the shovel. A man. He was thin and bundled in a thick gray coat. His close-cropped, steel-gray hair gleamed against his olive skin.

A Farther
?

Another glance confirmed it was true, but he wasn’t in uniform like the soldiers roaming the village.

A fugitive?

I didn’t have the luxury of puzzling over his origins at the moment. I was still very much alone with him in the barn.

“Don’t move,” I said. One glance confirmed that he was too close and I was too far for me to make a run for it without being intercepted. No, I needed to convince him that I wasn’t afraid. I lifted the shovel.

His mouth turned up at the gesture. Clearly, he didn’t find me remotely threatening.

“I mean it,” I said, my voice cracking sharply and my arms beginning to burn from the weight of the shovel. “I’ll hurt you—”

“I am looking for Aaron or Eloisa Weaver.”

My parents? Suddenly my lungs were empty of air.

“Lower your weapon,” he murmured, reaching into his coat.

I tensed, expecting a gun. But what he withdrew shocked me. A broach in the shape of a Y. It glittered coldly as he held it out for me to see.

“I am with the Thorns,” he said.

THE MAN LEANED against the opposite wall and tucked the brooch back into his pocket as I stood rooted to the ground, struggling for words. Slowly, I lowered the shovel and sagged back against the wall. Was this a trap? Did I dare admit to knowing what he was talking about? He could be anyone.

“Thorns?” I asked.

He made an impatient noise in the back of his throat. “You know,” he said, confident as his gaze searched my face. “Don’t waste my time, girl.”

“Where did you come from?”

He was not from the village. He was Aeralian, but he wasn’t one of the soldiers—I’d never seen him before in my life.

A fugitive? He didn’t look like any of the thin, frightened, starving escapees that found their way through the forest previously.

The stranger grimaced, a quick twist of his mouth that hinted at volumes of unspoken memories. “I’ve journeyed here from southern Aeralis,” he said.

He pulled a pipe from his pocket and stuck it between his teeth. From his other pocket he produced a match, lit it with a swipe against his shoe, and cupped one hand around the pipe as he touched the flickering flame to the tobacco inside. A tendril of smoke curled up, and I frowned. He pretended not to see. He tossed the match onto the flagstones by my feet, but my eyes didn’t stray from his to look at it. I stepped on it with my heel, grinding the ashes into the dirt. He half-smiled around the pipe, as if he’d been interested in my reaction to his lighting up in our barn.

“I crossed the border into the Frost this morning, avoiding your village and keeping to the forest to stay clear of the soldiers,” he said.

The soldiers
. My stomach danced nervously at the realization that once again, I had a Farther in my barn. Was this one a fugitive like Gabe had been? “What do you want with my family? Are you seeking shelter?”

He inhaled smoke and gave me a short, spare smile. “No. I am sorry to intrude like this, but I must speak with your parents, and I dare not wait until nightfall to make my presence known. Where are they?”

A moment of small shock followed the question. The air felt like ice against my skin, and my heart thumped loudly in my ears. He asked so casually, so expectantly—as if they were right around the corner, right outside. It made the pain of their absence that much keener as I answered him.

“My parents are dead.” The words fell out of my mouth like stones, clattering in the silence that immediately followed.

His eyebrows lifted in shock, and his eyes drained of expression. They were flint-like as they stared into mine, daring me to admit I was lying. “Dead?”

“More than six months ago,” I whispered.

“I am sorry. I didn’t realize...” His voice trailed off, and he took another puff of the pipe and scrutinized me again, really looking this time. I could see him taking in my age, my slight frame, the bags under my eyes, and my bony wrists. I probably looked like a child to him. “Who has been completing the missions?”

The man was waiting for me to speak. I took a deep breath. “Me.”

“You?”

I lifted my chin, feeling defiant. “Yes,
me
.”

I waited for him to express more disbelief. But instead he blew smoke out of his nose like a dragon and gestured at me with the pipe. “What is your name?”

I hesitated. Was this another test? “What is yours?”

He smiled again, but it was less spare than the last time. “I am called Atticus by my friends. We don’t keep many names in the Thorns. It makes us harder to trace.” He paused, waiting for me to reciprocate.