Page 73 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

BEFORE

I should have waited another year or two. Maura was going to find out. She’d only sent me over the mountains to fetch the palmarosa that the priestesses and priests grew in their gardens for use in the temples. The temples were the only place where the plant still reliably grew.

Instead of harvesting the plant and slipping back across the mountains, I’d journeyed south. I carefully kept out of sight of the southern road and did not encounter any humans.

But with every footstep, the words echoed in my ears.

I should have waited.

I should have waited.

I should have waited.

Another prolonged absence from the coven lands, less than two years after my last, was too suspicious. Maura was going to find out, and then I would have doomed not only myself, but Kyna as well. Maura would kill her to teach me a lesson and finally separate me from my past.

My chest ached with the effort as I climbed the last bluff between me and the sea. Once I reached the top, I would be able to see the cottage. I counted out the months on my fingers, pressing each one into my thigh as I ticked them off. The child should be nearly a year old. If it had survived.

I should have waited.

I should have prayed to the Dark God for Kyna’s baby to be healthy. Instead, I’d begged him to carry her away from Velora by whatever means necessary. If that meant losing her husband and the life growing inside of her, at least she would be safe from Velora’s curse.

But what I should have done did not matter, because with my next step, I crested the hill that overlooked the sea.

There was the little cottage, perched on the bluff.

Sand blew between the golden grasses. Once, they’d been green and thick with seabirds.

For someone who had never seen the landscape in the time before, I knew the mixture of gold and blue must seem beautiful. For me, it only ratcheted up my worry.

The cottage looked the same. The thatched roof was in good repair, as were the walls. I was too far away to see the decorative seashells tucked into the grooves of plaster between the stones. But the walls themselves looked straight and sturdy.

Every window was closed tight.

Kyna liked them open, even before she’d met the man who’d chained her to this continent. I summoned up his name from the dredges of my memory. Merrick.

I walked faster. The chorus in my mind shifted. I should not have waited so long. To a witch, two years was nothing. But humans were so fragile.

Merrick’s boat bobbed in the harbor, the deck conspicuously empty. Why wasn’t he out fishing?

I should not have waited so long.

Ice filled my chest, sending shivers down my limbs. I broke into a run.

I was close enough to see the seashells.

I forgot to knock on the door. It wasn’t locked.

I blinked into the dark interior, my senses struggling to sort out the details as they flooded over me. A fire blazed in the hearth—unnecessary with the spell I’d placed on it to keep the water and ice out. Kyna knew that.

But Kyna was not there.

She was not at the worktable slicing bread, nor in the chair that faced the window. My throat closed as I spun to the bed in the corner. The curtain was closed. I ripped it aside, but there was no one there, either. Just a rumpled pile of blankets.

Then I heard the cry.

“Please, I just got her to sleep.”

I turned slowly, not sure I wanted to see.

How had I missed the rocking chair before the fire?

Maybe I had not wanted to see it. It wasn’t Kyna there in the spindly creation, slowly rocking back and forth.

The man, Merrick, held a bundle of blankets across his lap.

A chubby little leg dangled out, kicked free of the covers.

I had not spent much time around babies in my life or death. But the child looked about the right size for her age. He had said her.

I did not move any closer, hovering near the bed in the corner. But it was a small cottage, and my gifts from the Dark God ensured that I noted every bit of sensory information as it pressed in.

My pointed nails dug into my palms as I curled my hands into tight fists.

“Where is Kyna?” She must have told him about me, for him to be sitting there so calmly when a stranger burst through the door. But to not react at all… I should not have waited so long. The ice in my chest became a weight so heavy I struggled to stay upright.

“Gone,” Merrick said softly, his eyes fixed on the child in his lap.

“Gone where?” Even though I knew. Kyna would never have left her child. A daughter, her thick hair already the same shade as her mother’s and my sister’s and my own.

Ice formed in my palms, crystallized in my veins.

“She did so well,” Merrick said. His legs stopped moving. The rocking motion of the chair slowed. “Carried her all the way to term. There was no midwife, but she delivered her just fine. She nursed her. Got up and walked around.”

I did not dare to hope. But I also could not fully believe what I saw before my eyes. The chair stopped moving.

“But she never really recovered, not fully. She grew weaker and weaker. Until one night she just slipped away.” Tears tracked down his cheeks. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to the head of dark hair. “Now it is just the two of us.”

Hope—I’d been foolish to ever have it. Hope was for those more fortunate and deserving than I.

I’d spent a lifetime helping Kyna, readying her for the journey across the water to safety.

Even now, I stood there knowing that if Maura found out, I would be punished brutally for my insubordination.

My two allegiances, coven and family, always in conflict.

But I’d been so close to getting Kyna away to safety, to finally resolving the terrible tug on my resources and my hea?—

“It was supposed to be the two of us ,” I bit out.

This was his fault.

He’d convinced Kyna to stay. He’d gotten her with child. This poor, useless fisherman had ruined everything.

“You were the reason she stayed. She should have been safe. She had enough money to buy passage across the Southern Fate. If it weren’t for you, she would still be alive,” I raged.

My power wrestled free, ice coating the floor.

The cloying heat tried to melt it, but my anger was a visceral thing, feral and untamable.

But Merrick did not react. He sat in perfect stillness, staring down at the sleeping child in his lap.

That made me angrier still. Ice climbed the walls. “You have nothing to say for yourself? No defense? You know you are to blame!”

“A spell for the child,” he said softly. “That is all I ask.”

So, he did know everything.

A spell for the child—for Kyna’s child, for Rylynn’s last living descendant in Velora. But I could not find the words.

The ice on the floor and walls cracked, thrashing against the spell I’d cast years ago to keep the moisture out of the cottage. My power surged, trying to find escape, then turning back in on me. I was going to combust. I had to get out.

I could not give her a spell. I could not save Kyna. I had failed.

If I stayed a moment longer in that sweltering hell, I would doom us all.

I crashed through the door, ice crackling in my wake. I did not make the conscious decision to climb the bluff rather than descend toward the water. But what did it matter? Kyna was dead.

It was not Merrick’s fault. It was mine. I should have gotten the coin together sooner, gotten her across the water to safety before she was old enough to learn about men and love. She should have borne her child in safety, in a land of life and beauty.

She did not deserve to die. None of them had.

It was all my fault.

The golden grass turned brown beneath my feet, withering and dying as my frost murdered the last vestiges of life. It would never regrow, not in Velora. Everyone and everything that remained in Velora died.

Except me. I would live forever.

I stumbled, knees crashing to the frozen ground, then my elbows. I did not try to spare myself. I flattened my hands against the ground, curling them into the dirt. I couldn’t hold back the power a second longer. Part of me did not want to.

Velora was already in her final death throes. If my power could speed the process, then so much the better. I poured my frigid power into the ground, freezing the grass and the dirt and the tiny creatures that burrowed beneath it.

Maybe if I tried hard enough, I would reach the Dark God’s hell, deep beneath the ground like the humans believed.

The Dark God was supposed to be my patron. The creator of the witches, I’d prayed to him for help. I’d prayed for him to help Kyna escape Velora.

“This is not what I asked for!” I screamed down at the ground, even though I knew the idea of the Dark Lord dwelling beneath it was a fallacy. Human minds were too limited; they could hardly imagine the infinite realms occupied by the gods, so they assigned physical locations to heaven and hell.

I clawed at the ground, the sharpened points of my nails tearing as the dirt hardened, colder the deeper I went. But I welcomed the pain. It was the least that I deserved.

“I asked you to save her! What chance will her daughter have with that useless human! I asked…” A sob tore from my chest. “I should not have waited so long to come.”

I hunched forward over the ruined ground, sobs tearing through me, shaking my shoulders, my arms, until I was a ruined shell myself. Just like Velora.

“What do I do now?” I whispered. To the Dark God. To myself.

The air around me shifted, a change so subtle only my enhanced senses allowed me to perceive it. I felt it on my skin, the slight charge of power.

A tendril of wind caressed my cheek, sliding over the sensitive skin of my throat and beneath my ear.

It seemed to linger at the back of my neck, almost like a hand brushing across the sensitive, exposed skin of my nape.

It lingered there with me for hours as I tried to rearrange the broken pieces of my life into something recognizable.

It whispered the words of the spell that I could not summon earlier in the cottage.

When I finally stood, it followed me back across the mountains and into the coven lands.