Brightly Woven (17 page)

I woke several more times after that—or maybe I wasn’t even awake, I couldn’t be sure. The world around me felt like a feverish dream. Everything was slow and so, so painful. I sat up and dragged my bedding loudly across the wooden floor until it was directly in front of the fire. I picked up a log from the small pile, but it fell through my hands and thudded loudly against the floor. There was no feeling in my fingers, my palms, my arms. I braced my side against the wall and slid down, forcing my knees to stop straining and aching.

The rest was a blur of sound and agony. I must have pushed the log into the fireplace and sparked something, because the next time I woke, it was to Lady Aphra frantically calling my name and pulling me out of the fire I had started.

“Sydelle!”
She was shouting.
“Sydelle, wake up!”

I tried to open my eyes, to let her know how badly I hurt all over, but all I could mumble was “terrible, terrible cold” because it was all I could feel and think. Hundreds, thousands, millions of needles pricked my skin, and I let out a cry of anguish. Worse than breaking my arm, worse than falling onto fire-hot rocks. Worse than anything I had ever felt.

“Wayland!” she yelled.
“Wake up!”

North’s face hovered above me, but there were black blotches floating in my vision. It wasn’t until he took my face between his hands that my sight momentarily cleared. Eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, gloves. Gloves. He had put his gloves back on.

“Syd,” he said. His voice sounded much closer, and I was beginning to feel his hand rubbing hard circles on my chest, over my heart. My eyes closed, too heavy to keep open.

“What did she have?” North demanded. “What did she eat? Drink?”

“It was just milk and a sandwich,” Lady Aphra said. “The healer is coming; it’s taking her a while to get up the hill with the storm.”

“She doesn’t have time to wait,” North said sharply. “Go get me some of the thyme and heartroot from your garden. Get my bag and find me a bloody bowl, please!”

“The snow—” Lady Aphra began. Yes, the snow, the snow. My mind clung to the word deliriously, even as my entire chest constricted with immeasurable pain, and I cried. The snow…

Something hit the ground beside my face. I felt it shake the floor, but the voice that accompanied it was much harder to distinguish.

“Pale…pulled her out…hands…”

A pair of strong arms pulled me up from the floor, though my limbs were dead weight. I was a lump of skin and bones, lifeless, freezing. Something warm wrapped around me, something red that I could sense beneath my closed eyelids.

I felt North before I heard him. That same tingling warmth that I associated with him seeped under my skin, even if just for a moment. My back was pressed against his chest, and his tall frame completely enveloped me. I felt his heart racing.

“N…Nor…,” I cried. “Please help me, please, it hurts, it hurts. I can’t breathe. Please…”

“You’re going to be all right,” he said fiercely. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

There was pounding and screaming all around me. For one horrifying moment, I thought that the shrieking was coming from me, but my throat and voice were frozen. I couldn’t breathe—I couldn’t breathe.

“Shut…door…here!”

“Storm…help…”

“Get over here!” North barked. His face turned next to my ear, and I could feel his hand rubbing my chest for a brief moment. “Just breathe, Syd. I’m here. I know it hurts, but you have to breathe, you stubborn girl….”

I was gasping, willing my hands to lift from my lap to pry
off the imaginary fingers that had encircled my throat. Everything was lethargic and cold and dark except for North’s glove and its hard, uneven circles. That glove and the slowing beat of my heart.

“Mix the heartroot in now; just squeeze out two drops or it’ll kill her—can you possibly go any faster? Give me the bowl; just let me do it—here, now put it over the fire—have you never made a kulde antidote before?”

“Wayland! Don’t…”

“…the storm…get more…”

“The girl…”

“…Sydelle…look…she’s not…”

“Be quiet, both of you!”
North thundered, and the room was silent once again. North’s body was shaking erratically, and he was breathing against my ear, breathing hard as if for both of us. He grasped my jaw gently and forced it open. Something hard was pressed against my lips.

“You have to drink this. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “Please drink it, please.”

The warm liquid went down my throat, even as I coughed and sputtered against it. Disgusting. It tasted of death and dirt.

North held me the entire time, forcing me to drink all of the bowl’s contents. Every single burning, foul drop.

I felt…

I felt nothing. And then everything.

This time I knew I was the one screaming. Beneath my
skin, everything burst back to life with a roaring blaze that consumed me, pushing its way through my veins and forcing out the tolerable numbness behind my eyes. My head was thundering in pain.

Then North was holding the same bowl under my face, whispering in my ear, rubbing warm circles on my back.

“You have to spit it up—you have to get it out of you, Syd,” he said. “Throw it up!”

If I had been myself in that instant I might have been embarrassed, but I did exactly as I was told. I threw up until there was nothing left in me but dry heaves and thick tears.

Somewhere a door shut, but all I could hear was North’s voice; all I could feel was his warm breath on the back of my neck.

“That’s my girl,” he said. Sensation was tingling in my toes and fingers, but I still couldn’t move, paralyzed by the pain the cold had left behind, by its last grip on my body.

That, and the solid, undeniable warmth that was North.

The wizard fell back against the wall in exhaustion. He held me against him gently, as if I was glass—as if I could shatter and fall away from him at any moment and leave him breathless and alone once more.

“That’s my girl…,” he whispered, resting his cheek against my shoulder.

CHAPTER SEVEN

W
hen I was a child, no older than five, I came down with an illness that left me bedridden for weeks. I have very few memories of that time. Flashes of my mother’s pale face, the wide rims of the doctor’s glasses. Mostly, I remembered the pain: the heaviness of my limbs, my head too weak to move.

It was exactly how I felt upon waking to the sun shining in my eyes and the sound of shuffling against the floor. The noise wasn’t very loud at all, but it worsened the pounding between my ears.

I blinked. My limbs were as heavy as stones; I strained my neck, trying to see what was making the noise.

A bald old man was rummaging through North’s leather bag. The sun outlined his profile, but I could still make out the deep wrinkles on his forehead and the tight line of his lips as
he dug through the empty bottles. When his hand reappeared, he was clutching North’s stained purple handkerchief.

Whoever he was, he didn’t belong in North’s bag.

My voice came out a rough whisper.
“Hey.”

The scrap of fabric fell from his fingertips. From beneath my layers of bedding, I glared.

“So you’re awake,” he said. He stood slowly. “Aphra!”

The old woman appeared instantly in the doorway. I felt the soft, worn material of her skirt as she knelt beside me and placed a hand on my forehead.

“How do you feel?” Her voice was the softest I had ever heard it.

“Hurts,” I confessed, closing my eyes. I heard the floorboards strain and creak beneath the man’s boots as he walked past me. There was the sound of bedding being pulled away, and a grunt from the corner of the room.

“Up, you bag of bones,” the man growled. “I let you go back to sleep earlier, but now you have no excuse.”

“Magister?” North groaned. “Gods, I was hoping that was a nightmare.”

“Nightmare?” he scoffed. “You’re lucky I came. It’s not an easy trip.”

“I didn’t ask you to come, old man,” North said. “In fact, I seem to remember telling you I wasn’t coming to see you, either.”

“And yet here I am to knock some sense back into that thick skull of yours,” he said. “How very lucky you are.”

“Wayland,” Aphra said. “You’re disturbing Miss Mirabil—may I suggest you do what your magister says?”

“She’s awake?” North asked, kicking off the rest of his blankets. He squatted down beside me, a bright smile on his face.

“Hullo, my beautiful, beautiful darling,” he said. “Feeling better this morning?”

I smiled back weakly. “Not really.”

He chuckled. “It might take a few days. The poison has to leave your body.”

“Poison?”

“Pascal, give them a moment,” Aphra said, nodding her head toward the door. “I’ll need your help to clear the snow off the path.”

The old man clucked his tongue in disapproval, but he went.

“Snow?” I whispered.

“It was quite the storm last night,” North said, brushing a stray curl off my face.

I swallowed hard, catching sight of the loom out of the corner of my eye. “Was it me?”

North brought over the pitcher of water and helped me sit up long enough to drink.

“Was it me?” I asked again, my voice stronger. “Did I cause the storm?”

North’s brow furrowed. “What gave you that absurd idea?”

“The threads,” I explained, but it was useless. North shook his head.

“When you’re feeling up to it, I’ll take you outside,” he said. “I’ll try to get a letter off to Owain to tell him we may be a day late.”

“No,”
I said in horror, trying to sit up again. My head throbbed. “I can go now…we can’t get farther behind.”

North shook his head. “It’ll be a day or two before you’re strong enough to travel. I promised you that we’d get there in time, and I have no intention of going back on it.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” I said, trying for a smile. North only looked away.

“I need to tell you something,” he began, his voice tight. “That poison—that was the same poison that killed the king.”

“But how did he…?” My head spun. “You saved me. Why did he have to die if there were wizards there?”

“Because only I know who made the poison,” he said. “And because I’m the only person to have seen him make the antidote. It’s a hedge poison.”

“Dorwan? Are you sure?” North gave a curt nod, but his eyes betrayed his feelings. Had he known this entire time? Was that the real message we were taking to the capital?

“I was with him for a little while, when we were both boys. The only reason I met him was because I was snooping around, looking for information around one of the hedge camps. He showed me…He showed me a lot of these poisons and tricks that he thought I would like,” North said. “He thought we were alike, and that I would appreciate knowing them, I guess. It was a long time ago.”

“And it’s the same poison?” I said.

“It was the perfect plan,” North said. “No one recognized the poison, so they assumed it was foreign—”

“And that it came from Auster,” I finished. “He fooled everyone. How could something like this happen?”

“It happened because I didn’t stop him years ago, when I had the chance,” North said angrily. “I underestimated how much hatred he has…to do something like this…”

“It’s not your fault,” I breathed, my eyes drifting shut. For a moment he didn’t say anything, but I felt his dry lips press lightly against my cheek.

“Rest, Syd,” he said. Another dreamless sleep washed over me.