Winter Queen Read online

  “Dekle,” the girl answered weakly.

  Ilyenna gently reached for her arm. “Can I see?” Reluctantly, Dekle held it out. It was a mass of swollen, black tissue. A hard knot revealed where the jagged edges of the bone pressed against the swelling muscle. “What happened?”

  With a shudder, the girl looked away. “When I wouldn’t come out of the wood pile, a Tyran hit me with the butt end of his axe.”

  Rage flashed hot in Ilyenna’s breast.

  Balance, she tried to remind herself. For every innocent, there is also evil.

  But the adage did nothing to dissuade her anger. She gave the girl a strong dose of dandelion tincture, but she didn’t dare wait for the alcohol to take full effect. The girl’s eyes were starting to droop—a dangerous sign. “I’m going to have to set it.” If I don’t, you’re going to die, she thought.

  Dekle winced. “You’re going to hurt me?”

  Ilyenna hesitated before discreetly motioning for Sharina to come help. “Sometimes a healer has to hurt in order to heal.”

  Dekle violently shook her head and shrank into the sleigh bed.

  Ilyenna was sorry, but she didn’t have time for this. “You may as well be brave, Dekle. We’ll do it either way.”

  Wide-eyed, the girl looked between both healers. She must have believed they meant it, for she finally bit down on the blanket and lay back in Sharina’s arms.

  Ilyenna nodded to Sharina. “Hold her.” To the girl, she said, “It’s going to hurt, Dekle, but I need you to hold as still as you can.” Dekle nodded. Pushing down on the break while pulling on the girl’s hand, Ilyenna felt the bone snap back into place. She fought the nausea that rose within her as the girl arched her back and screamed.

  With those screams ringing in her ears, Ilyenna probed the break to see if it had lined up.

  Dekle jerked away, clutching her arm and sobbing.

  “Dekle,” Ilyenna said softly, “I need to make sure it’s lined up. I know it hurts, but after I’m done you can rest.”

  But Dekle was done cooperating. Sharina had to lay herself across the girl so Ilyenna could finish inspecting the break. Satisfied, she allowed the girl to cradle the arm against her stomach. Sharina helped Ilyenna apply a compress of mountain daisy, wrap it with heavy strips of canvas, splint it, and use hemp as a sling. Then they gave Dekle another dose of dandelion tincture. After Dekle, there were more breaks to set and wrap, ointments to rub into wounds, dressings to change, and tinctures to hand out.

  Ilyenna regularly checked on her father. She gave him another dose of dandelion tincture and stuffed more snow in his wound. But aside from the occasional moan, there was no change in his condition. Blowing on her numb hands, Ilyenna realized they were crossing into Shyleholm. She’d been so busy she hadn’t realized how far they’d come. She jumped down from the sleigh. All these people would have to sleep somewhere, and she was going to displace her clan to do it. With a suppressed sigh, she jogged on ahead.

  Women ran out to meet her. Worry and fear added a sharp edge to their normally soft features. When they realized Ilyenna had nothing to tell them, they spread out, searching for their loved ones. She couldn’t bring herself to ask for their help with the injured Argons. Not yet. Some of them had lost husbands, sons, fathers. Others would have their own wounded to tend to.

  “Bring the most severely injured to the clan house,” she called to the sleigh drivers. “The clan will have to take in everyone else for now.”

  She draped a man’s arm over her shoulder and helped him hobble inside. Enrid held the door for her. Inside, broths were already simmering in pots. Ilyenna laid the man next to the warm fire and went back for another. Those in the most distress, she laid before the hearths in the kitchen and hall. Others filled her family’s rooms and the rest of the hall. In addition to the overflowing injured, clusters of people hunched over loved ones.

  Ilyenna quickly saw how crowded the clan house was becoming and set the hale people to work passing out broths or blankets, gathering more firewood, or washing dirty bandages or clothing. Anything to keep people moving and useful. Even though the great hall was large enough to accommodate a clan feast, there wasn’t room to take a single step without stepping over or shuffling around someone. In passing, Ilyenna’s brother told her there were over five hundred Argons. She didn’t stop to count, but several hundred of those had to be injured.

  So the scrubbing, stitching, and amputating began. Her ears rang from their screams. Some were simply beyond her skill to heal, like a man whose foot was nearly cut in half. He adamantly refused amputation. It was hard to tell with all the bleeding, but she tried to align it as best she could before she stitched it closed, added a few leeches to increase the blood flow, wrapped it, and ordered the man to stay off his foot for the better part of a year. She knew from the look in his eyes that he understood. If they did manage to save his foot, he’d never run again. He’d be lucky to hobble, if he lived at all.

  After the most dire cases were finally under control, Bratton finally came to her. Without waiting for her to ask, he prostrated himself on the table. “I’ve a few cuts that won’t stop bleeding.”

  Ilyenna eyed him as she washed the blood from her hands. “You should take some whiskey. Give it time to work before we start.”

  He shook his head. “Can’t be drunk. At least not until Father wakes up and can take over again.”

  She opened her mouth to say even a little would take off the bite, but Bratton seemed to know what she was thinking. He gave her the look that meant “Leave it alone.” Pursing her lips, she nodded. Then she ordered one of the Argon women to get him a cup of tea made from willow bark and other healing herbs. While he drank it, Ilyenna pulled away the bandage from his thigh. She hissed at what she saw—a gouge that cut clean through the muscle. She lined up her bone needle and threaded a strip of sheep intestine through the eye. Then she gave her brother a chunk of leather to bite down on. “You need someone to hold you?”

  In answer, he lay back on the table. She poured whiskey on the wound and scrubbed it clean. Bratton arched his back, his whole body straining. His face turned red and the veins stood out on his face. Starting deep, she worked her stitches toward the surface. He cursed her through the leather. Eventually, he started screaming. When he tried to squirm away from her, Ilyenna nodded for some nearby men to hold him down.

  He shoved one. “No!”

  “Bratton!” she warned him.

  The two gripped his arms and held him while she finished. When it was over, he buried the heels of his hands into his eyes to hide his tears. Ilyenna quietly set a mug of whiskey at his side. Without a word, he drained it.

  Lifting a shaking arm to her forehead, she wiped the sweat from her brow. Great-aunt Enrid came over from the hearth and set a plate in front of her and a bowl of qatcha in front of Bratton. Ilyenna wasn’t really hungry, but she knew she needed to eat. She washed Bratton’s blood from her hands and sat down on a chair. Her legs, feet, and lower back ached from hunching over so many people.

  With a crust of bread, she poked at a boiled potato topped with melting sheep cheese. Taking a bite, she suddenly realized she was famished. But one glance at the tight lines around Enrid’s face told Ilyenna they had another worry. It wasn’t hard to guess what. “How’s the food holding out?” she asked softly.

  Enrid glanced around before edging closer. “Doubling our clan’s numbers in the dead of winter . . . I’m watering down the stew. If we’re careful, no one will starve.”

  Ilyenna pushed the plate away. “Let one of the others have it.”

  Enrid planted both fists on her hips. “You need your strength as much as anybody.”

  Ilyenna rubbed her forehead, trying to work out the knot inside her skull as she would a cramped muscle. It didn’t help, but she was so weary that closing her eyes for a moment brought some relief.

  “You’re tired. You and Bratton get some rest,” Enrid said.

  Ilyenna shook her head. “I’ll
sleep tonight. The fevers are starting. We’re running out of leeches and garlic. I’ve bandages to change, and I need to make new ointments.”

  Enrid gestured to the window. “It is night, Ilyenna. If you don’t go to bed, you’re going to do something foolish.”

  To placate her, Ilyenna grabbed the plate and began to eat. Enrid threw up her hands in defeat and went back to the hearth.

  Bratton’s breathing had slowed. “We haven’t enough men to guard the canyon,” he said. “But we need to send up some sentinels.”

  Ilyenna nodded. “I’ll have Otrok and his friends go up.”

  “Tell them to light a signal fire if they see any danger and then make a run for it.”

  “I’ll send him now and see that someone in the village takes shifts watching for it.”

  Tension drained from Bratton’s face. The whiskey was working. If he was drunk, she might get some answers. “I’ve heard bits and pieces of what happened.”

  The muscles in Bratton’s jaw bulged. “We came across them just before Argonholm. Their men were fighting off Tyrans, trying to give the women and children a chance to escape. We drove them off. Would’ve moved on to the village, but it was already overrun—Tyrans picking off Argons one at a time. All we could do was gather those we could and run.”

  Ilyenna stared at her hands, still imagining them stained with Bratton’s blood. She’d treated the injuries, but imagining how they’d been inflicted made it so much worse. “Why did the Tyrans attack?”

  “No one knows.” Bratton scrubbed his face with his hands. When he spoke again, his voice sounded raw. “Some of the clanwomen escaped without coats on their backs or shoes on their feet, but not a one left without a weapon. Even the younger children had knives. Without their help, I don’t think we’d have made it.”

  Ilyenna tried to imagine the women and children fighting for their lives. How many had died? Had Rone and his family been among them? She looked away from Bratton and cleared her throat, but her question seemed to lodge there.

  Bratton seemed to know what she couldn’t ask. “I didn’t see Rone or any of his. They were attacked before dawn. Fell just after nightfall.”

  Trying to hide the color rushing to her cheeks, she nodded quickly. “Our clanmen?” She scraped the last bite of her dinner off the wooden plate.

  Bratton rubbed his eyes. “Thirty-eight dead or unaccounted for. Sixty-seven seriously injured. Not one came away without some kind of wound.”

  Ilyenna swallowed several times. “Their names?”

  Bratton shook his head as if to drive away an unwanted image. “Let the dead care for the dead, Ilyenna,” he said coldly. “For now, you need to concentrate on the living.”

  3. Blood and Ashes

  Blood seemed to follow Ilyenna everywhere. When she fell into dreams, she drowned in a river of it. Whenever she blinked, crimson light leaked through her closed eyelids. Even now, the predawn sky was stained the color of bloody water. No matter how many times she scrubbed her hands, she couldn’t rinse the hurt from her soul.

  With tears stinging her eyes, she lay slumped against the window, blankets wrapped around her. She relished the cold against her aching head as she watched tiny frost flakes fall from the sky. For a moment, she thought they were really winter fairies dancing and spinning on the breeze—fairies who should have long ago given up winter and returned to their homes in the far north.

  But that was ridiculous. Even if they were fairies, mere mortals could never see through their glamour. She sniffed and wiped her eyes. The Balance was seriously off when the seasons failed to shift and one clan turned on another. It had been two days since the Argons had arrived. She’d been unable to sleep that night. Sometime in the darkest hours, an idea had formed in her mind. A dangerous one. But after two days of people dying . . .

  Bratton moaned and shifted in his bed. After extracting herself from her blankets, Ilyenna went to check on him. He still burned with fever. She leaned over the other bed. Her father was so unnaturally still, no matter how hard she had struggled to wake him, no matter how many medicines and treatments she had tried.

  He was worse than ever. They both were. Ilyenna had been healing since she was old enough to thread a needle. She knew how close she was to losing both of them. In the end, that made the choice for her. Before she could change her mind, she tiptoed through the clan house so as not to wake the Argons scattered everywhere.

  When she reached the hall where the most severely wounded were kept, she nearly gagged. The air was rank with garlic, whiskey, and a myriad of body odors. Hiking up her skirt, she stepped over a slumbering woman, her arms clutching her child—even in sleep, she was afraid to let go.

  Just before Ilyenna reached the door, she caught sight of the old man with the amputated foot. He was dead. All she could feel was relief that there was one less mouth to feed. She covered his face so as not to frighten the children. “So passes a warrior,” she whispered. “So passes an Argon.”

  Brushing the death from her hands, she stood. She’d have to remember to call one of the men to haul him out.

  She entered the kitchen and fed the fire. Having the refugees in her home left her feeling like she slept under too many blankets. And the dying hadn’t slowed. If anything, it had increased. Already a line of shrouded, frozen bodies waited for the ground to thaw so they could be buried behind the clan house. But Bratton was right. Ilyenna couldn’t worry about burying the dead until the living had the time and strength to dig the graves.

  Without waiting for the fire to take off, she wrapped her coat over her dress, braced herself against the cold, and stepped outside. The cold immediately took her breath away.

  When Ilyenna was a child, Great-aunt Enrid had told her stories of the constant battle between the queens of winter and summer—two women on opposite sides of the Balance. In winter, the summer queen was always forced to retreat to her personal domain far to the south. A place where summer never faded, where no one ever died of cold and where food was always fresh.

  Ilyenna thought if she ever came to such a place, she’d never return to her home in the mountains. She hated winter, hated the sickness, hunger, and death it brought. It had tried to break her once. She’d vowed it would never come so close again.

  She trudged through the snow to the slight rise behind the clan house. There, snow-covered mounds dotted the hillside far back into the trees. A graveyard was a link between the living and the dead, and she had to speak with her mother. Twilight or morning was best. The dead were tied to night’s side of the Balance, as the living were tied to the day’s. She stopped at her mother’s grave.

  “Mother . . .” She hesitated. It was dangerous to seek the dead’s attention. Dangerous because they might just decide Ilyenna should join them. “I need you to let Father and Bratton stay with me. I know you miss them. I know you long for them. But I–I’m not strong enough to lead the clan by myself. Please. If you hold any sway with death, let it pass them over.”

  Wondering if she’d been heard, Ilyenna waited. Nothing happened. It was said that the dead no longer understood the living’s fondness for life. Ilyenna’s mother had died trying to save her. Perhaps it was selfish to ask for more. Perhaps Matka wouldn’t understand why Ilyenna wished her father and brother to remain in a world of cold and cruelty.

  But she had watched so many die. She couldn’t bear to see her father and brother join them. As she turned to go, a small shadow fell across her. But that was impossible; the sun had yet to rise. She glanced at the sky. Frost was still falling, but one of the flakes was acting strangely, almost as if it was moving of its own will.

  Ilyenna stared as it zipped and twisted, moving horizontally instead of downward as falling frost was meant to. But it moved so fast and erratically, Ilyenna kept losing sight of it. She started when she felt a strange pressure at her feet.

  In the hollows of the snow, shadows boiled like cauldrons of vapors. Ilyenna’s breath caught in her throat. The shadows surged and sp
illed over her feet like smoke, then stretched up, reaching for her. She cried out as they crawled up her body, covering her like a second skin.

  Ilyenna scrubbed at her arms, trying to remove the shadows, but they clung to her. Her heart thudded painfully in her chest as she stumbled and fell back into the snow. Suddenly the shadows returned to the ground. She pulled her sleeves up, revealing her pale skin, no shadows in sight.

  She scrambled to her feet and ran from the graveyard. At the clan house, she hurried past Enrid and went straight upstairs to her father. She knelt beside him, pressing her fingers to his face. He shifted away from her cold touch.

  Moving to the other bed, she touched her brother. His fever had broken and his color was better. Relief warred with horror inside Ilyenna. She pressed her hands into her stomach and doubled over. It was never a good idea to attract the attention of the dead. But if she was careful, perhaps they would forget about her. Besides, she’d had no choice.

  After feeding the qatcha to her father and brother, Ilyenna stumbled back to the kitchen and collapsed in a chair. The first thing she noticed was that someone had already removed the dead man.

  Enrid glanced up. “You’re up early,” she whispered so as not to wake those lying on the floor. As cold as it was outside, heat shimmered from the huge fireplace. Enrid ran a knife through a nutty brown loaf of bread and slapped some lard on a slice; the butter had run out a few days ago. She held the bread out to Ilyenna.

  Ilyenna shook her head. “I’m all right.” The burden of caring for so many was crashing down on her. She braced herself against the table as panic swelled in her chest.

  “Winter’s almost up,” Enrid said.

  Ilyenna grunted. “Just in time to start digging for roots and shriveled berries.”

  They’d already started killing barren ewes. The dogs would be next. She wondered how they’d survive next year if they were forced to decimate their herds.

  Glancing around, she couldn’t help but once again notice the Argon’s clothes. Most of the people had been forced to flee their homes with what little clothing they’d had on. Ilyenna was still treating their frostbite.