Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 15 of 22

The tunnel beyond the signpost ran level for a long stretch, and the air grew sharper with each step. Elaria pulled her coat tighter and kept one hand braced over the cradle. The cold outside should have helped Lia, but the colder the corridor turned, the harder Elaria's own body worked to keep her warm. She could feel the heat rising off her chest through the cloth. Lia had not spoken in a quarter hour. The small sounds the sprite usually made, the soft clicks and the breath like frost on glass, had stopped. Elaria knelt and set the orb on the stone. She drew the temperature stone from her inner pocket and pressed it against the cradle's lining. The stone's veins should glow bright when cold. They glowed only faint yellow, dim as a banked coal. She opened the cradle flap. Lia lay curled on her side, wings folded, her blue skin paled to milk. The sprite flickered once, like a candle guttering, and her edges blurred against the frostcloth. Elaria felt the heat trapped inside the cradle hit her face. Her own body had cooked the small space while she walked. She worked fast. She pulled the thick wool blanket from her pack, the one she had layered with packed snow between its folds, and shook it open. She fitted it against her chest under the cradle straps, doubling it where her ribs pressed closest. The snow inside the weave crunched as she tightened the buckles. It would slow her heat. It would not stop it. Lia needed something colder to hold. Elaria cupped her bare hands and breathed out. Frost climbed her fingers. She shaped the ice the way her mother had taught her as a child, drawing the cold from her blood into a small figure. She made it the size of her palm: a fairy with folded wings and a long gown, the surface clear and hard. She set the sculpture inside the cradle beside Lia. The sprite's hand twitched. Then her fingers closed around the carved wing. Color returned to her cheeks in a slow flush of blue. The flickering stopped. Elaria pressed the temperature stone to the cradle again. The veins brightened to a steady cold white. She closed the flap and stood. Lia's breath ticked against the cloth, small and even. The blanket bit at Elaria's chest through her shirt, and she could already feel the snow inside it beginning to melt against her skin. She had bought Lia hours, not days. She lifted the orb and walked on, counting in her head how far the next chamber might be before the blanket gave out.