Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 23 of 39

The blue thread in Lia's chest held, but only just. Elaria crouched over the sprite and watched the light thin every time she looked away. The fresh snow had bought minutes, not hours. Above the broken roof, the wind carried the smell of the open glacier — miles of it, between her and any road home. She had the crystal in her coat. She had a dying sprite against her ribs. She had nothing to feed the cold thing that had kept her alive down there. She took stock on the packed drift. The frostcloth was wet through at one seam. The snow-blanket at her chest was slush. Her ice shard was a stub. Lia needed a container that would not warm from Elaria's body, and cold food a sprite could take. Elaria had neither. She made the container first. She peeled her glove and set her palm on the drift and pulled. Cold came out of her the way blood came out of a cut. She shaped it as it left her — a bowl of clear ice, ribbed for strength, a lid hinged with the same. She lined the inside with the driest frostcloth she had. When she lifted Lia in, the sprite's wings did not fold. That was worse than a cry. Food was harder. Elaria dug through her pack with stiff fingers and found the ration brick her father's quartermaster had pressed on her before she left — meat, fat, dried berries, hard as wood. Warm food. Wrong food. She almost threw it into the snow. Then she stopped. The curse fed on warmth. Lia was its opposite. What killed one might feed the other, if she could invert it. Elaria shaved a curl off the brick with her knife and set it on her bare palm. She pushed cold into it the way she had pushed cold into the bowl. The fat went white. The berries went hard and glassy. The curl stopped smelling of meat and started smelling of nothing, which was what winter smelled like. She held the frozen shaving to Lia's mouth. The sprite did not move. Elaria waited. A wingtip twitched. Lia's small hand closed on the curl and drew it in. The blue thread in her chest brightened one notch and stayed there. Elaria let her forehead rest against the cold rim of the bowl. She shaved a second curl and froze it and set it in the lining beside the sprite. Then a third. She wrapped the rest of the brick in cloth and stowed it deep in her coat, where her body would not touch it. She stood. Through a gap in the beams she could see, far down the slope, a spire of blue stone rising from the ice — a chapel, or what had been one. Smoke did not rise from it. But a roof did. She lifted the cradle and started down.