Elorien Wizardbane's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The skull sat on the shelf for three days. Snow ticked against the crystal windows of the library tower. Elorien watched Aldren pace below and could say nothing. It had learned one thing since the curse left: the sparks were gone, but not the frost. Cold still gathered on its teeth, the way it always had. Cold was the last thing the skull could still make. It began to think about how to use it. Edric worked at his bench near the shelf. He was the alchemist, the pale man in the stained apron who hunted cures no one else would touch. He had lost a wife to poison and never stopped chasing the hand that made it. He set out glass vials and warned Aldren, again, not to touch anyone. "The gray reached your wrist," he said. "Keep your gloves on." Aldren, the arcanist, ignored him. He set his crystal-phoenix staff against the shelf and leaned close to the skull's cracked jaw. "Still empty," he said. "Still useless." His bare gray hand rested on the wood, inches from the bone. Elorien felt the nearness of him. It could not speak. But it could freeze. The skull pulled cold into the missing-tooth socket. Frost crept out of the crack in the jaw and spread across the shelf toward Aldren's fingers. The wood went white. Aldren jerked his hand back. "It moved," he said. "The frost moved." Edric came fast, glasses catching the light. He touched the frost line with a gloved fingertip and studied where it stopped. "It didn't drift," he said. "It reached. Toward you." Isolde Wintermere entered then, snow on her cloak, the gold-ribboned scroll in her hand. She was the librarian who had carried the skull to this tower to keep it from worse hands. She had never once let her skin touch it. She looked at the white shelf and the two men. "It's talking," she said. "In frost." "It can't talk," Aldren said. "It just told you where it wants your hand." Isolde set down the scroll. "Ice on wood spells nothing. But it aims. That's not nothing." She pulled her scarf tighter and did not go closer. Elorien understood her at once. She was the only one who saw the shape of it. The frost was crude. It could point. It could beckon. It could draw a bare hand toward bone that no longer held the curse but might learn to hold it back. That was enough to begin. Edric wiped the shelf clean and stepped away. "Move it," he told Isolde. "Somewhere it can't reach him." Isolde lifted the skull with her cloak and carried it to a high shelf across the room, alone. "Cold and quiet," she said. "Where it can point at no one." But the skull had found its voice again. Not words. Direction. And now it knew it could aim.