Tomas Thornwood's Arc

Chapter 9 of 12

The freed souls had scattered into the woods at dusk. By morning, Tomas found their marks. A doe lay stiff in the ferns, no wound on her, only frost on her open eyes. A rabbit the same. Whatever the souls touched, they drained. He knelt by the doe and pressed his palm to her cold flank. The old cures had stopped the mage. Salt, iron, running water. But those cleaned blood and broke bonds. He did not know if they would touch a loose soul. Guess wrong, and more things would die while he wasted the day. He brought the doe's cold to Auria's cave. She was the healer banished to these woods, the one who had first warned him of the stones. Silver eyes, purple hair tied back, hands always busy. When he stepped through her herb-fence gate, she was crushing leaves into a bundle by the cauldron fire. She took one look at his face and set the bundle down. "They're feeding," Tomas said. "Two dead already. I don't know what stops them." Auria wiped her hands and pulled an old book from her shelf. Its cover was cracked leather, the pages thick and hand-marked. "My family kept this. Stories of spirits, good and cruel." She turned pages fast. Luca crept in behind Tomas and pressed close to his leg. The fox boy's ears were flat. His brother had been taken by this same curse. Auria stopped on a page and read. "Hungry souls fear the hearth. Not salt. Not iron. Fire and warmth." She looked up. "A soul torn from its body is cold. It hunts heat to fill the cold. But true fire, ringed and living, it can't cross. The warmth unmakes it." Tomas's jaw tightened. "Guess wrong and something else dies." "Then don't guess." Auria took a coal from her fire in an iron pot. "We test it now. On one. If I'm wrong, we've lost a coal, not a day." They went to the ferns where the rabbit lay. The air there hung cold and still. Tomas felt it move, a pull at his chest, hungry. Auria set dry sticks in a ring and dropped the coal. She blew until the fire caught. Then she waited. The cold thing came. It bent the fern-tops with no wind. It slid toward the warm bodies of the three of them, toward Luca. Tomas stepped in front of the boy. The fire snapped high. The cold hit the ring of flame and recoiled, thin and shrieking, then thinned to nothing and was gone. The ferns went still. The pull left Tomas's chest. "Fire," Tomas said. "It works." Luca let out a breath. Auria closed the book. But Tomas counted in his head. He had one fire. The souls were scattered across the whole forest, and cold was coming with the night.