Stealing Snow (9 page)

When I awoke, a boy was in the doorway, standing rod
straight. I hoped for a second that it was someone I’d know. But when he moved, I realized he was wiry and tall, not as graceful as Jagger. Not as solid as my Bale. He made me think of the toy soldier that Magpie had under her bed, but I couldn’t focus long enough to find out who he was.

“The fever isn’t breaking. There’s something wrong,” I heard the girl say, minutes or hours later.

Her hand hovered over my chest. “There’s something not right in there,” she assessed. “It’s like something is stopping the magic from working.”

“She’s part witch and part snow. That’s what’s wrong,” the boy countered, speaking for the first time.

Perhaps it was the fever, but his voice sounded distant and matter-of-fact, as if he thought the girl were overreacting. Or perhaps he didn’t care whether my fever broke or soared.

“River Witch … Nepenthe … come quick,” the girl called.

“Too hot or too cold. Make up your mind, dearie,” the River Witch said, beside me again. There was concern in her voice.

She peered down at me, one of her scaly fingers pulling at the skin beneath my eye. “She’s filled to the brim,” she said. “We need to get the water out of her.”

I felt panic grip me harder than that seaweed had. If fire was used to warm me, what exactly was the water removal method?

“You’re going to feel this,” the River Witch warned.

She put her hand over my heart. I felt my chest lift up toward it like a magnet. Water rushed out of every part of me, every pore. Even my eye sockets. And from my mouth a geyser spouted up toward the ceiling.

When the water stopped pouring out onto the floor, the girl approached me again. She touched my forehead and nodded to the witch. My fever had subsided. “You are going to be okay. You need to heal, and no one knows how long that is supposed to take. A normal person couldn’t have survived that,” the slip of a girl whispered.

I would have protested. Normal had been the unattainable goal for so very long at Whittaker. How was it possible that
not
being normal had saved me?

The next time I opened my eyes, the boy with the impossibly straight posture was staring at me. He was handsome. Not Bale handsome or Jagger-the-orderly-who-brought-me-to-the-Tree handsome. This boy was more innocent looking despite the deeply serious scowl on his face. The girl with the singsong voice was next to him. They were watching me as intently as Vern and I watched
The End of Almost.

“I’m Gerde, and this is Kai,” the girl explained.

I couldn’t tell anything more about them. Were they brother and sister? Boyfriend and girlfriend? Husband and wife? They looked to be about the same age as me. She was obviously a witch, but was he a witch, too? So far, all he’d done was stand and stare while the River Witch and the girl worked their strange medicine on me.

“You were dead. It might take you a while to be completely alive again,” Gerde explained.

What do you say to the girl who covered you in leaves
and set you on fire and the boy who probably saw you naked?

“Hi,” I managed to eke out. If this had been Whittaker, I would have done or said something to mark my territory, to tell them not to mess with me. But we weren’t there, and they had just saved my life.

The girl perked up, happy to see me awake.

“Who’s Bale? You said the name like a million times. Also, Jagger. How many suitors do you have, Princess?” Gerde asked, her lilting voice filled with curiosity.

I couldn’t explain who Bale was to me. We had never made a name for what we were, and we had never gotten past the first kiss. But he was more than her word “suitor” and more than a friend and more than any other person in my world or this strange one. And Jagger, this boy I had known for less than a heartbeat, was the boy of my dreams. Only my dreams were nightmares. I needed one boy to find the other, and now both were gone.

“Gerde …,” Kai warned.

I didn’t understand why he stopped her. What harm were a few questions? He didn’t know enough about me to want to respect my privacy.

“Right, you should rest,” she singsonged again. She started to hum. I wasn’t sure if it was coincidence or not, but the humming made me want to sleep. It pulled me like the tide under again into the blackness.

“Maybe the witch should have left her in the water,” a voice said, chasing after me.

It sounded like the boy’s.

“Welcome back to the living, Snow,” the River Witch said. She was standing in front of a large oval window when I awoke again. There were scales on her back that seemed to be part of a shiny, metallic cloak. I wondered what else besides her tentacles was underneath it.

Her long, thin feet were bare against the whitewashed wooden planks of the floor.

All the walls of the room were made of the same white wood, and thousands of drops of water dripped from every crevice of the structure. The result was cacophonous. The sound of water on wood hit my eardrums over and over. It was the constant kind of sound that could drive a person crazy. Other than the bed I was lying on, there was no other furniture in the place. Glancing around nervously, I could not see a way out. There was a rustling in one of the corners. Or rather a slithering. It was too dark to see what it was. But whatever it was, it was moving.

My bed lurched. It felt like we were on a boat, and I suddenly feared I was even more trapped. I looked around for Kai and Gerde. They were nowhere to be found.

I half remembered the boy saying that I should have been left in the River. But I wasn’t sure if he’d said it or I’d dreamed it.

The River Witch turned and looked at me.

“What is wrong with you? How could you take a drowned girl on a boat?” I demanded.

She laughed. “It’s the only way, my dear. Unless you prefer another swim in the River.”

“What are you?”

“Oh, my dear, there are things above and below that no one has imagined or known about. I am one of those things for many people.”

I sat up too quickly. My head screamed. I rested back on the rough pillow.

“You have more spunk than she did. That will serve you well,” the River Witch said and laughed. “You will be on your way. All in due time. But not before I tell you a story.”

“I don’t need a story. I need to find my friend and go home,” I said, feeling desperately close to whining.

“But that’s the thing. You already are home. I have to say, you look so much like Ora. It’s uncanny.”

“You know my mother?”

“Know her? We are sisters.”

I squinted hard at the River Witch.

Sisters? I had never met any other family outside my mom
and dad. And the entity standing in front of me had more in common with the water puddling on the floor around her than my very perfect, very human mother. “You think… You’re my aunt?”

The River Witch laughed. “No, Snow. Ora and I belonged to the same coven.”

Coven? The word thumped in my head. I’d recently discovered a lot about my mother. First and foremost, she was a liar. And now she was a person from another land. But somehow the idea of her being magical, of being the same as this mermaid-witch thing from the River, seemed inconceivable.

“You’re saying my mother was … is a witch. Like you?”

“There are all kinds of witches, my dear.”

“And what kind of witch is she?” I asked reflexively.

“Not the same kind,” the River Witch answered cryptically. “But there is so much that you do not know. Shame on Ora.”

I didn’t like her insulting my mother even though I was mad at her myself. But I didn’t have the energy to defend her. I could barely sit up.

The witch’s cheek gills opened and closed with a sigh of annoyance. “Ora has not protected you and has kept you ignorant. If she really believes that is the best way to keep you safe, then she learned nothing from her time in Algid. You have missed years of preparing, years of training…”

“Preparing and training for what?” I asked, more confused by the moment.

The River Witch sighed, and a few drops of water splattered onto the floor as a result.

“Oh, dear. The first thing you should know is whoever you believe is your father is not.”

“You’re lying …,” I said. But some part of me stopped short. Some part of me wanted to hear her out. I barely knew my father. His visits were sporadic and always at the urging of my mother. I would have been sad about it if I hadn’t been drugged up all the time.

“You don’t believe me, but in time you will. Let’s start from the beginning, then … with your
real
father, King Lazar.”

As she spoke, I wanted to resist, but I leaned into her words like a five-year-old listening to a bedtime story.

“Algid wasn’t always covered in snow,” the River Witch said. “It used to have seasons. And then Prince Lazar was born, which would change the course of our world. Lazar was the first of the royal line to carry strong magic within him. Magic is usually reserved only for witches, so it created quite the stir. Some say his mother had an affair with a god. Others say she dabbled in dark magic herself. No one knows the truth, and we never will because when Lazar was born, he came into the world and froze his own mother to death. Not an auspicious start.

“Lazar’s father feared for his own life and came to the coven for help. My sisters cast a protective spell on the boy, restraining his magic and putting a forgetting spell on all who knew of what he had done. And everything was fine for a time.

“But when the young prince came of age, he found an object that amplified his own powers so much that it broke the spell.”

“An object?” I asked.

“A mirror. Even our coven believed that it was just a legend. But Lazar found it. Larger than life and more powerful than anything in Algid. Than anything everywhere. And in an instant Lazar’s power was back with a vengeance.”

A magical mirror sounded ridiculous. But then the memory of Bale going into the mirror that appeared in his room came flooding back to me.

“The King sought the coven’s help once again. But instead of restraining his son’s powers this time, the King could see only his own greed. He demanded that the coven teach Lazar how to wield his great power so that the King could use it for his own benefit.”

I snorted at that. Witches training princes who wielded magical snow? That hadn’t made it into any fairy tale I’d ever read. The River Witch ignored me and continued.

“Then something happened that the King did not expect. Lazar fell madly in love with one of the witches’ nieces, and she loved him as well.”

“My mother?”

The Witch blinked hard, interrupting the flow of water down her face, as if remembering. As if the idea of their being together were unnatural to her.

“Yes. And your father insisted on marrying her despite the law that said royalty can only marry other royalty. When his father refused to bless the marriage, Lazar lost control of his temper, and the King met an icy end. Prince Lazar became King Lazar. When he realized the extent of his powers, he froze over the lands of Algid so all would bend to his will. He took the throne and a wife on the same day, and you were born less than a year later.”

“So what happened? Why did my mother run away from her icily ever after?” I smiled, proud of my pun.

The River Witch did not return the smile.

“She was still a witch. We believe in the Elements. In nature. It could not have been easy to see the whole world frozen in the name of their love. But she loved him deeply in return. And so they were happy for a time. Blissfully so.”

Nothing says I love you like freezing the world
, I thought. But this time I kept the words in.

“So what happened?”

“The oracle.”

“Oracle?” I said, remembering a book of Greek myths I’d read from the Whittaker library. “Please tell me that this story does not involve a fortune-teller.”

The River Witch ignored my comment and continued. “There was a prophecy spoken on your birth to the three most powerful witches in the land. Remember, you are the daughter of magic on both sides of your lineage. You have magic within you. Powerful magic, probably the strongest that Algid has ever seen. You can control snow. Thus, you were named. The prophecy said:

When the Lights go out at century’s turn,

The progeny of the King will rise to power.

She will either claim the throne herself … or she will give the King more power than he has ever known.

Only she can choose the path for Algid.

But not every path is clear, and there are those who have the power to change the course of fate:

the prince,

the thief,

the thinker,

the secret.

If they are destroyed, the King will surely fall. And should the sacrifice come exactly when the Lights are extinguished, whoever wears the crown will rule Algid forever.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“One doesn’t know the full meaning of a prophecy until it’s fulfilled, but it likely involves the Eclipse of the North Lights and you.”

“Do you mean the northern lights? How can they eclipse?”