Weavers (The Frost Chronicles) (9 page)

Adam folded his arms. “You should expect to see less of Ann for a while. She’s on a mission.”

“A mission?” My brow furrowed. “On your orders?”

“Not mine,” he said. “Atticus’s.”

“What mission? Where is she?”

“It involves...Korr.”

I waited for him to explain further, but he didn’t. A poisonous sensation pooled in my chest. He was going to keep this secret. “Is she all right, at least?”

“She’s fine,” he said. “She has her orders.”

I ran an eye over him. He wasn’t wearing his usual blue cloak, but a dark gray one. The clothes he wore beneath were black. “You are dressed differently.”

“I have a mission of my own.”

He didn’t tell me more. My mouth twisted in a frown.

Before I could ask, he was slipping away, and I was left feeling hollow and cold.

~

When I arrived back at the farm, Everiss and Ivy were nowhere to be seen. The house smelled like wet wool and wood smoke, and the fire on the hearth had burned down to coals. Jonn was sitting at the table, flushed and glassy-eyed, surrounded by papers with his notes scribbled across them. The journal from Echlos lay in his lap. The PLD lay beside his left hand, the wires spread out like the tentacles of an alien creature.

Frustration flared in my chest. I shut the door hard and yanked off my cloak. “What are you doing up?”

“I did it,” he said. The words burst out of him all at once, shutting me up.

“What?”

“I did it,” he repeated. An exhausted smile hovered at the edges of his mouth but didn’t quite land. “The journal...I deciphered how to use the PLD. The mission can move forward. We can bring them back.” He dragged in a deep breath. “You have to signal Adam. I have to speak to him at once.”

A tornado of emotion filled me—relief, excitement, dread. We could go through the portal now. This was it. I stood very still, staring at him.

“Did you hear me?” He seemed dazed. Whether it was from happiness or exhaustion, I couldn’t tell.

“Let’s get you back to bed,” was all I could think to say.

“Lia...”

“I’ll put out the lantern,” I promised. “Now come on.”

Before he let me help him back to bed, he scooped up the journal and his papers and clutched them to his chest. I tried to take them and he grabbed my wrist.

“It’s my mission,” he said. “Sorry, Lia. I’m not supposed to show anyone else except Adam.”

I bit my tongue and stepped back, letting go of the papers. We shared this mission. There shouldn’t be this secrecy between us. This was all Atticus’s doing, and I hated it.

After I’d helped him to lie down, I went into the kitchen to scrape together some dinner. When I opened the cupboards, my stomach somersaulted. They were completely bare. I quickly catalogued the supplies in the barn in my head—we had a few barrels of dried apples, turnips for the cow...but we’d been dipping into them. They were already low. We had Everiss to feed now, and there hadn’t been enough as it was.

The front door opened and shut. Ivy appeared in the hall, her nose red from the cold and her cheeks pale.

“Where’s Everiss?” I asked.

“In the barn, finishing the chores. She felt strong enough today.”

“And where have you been?” I was too tired, too defeated to be angry. I practically whispered the words.

My sister stood with her hands behind her back, chewing her lip.

“Berries?” I guessed, and a flicker of hope flared in me. It would be something, as pitiful as that something might be.

“No.”

“What, then? I came home and Jonn was here by himself, working too hard as usual, and—”

“I signed up for the Farther school,” she blurted out.

My mouth dropped open.

“There was no food—I didn’t know what to do, and you were gone, and I’ve probably picked every berry between here and Aeralis, and we’re all so hungry all the time. So I—I just went and did it.” She lifted her arm, and I saw the bag she’d been holding behind her back. “They give you food just for putting your name on the list, did you know that? I start tomorrow.”

“No,” I said, desperate. Not at that horrible school where the children chanted in unison about the virtues of the Farther dictator.

“I have to,” Ivy insisted. “We need food. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re starving to death!”

“I’ll check the traps again...I’ll talk to Ann...”

“You have your contributions to the welfare of this family,” she said. “Now let me have mine.”

~

Adam came to the house later that night, after I put out the lantern. I let him in without a word, and pointed him toward the bedroom where Jonn was resting. I sat at the table and stared at the shut door while they conversed quietly on the other side. Everiss slept by the fire and Ivy was upstairs in the loft. The fire crackled, and the wind moaned around the corners of the house and through the seams of the windowpanes. Snow fell softly, feather-light.

The bedroom door opened and closed, and Adam crossed the room and sank into one of the chairs beside me and put his chin in his hand.

“Well?” I asked.

“He’s done it.”

We sat together silently for a moment, drinking that thought in.

I sighed. “I’m frightened.”

“Me too,” he admitted.

I looked at him in surprise, but he didn’t acknowledge me. He just looked at the fire. “Now what?” I asked after another stretch of silence.

Adam ran one finger along the edge of the table, dusting away a speck of a crumb. “You’ll have to continue your training without me for a while, but I don’t want you to slack off. You can use my family’s barn to do the exercises I taught you, of course—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m the one who’s going to go,” he said. “I have to go through the portal to get them.”

I stared at him. How had I not realized? I supposed I just hadn’t thought about it. Of course someone would have to go. Of course that someone would be Adam, the strongest and most experienced among us.

Still, the admission stunned me.

“How long will you be gone?”

A muscle in his jaw jumped. “It should be a few weeks at least until anyone is able to return.”

“A few weeks?”

“According to what Jonn has discovered from the journals, the portal operates on very specific principles of space and time. We’ll have to coordinate and utilize exact dates for any organized return to this specific place, and these times occur only at certain intervals. Once I travel to where the fugitives are, we’ll have to wait in order to return at the right location. It won’t be available immediately unless I left as soon as I arrived, which I can’t count on. It may take time to find and organize them all.”

I nodded, absorbing this information. “So portal travel is like a Farther train or airship, with certain departure times?”

“A little,” he said.

Coldness seeped through me. I didn’t want to say aloud how much I would miss him, or how vulnerable we’d feel with him gone. We’d come to depend on his presence heavily, and the truth of it was now staring me starkly in the face. I shivered and clasped my arms around me, but I didn’t say anything. I had to be strong. I had to be Lia Weaver, invincible and unemotional, not this sopping mess of worry and concern that I’d become.

I thought of Gabe—his face had grown almost hazy in my mind over the last few months—and my heart twisted. I felt pulled in two. I didn’t want Adam to go...but I wanted Gabe to come back, even with as much as I feared and dreaded seeing him again, because I didn’t know where we stood.

Adam stood. “I should go. I need to meet with Atticus tonight to discuss what must be done, and then I have other places to be.”

“Other missions?” I asked lightly.

He hesitated a long moment, as if he had something he wanted to say. “There’s always another mission,” he said finally. It was a non-answer, and I felt the sting of that keenly. He was cutting me out again, and it hurt. “Be well, Lia Weaver. The mission begins tomorrow, but I’ll see you again soon. Stay strong. I...”

He didn’t finish the thought.

I raised my gaze to his.

He hesitated, then reached out and brushed his fingers across my cheek. The touch of his hand sent a tremble through me. His eyes blazed, but he didn’t speak. He turned to go.

My heart hammered.
Tomorrow
.

“Wait. Adam?”

He stopped by the door, his hand resting against the frame. He didn’t turn back.

I went to his side and lowered my voice. “I’m not happy about this—this secrecy. Do you think it really protects us? Or is it simply making us more vulnerable, more easily divided? It’s one thing to keep some things secret to avoid giving up information when under torture. It’s another thing to be so cut off from one another that we can’t help each other when we need it.”

His fingers drummed against the doorframe. “You don’t understand. Atticus is—”

“Then help me understand.”

He shook his head. “I really must go. We’ll talk later.”

“Adam...”

He touched a finger to my lips, silencing me, and then he went out into the night, leaving me standing there alone.

THE WALK TO the village the next morning crackled with unvoiced tension. Ivy kept pace with me, but her cloak fluttered pitifully in the wind, and her dark eyes looked huge in her face. She was nervous.

I was nervous, too. I didn’t want to let her do this, and I still wasn’t convinced that she had to, either. I would go to the Mayor’s house, speak to Ann. Perhaps a servant position was open, one that could be paid in food...

There had to be
something
. Some other option.

Ivy aside, concern about the mission gnawed at my insides. I didn’t know what was happening. I felt as though I were tiptoeing across ice, not knowing when or where it might crack.

“Don’t worry about me,” Ivy said at last. “I know how to take care of myself.”

“I’m always going to worry,” I told her. She rolled her eyes. I felt old. Motherish. Brittle with worry.

We came into sight of the Cage. Ivy shivered. I touched her shoulder once, she gave me a tremulous smile, and we entered the tunnel together. She left my side only when we reached the schoolhouse.

The others had already assembled, and already I could hear the sound of their chanting. A trickle of unease ran down my spine, but my sister was already slipping through the gate and up the path. I stared after her, helpless, and as soon as she’d vanished inside, I headed straight for the hill and the Mayor’s house.

I needed to speak to Ann. Mission or not, it had been too many days since we’d spoken. I needed her help. I needed her friendship.

A servant answered my knock.

“I need to speak with Ann Mayor,” I said as firmly as I could muster. “I have some yarn—”

“Can’t,” the servant said.

“She’ll want to see me.”

“That may be true, but Miss Ann isn’t here.” The servant began to close the door. I shoved my foot in the crack and thrust my face close to hers.

“What do you mean, she isn’t here? Where is she? I can wait.”

“She’s in Astralux,” the servant said. “With Lord Korr.”

“Astralux?”
Korr
?

“The Aeralian capital.” The servant said it in a clipped tone, as if I was an imbecile.

I was so stunned that she managed to push my foot away and close the door in my face. I stared at the knob, numb with shock, my mind spinning twenty directions at once.

Ann was in Astralux? The capital city of Aeralis? And she was there with Korr? As his prisoner? For some other reason altogether?

What was going on?

The secrets were getting out of control. I needed to speak to Adam.

~

I travelled straight from the village to the Brewer farm, and as I went, I considered every possibility. Had she journeyed there again with her father, perhaps? Was it possible she’d made the trip alone under some excuse of tourism? Was this about her mission?

Was this Atticus’s doing?

I reached the Brewer farm and hurried straight to the barn. Adam should be there. If he wasn’t, I could leave a message... I hadn’t really thought any of this through. I was simply moving. I wrenched the door open and stopped.

Someone was there, but it wasn’t Adam.

Atticus
.

He stood facing the exercise ropes, his hands on his hips. He turned and saw me as I stepped inside, and his mouth curved in a careful smile that gave none of his thoughts away. “Lia Weaver,” he said. “I’d so hoped that you’d come by today. We need to talk.”

My heart flipped. “I need to speak with Adam Brewer.”

“Brewer isn’t here.”

A little shiver raced through me. Not here. There was something so ominous about those words. “Then where is he?”

Atticus shook his head. “In the Thorns, every operative has his or her mission to accomplish. They don’t concern themselves with others’ business. Adam is on a
mission
. It is none of your concern.”

All this secrecy was beginning to infuriate me. “That isn’t how we did things before you came,” I snapped.

His eyes narrowed. “I’m in charge now. We’re doing things my way.”

I shut my mouth and tried to be calm. He was right. I was being insubordinate.

“Listen to me, girl,” Atticus said. “Right now, your concern is the PLD and Echlos. Your concern is those fugitives.”

“Echlos? The fugitives? That is Adam’s mission.”

“Adam won’t be able to complete his task regarding the PLD. He’s occupied with something else.” He paused. “I need you to do it instead.”

I need you to do it
. I blinked, swallowed, stuttered. I wasn’t a seasoned operative. I wasn’t the one who’d trained for this. “Me?”

He spoke crisply. “Yes. You are familiar with Echlos, you know something of the histories, you know several of the fugitives...you are the best one for the job.”

“But my family...” I could not leave them for so long.

Atticus’s eyes burned like black fire. “Your family—and everyone else in this town—are in great danger. The Farthers are slowly tightening their grip, and they won’t stop until everyone is crushed. You are a Thorns operative. You swore an oath to this cause. Now, are you going to do your duty?”