Page 80 of Shadows of Winter

Swallowing, she laid her hand on his chest to make sure he was breathing. Thank Luvana, the Luck Goddess, he was. When Kaylina checked his pulse, his heart beat calmly under her fingers. But what had happened? She shook him again, as if he were asleep and could be woken.

But it was nothing so benign. His eyes wouldn’t open.

A sick feeling hollowed out her gut, the certainty that the curse had done something to her brother. Had a wind blown him against one of the travertine counters so that he hit his head?

“I am so tired of this place,” Kaylina snarled, lunging to her feet.

She grabbed the fireplace poker, longing for an enemy to present itself. But the castle wasn’t moaning, and no visions intruded upon her mind.

She stomped up the stairs with the poker, as well as her sling and knife, the glowing tower her destination. There had to be answers in there. Maybe whatever was making that glow controlled the whole castle and implemented the curse.

On the way, she thrust open doors, looking for a ladder or anything she could stand on to break the boards. A sturdy wooden chair in a nearby room was the best she could find. Not certain it would give her enough height, she dragged it scraping and thumping down the narrow hallway.

Maybe she should have spent that time finding a doctor for Frayvar, but her gut told her his ailment wouldn’t be solved with smelling salts or a potion.

“This won’t take long,” she promised, shoving the chair under the boarded-up ceiling in the tower.

Enough of the iron brackets that had once supported the stairs remained to provide handholds. If she could make a hole, she thought she could climb up.

With one foot on the cushion and one on the chair back, Kaylina jammed upward with the iron poker. The nailing of the boards had been clumsily done, and she didn’t think it would take much to bring them down. Even so, her first few angry thumps didn’t dislodge anything. Wishing she had a crowbar instead of the poker, she focused on the nails and gaps wider than the others.

Red light seeped through one of those gaps. A warning? She hardly cared. She wasn’t going to let the castle kill her brother.

Fueled by her rage and fear for him, she rammed again and again. Sweat broke out on her forehead, despite the persistent chill of the place.

One of the castle’s eerie moans wafted down from above. Probably another warning.

“Too bad.” With a final great thrust, Kaylina knocked one of the boards free.

It flew upward and clattered out of sight. Dust wafted down along with the musty scent of… dried vegetable matter? She wrinkled her nose.

The hole wasn’t large enough to climb through, so she attacked the board next to it. With the first gone, the others were easier to dislodge, and she’d soon knocked away two more.

One fell, almost hitting her as it clunked off the arm of the chair. Dried leaves fluttered down with the dust. She sneezed, her balance faltering before she jumped down.

From the floor, she eyed the hole, trying to see into the tower. The source of the glow continued to be a mystery, but a branch hung in the air, the ominous red illumination painting it from behind. Some long-forgotten plant that had died, she assumed, its skeletal remains undisturbed for decades, if not centuries. Normally, time would have disintegrated it, but if it had been an altered plant, the magic embedded in its husk might have kept it from falling apart completely.

After pushing the chair out of the way, Kaylina leaned the poker against the wall and used the remains of the staircase to climb. She had to stretch to grip the edge of the hole, and the board creaked when she shifted weight to it. Would it hold her up?

“It’s not that far of a fall,” she told herself, thinking of Frayvar.

He needed her to figure this out.

With an awkward lunge, she pushed away from the wall and gripped the edge of the board with both hands. Her muscles weren’t strong enough to pull up her full bodyweight, and she had to swing from side to side, hoping to create enough momentum to throw a leg up. The boards creaked riotously.

For some reason, Vlerion’s lesson on the log came to mind. Probably because she anticipated falling. Hitting the floorboards below would hurt more than water.

But with one great heave, she managed to hook her leg over the edge. A leaf fluttered down, landing on her nose. She clawed and strained to pull herself up, her muscles quivering before she made it.

Targon was an idiot if he thought she could become a ranger. One of his trained fighters would have leaped up and landed in a crouch with a sword out. She flopped down like a dead fish, rolling onto her back, cobwebs begriming her face, and hit her shoulder against something.

A ceramic pot large enough that it could have contained a symba tree rested in the tower opposite the arrow-slit window. The red glow came from it—no from what was in it.

Kaylina patted for her knife and pushed herself to her knees, dried leaves crinkling underneath her. The plant she’d assumed was dead was alive, the growth rising from the soil in the pot greenish, though it emitted the red glow.

She stared in disbelief. The strange illumination that had been, according to what she’d heard, seeping from the tower window since the curse was placed centuries ago came from… a plant?

An admittedly huge and evil-looking plant composed of both thorny branches and vines, the latter snaking over the edge of the pot and to the walls of the room. A few even trailed up the walls, as if they were trellised. Somehow, they adhered to the stone. Large star-shaped leaves grew from the branches. The vines were bare aside from suckers on the very tips.

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