Page 1 of Winter's Fate

CHAPTER 1

The garden smelled wrong.

Laena Felicia Montrose-Aboret, once heir to the Etran throne, left her cottage shortly after sunrise to tend to her vegetables, as she did every morning. Birds hopped from branch to branch, astheydid every morning; and Brin, Laena’s newt-like companion—commonly known as a shimmerling—dropped from the eaves and landed on Laena’s shoulder with a pink beetle clamped between her jaws. Asshedid every morning.

Laena paused on the threshold, drawing in a deep breath through her nose. Beneath the expected scents of damp earth and ripening tomatoes, there ran an unmistakable undercurrent of rot.

“Did we lose a chipmunk to the walls again?” she asked.

Still on her shoulder, Brin spiraled in a tight circle and plopped down to begin devouring her beetle. Not a particularly helpful response. Brin had simply appeared one day shortly after Laena’s arrival, back when she’d been foolish enough to dub the place Sunflower Cottage. Now the name only reminded her, with bitter irony, that she’d once felt hopeful, even cheerful,about the prospect of living here. Some days she wished she could take it back.

But even as the shine of idyllic cottage living wore away, Brin’s companionship remained constant. Laena found she was glad for it. Shimmerlings were rare enough in Etra, and rather untrusting of humans. Laena considered it a distinct honor to be singled out—not that she’d ever say as much to Brin.

“I wish you’d do that elsewhere,” Laena said, nodding to the beetle.

Brin ignored her.

Laena sighed and retrieved her gardening bucket from its place on the porch, noting a new patch of chipped paint beside the window. Which reminded her of the splitting rail to the right, and the shutter that the last storm had left ajar. Keeping the house together by herself was quickly becoming more work than she could handle. But any worker she brought in to help would charge triple the usual fee without hesitation, and that was assuming there was someone who would agree to show up at all.

No matter. After the harvest, she’d have time to care for the house. In between all the canning, smoking, and jamming she’d need to do in preparation for winter.

As Laena hauled the bucket toward the vegetable garden, the smell of rot grew stronger, and the concern over the prospect of an unlucky chipmunk twisted into a real thread of fear. If the garden had contracted a blight, she might very well go hungry come winter.

Everything had been fine yesterday. More than fine.

And to all appearances, it was fine today. The tomatoes were plump and green, the barest blushes of orange beginning to suggest oncoming ripeness. The carrot fronds were undisturbed—she’d had to install a fence to oust the hungry groundhogs—and the zucchinis, as usual, bore more fruit than she could hopeto consume on her own. Even the strawberries looked perfectly healthy.

Laena followed the rotten smell to the end of the garden, where—in yet another fit of optimism—she’d planted a trio of butterfly bushes. The blossom-stuffed stalks made her think of fireworks after a ball, and her heart lifted every time she spotted a pair of orange, blue, or black wings alighting on the flowers. Even now, with all those early hopes dashed, the bushes felt like a promise. Like everything would turn out just fine, as long as she could attract throngs of pollinators to her garden.

A thin stone path separated the bushes from the vegetables, and even on her worst days, she still thought they lent the garden an air of luxury. Usually, they filled the garden with the delicious aroma of honey, a wonderful accompaniment to her weeding. Only yesterday, they’d been flowering in luminescent shades of fuchsia and purple.

Now, Laena had to blink hard to make sure she was indeed awake, and that her eyes were showing her the truth.

Overnight, her prized butterfly bushes had turned brown, their blooms drooping low to the ground as if bowed with weariness, petals scattered on the garden stones like discarded scabs. Laena placed a hesitant finger to one of the stalks, and the once-silky flowers crumbled beneath her touch.

She wrinkled her nose, venturing closer to sniff the air. The rot was most certainly coming from this corner of the garden, if not the bushes themselves. Laena could barely choke in a breath, the smell was so strong.

“They were fine yesterday,” she said. “Weren’t they?”

On her shoulder, Brin swallowed the last morsel of beetle and rested her head on her front leg. Time for a nap.

Laena set her bucket down on the path and tugged on her gloves, then knelt before the destroyed bushes and dug her spade gently into the dirt. It sank in almost too easily, as if a pocket of air had been blown beneath the soil. When Laenapushed farther, the spade struck something hard. A rock, surely. Though how it had come to be here, she couldn’t say.

With her gloves as armor, Laena plunged her hand into the dirt, wrapping her fingers around the offending stone. When she pulled, it came right out of the soil.

And it kept coming, until she was on her knees holding what looked for all the worlds like a midnight-purple icicle. It was twice the length of the dagger she kept secreted away in her trunk, and when she held it up to the light, she could make out sparks within it. Like stars shining through the black of night.

It was, without a doubt, the source of the rotten smell. Her stomach roiled against it, and though she’d experienced many an unsavory moment since taking up residence at Sunflower Cottage—there was a reason she associated rotting smells with dead rodents in the walls—this otherwise innocuous-looking object might well be the first to make her empty her stomach.

Warmth seeped through the fabric of her gloves, quickly heating to the point of discomfort, and she laid the icicle on the path before it could burn her hand. Actual heat? Or cold so deep that it burned? Impossible to tell, and she’d be a fool to test the question with bare hands.

“A prank,” she said, though her voice sounded uncertain even to her own ears. She wasn’t immune to pranks, certainly. People knew who she was, and many of them disapproved of her choices. But to murder her butterfly bushes so cruelly? That was beyond the red paint someone had splashed on her front gate, beyond the usual snubs in the market, the stalls that closed just as she arrived, and the potatoes swapped in place of steaks. Perhaps the villagers, who she’d once thought of as her people, had decided she should not even be able to grow her own food.

Surely there were easier ways to poison a neighbor’s garden than burying this untouchable icicle. Whatwasit, really? Holding her nose, Laena leaned in closer, squinting to inspect the thing, its depths tugging at the pit of her stomach like itmeant to draw her in. To hold her attention until there was nothing else, only the star-like glitter and the burning cold.

She shook her head, sitting back on her heels to put more distance between herself and the artifact. It almost looked mage-made.

There were not many things left in Etra—probably in any of the three kingdoms of the Vales—that were mage-made. Few enough, in fact, that a typical citizen would not recognize the material well enough to suspect it. Most such artifacts had been destroyed long ago, though as one-time heir to the throne, she knew that some of the more powerful or indestructible items were hidden away in the castle vaults.

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