Page 137 of Threadbound

It was eerily beautiful.

And really cold.

Jamie was huddled into his coat, a scarf wrapped around his throat and face, the soft knitted fabric pulled up over his nose. Even though it had been years since he’d been anywhere near his mother’s house, and dozens if not hundreds of washes, the knitted yarn still smelled ever-so-slightly of his momma’s perfume. Maybe it was in his head, just the fragments of memories that summoned up the scent, but it seemed to Jamie as though some part of Nell Weaver had been knitted into the loops of the scarf.

Mirage or no, breathing in his momma’s perfume helped Jamie stay calm, something he was going to need as they tramped through a mostly-frozen moor in the wee hours of the morning. To judge from Rob’s grumbling and the fact that Trixie kept trying to blow on her mittens to warm her hands, only Bran seemed to be largely impervious to the cold and darkness of the midnight moors.

Certainly, no one else seemed to be insane enough to be out, as Jamie hadn’t seen even the occasional wink of distant car lights, a campfire, or a ranger’s flashlight. Torch. Whatever. If Jamie were being honest, it was probably better that they were alone out here—having to explain (or come up with a lie to explain) what they were doing would be far more suspicious. Especially if Bran was going to try to talk to one of these water-creatures—the ashrays.

The academic part of Jamie was curious and a little excited to learn more about ashrays—what they looked like, what theywerelike. He was also more than a little nervous about what a water-spirit might ask for in return for the gold they needed. Maybe Jamie had been reading too much about fae, but he was afraid that they were going to demand blood or flesh or someone’s firstborn. Although he could probably personallyagree to that last one, since he wasn’t going to have any kids—at least not any biological ones.

Then again, the stories also made clear that whatever he agreed to—no matter how impossible it seemed—whatever he said would be twisted so that he ended up on the losing end of the bargain. He almost laughed at the thought that fae were like lawyers. Magical lawyers with claws and beaks and really sharp teeth who might eat your spleen if you didn’t pay up.

“How the bloody hell are we supposed to find heather under the damn snow?” Rob grumbled, his breath clouding in the moonlit air. One benefit of doing this under a full moon was that they could at least see where they were going without needing additional lights. The snow, although not deep, amplified the cold light.

“Heather grows in boglands,” Trixie supplied. She was their self-appointed botany expert, which Jamie was more than grateful for, given the slight trauma he had about plant identification thanks to too many hours spent struggling to ID the dead man’s breath—which he never would have been able to find outside of Elfhame. Some plants—and creatures—could apparently thrive in both Elfhame and Dunehame, at least according to Bran. The dead man’s breath was not one of them. Neither, annoyingly, was heather. Or bog myrtle. Or hyssop. Or maiden’s jewels, or selkie’s flipper. Yew grew in both, though, and so did holly. Which meant that if they didn’t find either here, they could keep searching in Elfhame while they hunted down the other fae flora.

“The bloody boglands are frozen,” Rob grumbled. “So how do we know they’re even boglands?”

“Lack of trees?” Jamie offered, feeling rather foolish, but not really knowing what else he was supposed to suggest. They were all out here because of him, after all.

“Does anyone even know what dead heather looks like?” Rob asked, although that probably would have been a better question to comebeforethey’d come out here.

“It’s not dead,” Trixie retorted. “It’s dormant.”

Jamie didn’t ask Bran if he thought dormant heather would still meet the requirements of the recipe. Since they didn’t honestly know what it was supposed todo—although Bran trusted that theBean Nighewouldn’t have mentioned it if it weren’t relevant, Jamie wasn’t so sure the crone wasn’t just completely mad or messing with them—it was even harder to say whether or not heather gathered in the middle of winter would do the trick.

Oranythinggathered in the middle of winter, for that matter.

Bringing it up now seemed like a bad idea, though. Especially since Bran didn’t seem certain whether or not Cairn would even survive until spring. Not that Jamie had asked, explicitly, but the sense of urgency that had surrounded him from the moment he found out—and had been palpable at the Court of Shades—made it clear that they were looking at days or weeks, not months or years, no matter what reassuring murmurs people made about the longevity of the Holly King.

Jamie also hadn’t asked what would happen if Cuileann mac Eug, the Holly King in question, sickened and died alongside Bran’s father. Jamie might not know much about the workings of the Sluagh court, but he was pretty sure that would spell catastrophe—and possibly even the end of the war with the Sidhe.

That was something else Jamie had a thousand questions about—questions he wasn’t terribly comfortable asking Bran, even putting aside the present circumstances. In the stories his momma had told, the battle between the winter fairies and the summer fairies was resolved by sharing the seasons—the HollyKing ruling the winter and the Oak King ruling the summer. But the origin of the story was that the Holly King had stolen the Oak King’s crown, making the Sluagh—although his momma hadn’t used that term—the aggressors. Whether or not that was true, the way Bran talked, it sounded like it was the Sidhe who were responsible, at least for this war.

But history made it clear that everyone blamed everyone else for wars—regardless of who was actually at fault. It made Jamie nervous, though, that he didn’t know more. That he didn’t have enough information to determine if there was a good side or a bad side—and which was which.

In the legends, the balance was important. You need both summer and winter, as well as spring and fall, so the ideal was what was achieved. But if you looked at it objectively, there were plenty of places in the world that didn’t have winter, and they did just fine. Antarctica, on the other hand, was pretty inhospitable. It was why in all the stories Jamie had ever been told, winter was a time of darkness and death, the thing that everyone was looking forward to being over. Something to be endured, not celebrated.

It made Jamie wonder whether or not the Sluagh were in the right—they were, by Bran’s own admission, creatures of darkness, people who worshiped death. Did that also make them evil? Would the world—Elfhame or Dunehame or both—be better with less darkness?

The very thought made Jamie’s stomach twist—because if that were true, then it meant that Bran was evil, or at least not good, and the idea of living his life without Bran in it was physically painful.

“Are you all right?” Bran’s voice was soft, reacting to the sudden inhalation of breath Jamie had made in his internal distress.

“Just cold,” Jamie lied, feeling guilty for the deception even though he knew it would be far worse for him to admit his thoughts out loud. He didn’t look over at the fae, fairly certain that if he did, Bran would be able to tell that more than the cold was upsetting Jamie.

Ahead, Trixie scrambled over an icy flat section of rock, Rob cursing as he followed her. Then she bent to clear away the snow on the far side, flakes clinging to the thick fleece of her mittens. “Ha!” Her triumphant crow echoed across the snow. “First try!”

“Bloody hell. That’sit?” Rob groused.

“Would you rather spend another three hours traipsing about looking for it? Because if you want to keep walking, be my bloody guest,” she shot back.

“Good job, Trixie!” Jamie called, forcing cheer into his voice despite the cold and his own misgivings.

Now they just had to find bog myrtle. Hyssop they’d gotten at the little herbal shop Rob had taken them to, so at leastthatthey didn’t have to hunt down in the snow.

Oh, and they had to find a loch with an ashray. For that one, they had to rely on Bran, because no book that Jamie had found was going to be able to help them there.

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