Page 5 of A Reign of Roses
Meanwhile, Shadowhold was probably just reaching the tail end of autumn, the Shadow Woods likely replete with toadstools and blackberries.
Another swift kick to the gut. That’s what thinking of my keep felt like these days. Not because of how much I missed my people, or Griffin or Acorn. Not because I longed for the comforts of lilac soap and whiskey and cloverbread.
But because even if this treacherous, frostbitten climb was possible, even if I reached the White Crow, convinced him to turn me full-blooded, stomached whatever anguish that might entail, andsomehow still arrived in one piece back to my shadowed, familiar castle…
Arwen wouldn’t be there.
Her books, filled with flattened petals, unopened. The side of my bed I’d so foolishly hoped would be hers, eternally cold. I’d never hear that peal of laughter again, nor smell her orange blossom skin.
I’d watch my home become a crypt.
I rolled over, burying my face in the snow, and roared until flames ran through my lungs. Until tears burned at my eyes and my chest rippled against the ground, the agony, shredding me, the guilt, the untenable sorrow—
“Stones alive,” Len breathed. “You need a break.”
“No,” I grumbled, spitting ice and pushing myself up from the ground. “It helps. I’m fine.”
“It’s almost nightfall. You can’t scale a mountain of ice in the dark with a broken rib and a punctured lung. Are you trying to die, boy?”
I’d asked myself that same question so many times I’d lost count. “Depends on the day.”
Len offered me a flat expression. “One pint, a hot meal, and you’ll be back to falling off the mountain again by sunrise.”
Perhaps he was right. I was slinking dangerously close to that tipping point. The one wherein my own death was looking just a bit too attractive. Where I’d either join her or stop having to live each despicable day without her. But then her sacrifice would have been for nothing and that—that I couldn’t allow. In life, or in death.
Dry wind bit at my skin as I limped toward Len with a grunt. Alarm erupted on his face as I drew near, but I only lifted the pails from his shoulders and moved past him, prowling down the mountainside. Len’s sigh of relief was audible as he stomped through the snow after me.
Vorst was barely a town. It was barely a village. That aforementioned seedy inn, a nearly bare general store, a temple, and Len’s quiet stone tavern were all it had to offer. Populated only by those passing through, solitary lifelong merchants like Len, and the rare scholar or priest who sought remote corners of Pearl to study or serve the Stones in peace.
Len’s tavern—which he made clear to me three different times on our trudge over was nothistavern, but his cousin, Faulk’s—was a frostbitten slate-gray hovel on the outskirts. I had to duck to enter, and, due to the low, slanted ceiling, hunch once inside, which sent currents of pain through my still-bruised abdomen.
With few options—the grim space had only a handful of mismatched stools and one bench with a man snoring beneath it—I sat down in a back corner beside the tavern’s hearth. My table was built from an overturned pig trough. A single pillar candle melted atop it, stuffed into an empty wine bottle and flickering for its life.
“What can I do you for?” Len asked, prodding at the crackling fire.
The heat permeated through my stiff, wet clothes. Remnants of ice and snow were melting beneath the layers. I removed my gloves, brushing frost from my beard and flexing my hands closer to the flames. “I’ll take that pint. And whatever you have to eat.”
Len nodded once, returning minutes later with a foamy ale and a lukewarm meat pie. One bite told me it was mostly gristle but I ate the entire thing regardless and then asked for a second. Being this far from the White Crow’s wards had bettered both my appetite and my injuries. I twisted to loosen my rigid spine.
“Want to know what Faulk tried to name the tavern?” Len asked, pulling up a low stool across from me and draping some animal’s hide over his knobby legs.
Irritation pricked at my neck. I couldn’t tell the elderly man to scram when he had offered me the first hot meal I’d had in days. But I really,reallywould have liked to.
When I remained silent he said, undeterred, “The Frozen Yak.”
“Yeah…that’s terrible.”
“I told him every patron will think of rock-hard vomit when they eat.”
My eyes found the soupy pie before me, and I lowered my fork.
“You’re obviously not from here, but in Vorst, yaks—”
“No offense, Len, but I’d prefer a bit of—”
“Solitude?”
I let my silence answer his question.
