Page 2 of Cosy & Chill
1200 years later
Roisin had gone to sleep while the smell of budding green filled her nose, and the days were growing longer. Now she woke in darkness to the scents of damp and mist, and the chill in the air raised goosebumps on her skin. She pushed herself upright, brushing moss and bracken off her form. No light came through the canopy of trees, not yet thinned by the onset of winter.
Roisin was thirsty and—even though she’d slept for six months—exhaustion weighed on her like a leaden cloak. Her energy would return when the sun rose, but the bone-deep exhaustion wouldn’t leave. It was the price she paid for her failure, and until she returned home, she was locked into this cycle of sleep and searching, sleep and searching, with no end or relief in sight.
The mist weaving through the trees condensed into drizzle. Roisin turned her face up to the spray, grateful for the touch of moisture after a long, hot summer.
The rain brought memories of stuffy rooms and dusty books penned by humans. Roisin had never given up hunting for her amulet, but only in the last three hundred years had she begun to research human writing. Most of the books dealing with fae lore were pure imagination. Some held tiny kernels of truth. And one book, rescued from a private collection in Westmoreland, had reminded her of a long-forgotten lesson.
Ye will need copper and gold to find the silver.That was the lore she’d been taught. She’d gone to sleep trying to recall reasons and means, but six months underground hadn’t produced a solution to the riddle.
Back in the spring, before she’d gone to sleep, her search had led her to a house on Richmond High Street. Half store, half dwelling, the house had stood empty since the death of its last owner at the beginning of the year. It might hold her salvation if only she could enter it.
She climbed to her feet and clothed herself with a thought.
She needed to search this house for one piece of silver. For that, she needed copper and gold.
The sun rose and her exhaustion receded. In twelve hundred years, she’d never been that close to her amulet. She would not lose that chance now.
“Copper and gold,” she told herself. “I need copper and gold to find the silver.”
She laid a hand on the rowan tree under which she had slept. “Thank you for your shelter and protection,” she said, before she turned and started walking.
Roisin leaned on sun-warmed stone and dangled her fingers in the fountain. Six months of sleep left her disoriented, short-tempered, and prone to take offence, but she’d learned that the quickest remedy was to be amongst people. Market Day in Richmond, bustling and cheerful, was an excellent cure for what ailed her.
She’d returned to her home the previous night, finding everything as she had left it. After drinking almost two gallons of water and spending half the night in the bathtub, she no longer felt like the dried-out husk she’d woken as.
Roisin had spent the morning wandering the town centre and the market, taking breakfast at a bakery, and lunch at a pub with outdoor seating. She poked her head into her favourite gallery and visited a few DIY and home décor shops, but even the latest interior design trends couldn’t hold her interest. The house at the end of the High Street called to her with an urgency she’d not felt before.
She’d seen the house built at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign. Back then, the store had been a haberdashery. Later, it had become a gentlemen’s outfitter. Roisin remembered a family of shop owners and a posse of hazel-eyed, brown-haired children. She’d been inside the shop many times, yet nothing had ever drawn her to the place.
Did that mean she was close to finding the copper and the gold she needed when—in all the years—she’d never unravelled the lore’s meaning?
She pushed away from the fountain and returned to wandering the market stalls, gaze drifting over artisan cheeses, bottles of sloe gin, and wooden chopping boards.
Magic brushed her nape.
Roisin didn’t dare move. She kept her eyes open, scanning the market, trying to find what had sparked her senses.
The cheesemaker in her green apron.
A fruit seller shouting about apples.
Customers queueing to buy spices.
Roisin’s gaze moved along the stalls until it alighted on a young man ringing up a sale, his hair a shimmering golden halo in a beam of sunlight. A little farther down the same row stood another young man with hair as bright as a copper pot.
Ye will need copper and gold to find the silver.
If she’d been younger, newer to this hidden life, Roisin would have screamed.
Instead, she said nothing. She memorised the sign over the market stall where the golden-haired young man sold ice cream before she followed the copper-headed human to find out who he was.
