Foxfire in the Snow Read online

  With my arms still crossed high—for I would crush my damn breasts if I had to—I thanked the fruit vendor and walked as confidently as I could onto the access road. She called after me with more things to buy, but I forced myself to keep walking. I had to, or I’d spin to shavings. I passed yet more vendors. Some were stationary, and these I could weave around and ignore the calls to purchase, but the ones with pushcarts dogged my heels despite my appearance.

  “Fresh pineapple!”

  “That shirt! Let me repair it for you! Ten minutes! I’m the finest trade tailor in Sorpsi!”

  “Apples and blood oranges and limes! A bounty to bring home to your family!”

  There were too many voices. Too many people looking at me and making assumptions. I broke into a run as their words chased after me and battered my ears. They weren’t being specific. It didn’t matter.

  “We have the best price here! No need to go down the road! We can even beat guild prices!”

  “Your family will love the mangosteen! We guarantee it!”

  It was hard to swallow. My throat burned as I dodged arms and elbows on the crowded street. Women in bright hats and dresses turned their exasperated eyes on me, tsking my haste. Men stepped from my path and looked past me, trying to discern the manner of the disturbance. I pushed children away with my hips and nearly collapsed onto an insect cart coming into the access road as I turned left, off the main street.

  Here, it was quieter. Shoppers still milled about, of course, and several meters away, another cart vendor, this one selling smoked meat on sticks, didn’t even look up from his cart as I pressed myself into the side of a brick building and tried to breathe.

  I dug my fingernails into my palms and forced myself to look at the overcast sky, then to the plaza a few streets away. I had to get a new binding before attending the fair, so melting into a puddle of tears and scratched skin was not an option. I pushed from the wall and wrapped my arms back against my chest. This time, I positioned them high enough that the front of my shirt flattened. That looked better. It looked right, or, at least, right enough to get me through town.

  When my heart still pounded and my breathing made me feel dizzy, I shut my eyes and remembered the last time I’d been in the plaza. I’d been eight or nine at the most. Magda and I had been playing on the old limestone statue of Sorpsi’s last king that sat in the center of the plaza—the one of him abdicating his throne to the peasant woman who had defeated him. Magda and I had been fighting with bamboo swords, wearing identical white linen dresses, her long black curls braided with ribbons, and me with the dress’s blue sash tied around my face so I looked like a bandit. Or something.

  I remembered how uncomfortable the dress made me. Not because I didn’t like it, but because of how everyone looked at me in it. How their eyes became soft and mushed. And then I remembered how much Magda hated the dress, too, because she hated frills and constricting fabric, and how there was the perfect puddle at the base of the statue, filled with thick mud, that was so satisfying to jump in.

  I remembered the mud, and the laughter, and the mischief in Magda’s eyes and took a deep breath. I smiled at the memory, and it was enough to center me. I started walking again, through the narrow streets that widened as the spires of the castle became visible. Three blocks later, the city centered bloomed—a stonework plaza peppered with fountains and the old king’s statue. It wasn’t nearly as crowded as I’d expected, which was puzzling, but it was the second day of the festival.

  Closer to the plaza, the road was cobblestone, with wood footpaths raised a good handspan from the surface. I passed two stores, one selling silk bolts and the other tailored suits, before I stopped. The Tailor’s Wench, while not the most attractive of names, should have been bustling this time of day. I often shopped here with Mother as it had the best quality cotton for binders, but it was closed and the door locked.

  I frowned and rubbed my arms. It wasn’t a holiday. Guilders and traders alike had to make a living. The queen gave neither handouts nor sponsorships. Why would they be closed?

  “Out of business. They couldn’t keep up with the water frame that’s being tested a few countries over. I heard it can spin more than one hundred threads at a time. For cotton, they just couldn’t compete.”

  I turned to the short gentleman behind me. His gaze flicked only briefly over my personage, and then he gave me a friendly nod. I relaxed, but my arms stayed high. The drape of his shirt was caught, only slightly, near the top of his chest where a binder would have started. We weren’t exactly the same, he and I, but his presence was a comfort nonetheless.

  I pulled my shirt away from my body. “I don’t know where else to go.” I smiled halfheartedly.

  He stroked his chin, which was smooth and free of stubble. “You weren’t going to walk around the city like that, were you?”

  He wasn’t referring to my clothes, although with the damp leather smell mixed with the blood and wet, he had every right to do so. Instead, his eyes grazed my bandolier and the three pouches that hung there.

  My brow furrowed. “The alchemist fair?” I asked, stuttering on the words. “Isn’t everyone wearing them?” Although now that he mentioned it, I hadn’t seen anyone during my walk from the pier with a bandolier, or the long alchemical coats some wore. This close to the main plaza, we should have been swarmed by both guild masters and apprentices. Where was everyone?

  “The fair?” He clasped his hands and rocked back on his heels. “It’s been cancelled, order of the royal daughter. You’ll run into Queensguard, soon enough, who will ask you to take your bandolier off as well. There’s just too much suspicion. Too many people are on edge.” He pointed back toward the docks. “Guessing you came from that way? Surely you saw the for-hires?”

  My shoulders sagged. My mouth gaped. Something dropped, too, deep in my stomach, and tears stung my eyes. “Cancelled? But…but why?”

  The man picked a piece of lint from his jacket. “Because the queen’s gone missing, country mouse. Three weeks now. And when things like this happen, you know it’s always the unbound guilds that get blamed. The consort is at his wit’s end. The queen has to meet with the Triarchy of Puget and the King of Eastgate in four days to reestablish the border treaty. This is the first time it’s come due since Queen Iana took the throne. I’m sure you can infer what no attendance would mean. Her daughter isn’t exactly jumping up to help either. But it boils down to not needing a bunch of alchemists about when you’re trying to find a missing royal.”

  “But Mag—” I stopped myself before saying her full name, and the sound died, bitter, in my mouth. He didn’t know the royal family like I did. Like Mother did. It was a lot to filter all at once—watching the dream I’d finally decided to chase summarily squashed right in front of me, while I dripped fetid water onto the shoes of possibly the only person in town I wasn’t embarrassed to be around.

  Cancelled. The fair was cancelled.

  I wanted to yell. I wanted to scream. I wanted to take one of my pouches and toss it onto the roof of The Tailor’s Wench just to watch the straw explode in a shower of red crystal flowers.

  “Cotton for binding?” My eyes went down to the stone, down to my sodden boots. My hand went to my pocket and pulled out the stones—the largest stamped with the parrot of the queen’s crest, the other three with aspen leaves to denote their low value—and held them flat on my palm. “I can’t do anything without a new one, whether the fair is happening or not.”

  “Nowhere around here. Not anymore. Has to be imported from factories outside the three countries, and the quality is low. The three countries are the only ones left on the continent with guilds now, what few remain. Everyone else has traded quality for quantity. I can give you my cloak if you like?”

  Everything was too tight, from the wet clothing to my binding to my bandolier. I took the cloak—thin brown wool with a deep hood—and offered my stones.

  “Keep them,” he said, his tone soft and apologetic.

&n
bsp; I couldn’t respond. My throat and eyes burned. Instead, I bowed and turned sharply back toward the plaza. I’d always been stellar at running away from things.

  So I ran to the only place in the capital I knew would be empty of people. To the last place I had ever been able to just be me.

  I ran through the streets, around the king’s statue. I ran past the guildhalls I knew too well, past pubs I recognized from Mother’s stories. I ran past the palace courtyard, the spires of the building looking like they might pierce the sky, the clouds, and spill yet more rain onto my pathetic form.

  I ran past the palace itself, and behind it, stables where people called to me to stop, to wait, that I wasn’t allowed. I had attached the cloak around my neck but would not take off the bandolier. Without my extracts, what was I? Without alchemy, without an apprenticeship…I would not remove the last part of my dream, and damn everything for taking this from me!

  I didn’t pause as dirt and stone gave way to trees and sedge. When the humid air of Sorpsi’s tropical rainforest hit my face and further curled my hair, I took deeper breaths, daring the air to choke me. As the ferns grew wider and scaled the trees, as the sounds of insects and the rustling of foragers overpowered the crashing of my feet, I kept running. I stopped only when I could no longer see the castle’s spires, and when the trees grew so densely together that I could see the pale-blue glow of foxfire fungi at my feet. I stopped when I could no longer hear the voices of the people calling after me. All around me, only insect hums. Bird calls. The digging and rustling of some unseen rodent.

  Here, on the prone trunk of a massive cedar tree, I knelt and dug my hands into the decay, a patch of green-glowing foxfire pressed around the edge of my boot.

  I sobbed—for who was around to hear? Did it matter? I sobbed and coughed and nearly vomited on feelings too long buried. I’d have to go back to the capital before dark. I knew where Mother was at least. The death of the grandmaster woodcutter meant she was likely at his guildhall, now hers, for she was next in line. I would have to tell her about our house. We’d have to go back and rebuild, and really, there was no reason for me not to go back. I had nothing here, not with the alchemical fair cancelled.

  So much for finally breaking away.

  I pushed my fingers into the rotten wood and tore off a chunk, letting bits crumble down my hand. Stupid. This whole thing had been stupid! I tossed the wood as hard as I could at a funny-looking stump in the distance, hoping to hear the satisfying explosion of brown, brittle wood on a hard surface.

  “Ahhhhhhh!”

  The stump expanded into a very short, graying man in a brown cloak. He swung his head in my direction, looking, no doubt, for the source of the wood missile, and in doing so, slipped on the wet sedge. The plants he’d picked flew from his hand. He landed on his back in a thick blanket of fog. The sedge engulfed him, and through the patches of gray and green I could only make out the brown of his cloak.

  “Sorry!” I called out, trying to keep the frustration from my voice. The queen’s forest was no place to come alone. What was he—

  I saw movement in the mist. I hopped the log and moved to the edge of a small clearing. The sedge grew knee-high here, and the ferns arched over my head. Sunlight flitted down but pierced the mist only in fragments. The man sat up, muddy and scowling, but there was movement behind him that I was more concerned with.

  A slender form emerged from the fog.

  I stumbled. My heart pounded.

  Nothing human moved like that.

  The fog fell away and revealed a spindly trunk and a thick halo of wide leaves. The magic thing pulled itself across the ground with flapping, piercing roots toward the man still just sitting on his backside! A collection basket lay upended to his left, with bits of herbs and mushrooms spilled across the sedge.

  I took another step forward before I could stop myself. My boot crunched down on some unseen twig, and it was only then that the man turned toward me, his lips bunched tightly together and his brows furrowed into rebuke.

  His face snapped into my memory, and I choked back a yell.

  Master Rahad.

  The queen’s royal alchemist.

  Four: Earth

  He didn’t stand but, instead, waved me back, pulling a machete strapped awkwardly at his side as he did so. Roots wove toward his limbs drunkenly, blindly. I wanted to comply with his unspoken request but…that was a palm tree, coming toward him, and it was not alchemy that animated the thing.

  There was no law against magic, of course, the same as there was none against alchemy, but I’d never seen magic before. I shivered, though it wasn’t cold. Someone had enchanted the tree, or there was an amulet nearby. The stupid things were artifacts left by the old king, used to store magic and spells, and were so old they leaked. He’d had them buried everywhere, and our first queen, the one who had defeated him, had never managed to find them all after she took his crown. They still popped up every once in a while, spilling their poison. They were the reason for the abrupt climate changes across the three countries, too, or at least that’s what Mother had told me. That was how powerful magic was. Master Rahad, alchemist or not, couldn’t fight it, surely. And I couldn’t just leave him to die since his fall and the enraged monocot were entirely my fault.

  And the palm… I tilted my head. Its fronds were enormous strips of green so high up I couldn’t have reached them if I jumped. I was only a few bounds from Master Rahad, but the palm was only a meter or two away. Hovering.

  I held my breath. The wind stilled.

  Master Rahad sneezed.

  The palm whirled into motion. A black, speckled root no thicker than my pinkie finger shot from the trunk and slithered up Master Rahad’s leg. He scooted back as quickly as he could, but the root pulled, halting his movement, and then slid him back across the wet sedge. He batted it with the side of his machete, spanking it like a wayward child instead of cutting the damn thing off. The fronds quaked, but instead of moving, the palm sent another root swaying toward his head.

  “Master Rahad,” I whispered, edging closer. “I could tackle it maybe—”

  He made a hissing sound and again waved me away. The second root slithered across his chin, and this time, he did try to sever it, but the root slipped past his machete and wound around his neck.

  “Hey!” I yelled at it, hoping to get the palm’s attention, although I had no idea what I’d do once I got it. Still, Master Rahad couldn’t do anything if he couldn’t breathe.

  Another root rose from the palm trunk, as thin as a porcupine quill, and jerked toward me, the tip bobbing up and down and dripping a clear fluid into the sedge. Gods, the thing had walked right out of a nightmare into reality, thanks to magic.

  “Get away!” Master Rahad yelled at me.

  “Master Rahad, I can help!” Or at least I could die in the general proximity of my dream.

  “You’re an idiot! Just back away slowly and get out of here before it—”

  The root that had been pointing at me gave a final jerk, then embedded itself in Master Rahad’s leg.

  He screamed. Only a few drops of blood oozed out, so thin was the root, but I closed the short distance between us anyway, my mouth filling with the wet taste of decaying plant matter. Another root, thicker this time but only just, struck Master Rahad through his other shin, pinning him to the ground.

  “I said keep away!” Master Rahad yelled again as he whacked the machete against the rigid spine-roots. Pinpricks of blood welled from his wounds and stained the sedge a diluted crimson. The thing’s attention was now entirely on Master Rahad and his clanging machete as he tried to sever the roots.

  New fog blew in and swirled at my ankles, lapped at my hips. The air stank, and sweat dripped over my eyebrows and into my eyes. It was really hard to ignore his orders. I wanted to run, but another root smacked the machete from Master Rahad’s hand as the blade nearly cleaved the first one apart. The root around his neck tightened and pulled him down flat, crushing the sedge. Th
e palm bent, bent over, and its fronds pointed like knives at the alchemist-shaped indent in the sedge.

  I had to cover my mouth to dampen my scream. This was no mild, vestigial magic. Well, I’d wanted to impress him, hadn’t I? What better time than during our impending deaths? I took a deep breath of the fetid air, for the fog was past my eyes now, and grabbed for my pouches with a shaking hand. I was out of the yellow, and the blue green, from elf’s cup, would do no good; I doubted I could poison a palm. The red—the one that made the crystals—might work, but the palm was too close to Master Rahad to just fling pigments around.

  “The amulet!”

  I heard the choked cry as the palm began to shake. I hadn’t seen one, but I hadn’t really looked, and logic said it had to be there, somewhere. I shifted my attention to the trunk that was more a mass of teeming roots than a central stem. I had a vague idea of the shape since Mother had a small collection of magic books in her woodshop that she used to prop up one leg of the treadle lathe. Over the years, I’d skimmed most of them out of sheer boredom. In the middle of the roots lay a mahogany-colored, oval amulet leaking clear fluid onto the palm.

  The palm gave a final shudder, and its fronds fell like spears down on Master Rahad. He gurgled as I took my foraging knife from my belt, waved it briefly in the air to collect a bit of fog, opened the top of the red pouch, and stuck the blade in. I yanked it back out, hoping the fog would give me enough of a water barrier that the metal would not explode in my face, then threw the knife at the center of the palm.

  The blade embedded in the bark. My aim was terrible, but I hadn’t been aiming for the amulet, and the stem was wide enough it didn’t matter. The palm straightened, half its fronds still attached. It pulled all its roots back, though, including the ones in and around Master Rahad, and sent them to the handle of the knife to bat at it ineffectually.