“Not spread the Fire?” I say. “The Cold—that’s what we call it—kills many of us every year. Something about the snow and ice and cold air slows it down, so we live a little longer, but it still gets us all eventually, like it did my father a while back.”
“I’m sorry,” Wilde says. “About your father.”
“Me, too,” I say.
“Goff sounds like our father,” Siena says. “Eviler’n a pack of Killers scorch bent on biting their fangs into anything that moves.”
“Yah, well, we’re learning very quickly that he’s not such a good guy,” Buff says.
“Where’s he get it?” Siena throws out there. “The Cure.”
It’s another good question none of us know the answer to. “I’ve taken a fair look at the dried herbs,” I say. “But it’s nothing I’ve seen growing on the mountain. But it’s possible he grows it right in the palace somewhere.”
No one has anything to say to that. A question they’ll be able to answer pops into my head. “Why’d you come here anyway?” The question I don’t ask is: why’d you sneak in the way you did?
“The Cure,” Siena says. “Mostly. We want to get more of it for our people, to stop the death. Whatever’s in the air is killin’ us all, one by one. We can’t barely live past thirty. We were gonna offer a new trade ’greement, a good’un, in exchange for more of the Cure, but he wouldn’t e’en listen to us. All he cared ’bout was what happened to my father.”
“When we told him Roan was dead, he threw us all back down here,” Circ explains. “He didn’t look like he’d be letting us out anytime soon.”
And there it is. Unless Wes can come through for us, we’re all freezed. I’ll keep that to myself too.
~~~
Everyone goes silent for a while after that, each lost in their own thoughts. Mine are like dead leaves in the wind, drifting and swirling and scattering every which way, as haphazard and random as falling snow. Too many questions and not enough answers.
But mostly I just think about Jolie. Whether she’s wandering the palace somewhere, carrying a bucket, or planting seeds in the palace gardens that will sprout the stems that’ll eventually grow into the Cure plants. Whether she’s thinking about me, about ways to escape so she can come home. Whether she’s tried to escape and gotten caught, been punished. Whether Wes’s seen her around, and is biding his time to get us all out together. Wes has always been so icin’ good at protecting us, at taking care of us. Can he do it now?
Then I hear a voice through the hole in the wall, raspy but whispered. “Hey, Icy,” Skye says. “You there?”
“It’s Dazz,” I say, peering through the hole. “And where else would I be?”
She laughs and I see her lips turned up into a smile. She’s not looking through the hole—just talking through it, laughing through it. “Good’un. I meant if you were sleepin’, but considerin’ yer speakin’ to me, I s’pose you ain’t.”
“I ain’t,” I agree.
“Watcha doin’ down ’ere?” Skye asks. “Watcha in for?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” I say, trying to think up a good response.
“No, you stopped yer story when you followed us through the woods and found where we got caught.”
“We picked a fight with a coupla of castle guards,” I say, bending the truth just a little for effect. We didn’t actually fight them, although I definitely wanted to.
“You did what? Are you wooloo?” The word rolls around in the hole, clattering against the sides like a pebble. I can easily guess what wooloo means.
“Uh, yah, I guess we are,” I say, wondering if being crazy is a really bad thing where she comes from.
She laughs and I admire her lips. I could reach through and touch them so easily. Shame I can’t fit my head through. I’ve never made out in a dungeon before. “We’re all a little wooloo too,” she says. “Hafta be to survive fire country.”
I steer the topic away before she asks any more questions. “You know, the only reason you knocked me out in the woods was because I was surprised you were a girl,” I say.
“Ha!” Her laugh echoes loudly through the dungeons. “Surprised, eh? Seems to me you were the one chasin’ me.”
“Yah. But when you turned and you were so—so…”
“So what?” she says, a smile in her question. I wish I could see her face again. All I’ve got is a memory, a set of eyes, and a pair of lips to go offa.