Snow Like Ashes(92)

I don’t regret bringing the ramps down. I don’t regret taking action. But I will always regret letting any Winterian hurt when I could help them, when I could have saved them. I’ve been selfish for far too long, and too many people have died.

Tears spring to my eyes, blurring everything. The men release me when I shove them off and fling myself toward the boy. His back is a bloody mess now, thick lines of maroon running through a smear of scarlet red. I slide to my knees in front of him, cradling his white head as he holds himself in a ball on the dirt. Grabbing on to him like I should have grabbed the man, his heavy black rock pulling him off the platform, rolling through the air like a magnet getting dragged to its mate. Helpless and alone, falling and falling, left to die while a battle rages on around him, while I get thrown through the air by a cannon and Mather gets dragged to Bithai …

The whip pops but I catch it this time, the leather licking around my arm and holding tight. I grab the thicker end and yank, pulling it out of the soldier’s hand in one flesh-biting jerk. The soldier’s eyes flash wide before he barks for help from nearby men, from other soldiers struggling between saving their comrades and the growing panic around the boy and me.

I pivot to the boy, the whip still around my forearm. “You’ll be all right—” I start, but see his back. Blood pours down his sides from the ripped flesh, his ribs sticking out as white islands in a blood red sea. He doesn’t move, doesn’t cry, doesn’t do anything but stay curled on the dirt.

My hands go to his head. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, my forehead pressed to his matted hair. He squirms, a flicker of life in my palms. “I’ll make this better, somehow, I’ll save you.”

This is so wrong. And I can’t change it, couldn’t stop it, made it worse—I did this to him.

A chill turns my limbs to ice, makes my lungs freeze so much I’m sure frost puffs out with my breath. Everything about me turns to snowy chill, my hands freezing in a cage around the boy’s head. So wondrously cold, every fiber in me twisting like ice-covered branches in a forest—am I slipping away now? Is the horror of this pushing me to death?

This is how I felt when Sir died. This uncontainable chill, everything in me going numb. This is how death feels.

Soldiers break through the snowy vortex of my panic, their rough fingers grabbing me and hauling me up, yanking the whip off my arm and tearing me away from the boy. I pull against their grip, kicking out at them, fighting to get back to the child.

The boy peeks at me from between his fingers, his blue eyes rimmed with tears and …

Relief.

He’s relieved. I gawk, not sure if what I’m seeing is real or some distorted image I want to be real with all my heart. My eyes travel past his face to his back, his back that should be bloody and gruesome, but … isn’t now. His torn shirt shows clean white skin gleaming in the hot sun, not a scar or a scrape or a single lingering cut. Like he was never whipped at all.

The soldiers holding me notice it too. Everyone feels it, this moment, echoing through the Winterians as they’re filled with the same relief. He’s healed.

A wave of cold slides through me, and I want to bask in it forever, let icy flakes coat my body, whisk me away to somewhere peaceful and safe. No one else around me seems aware of the sudden cold I feel, and I wonder if I’m hallucinating.

The soldiers wake from their stupors before I do. Their hands tighten on my arms, fingers slipping in the blood that cakes my skin from where the whip bit into my forearm. They drag me away, through the crowd of Winterians who gape as I pass.

She brought the ramps down. She healed the boy.

A Winterian man steps forward. One of the many who looked at me with suspicion and hatred, who echoed Conall’s distrust of me. His face relaxes in a smile so genuine and pure I expect the entire foundation of Abril to shatter in two, and he lifts his arms into the air, tips his head back, and screams. His cry of joy is the shock wave that sets off the rest, the screams and cries rippling through the Winterians like their excitement had been building since the first post snapped. Spring soldiers look up from the bodies of their dead comrades, their fallen ramps. Their prisoners have never had such joy before. How do they stop it?

I’m so lost in the euphoria around me that I don’t notice the guards dragging me back into Abril until the gate closes behind me. But even as the heavy iron bars drop into place, the cold in my body doesn’t dissipate. The Winterians’ cheers don’t fade.

Angra can hear it, I’m sure. He can feel the shift in the air, the joy spreading like wafting flurries of snow through the Abril work camp. My grin returns, bursting across my face.