“Everyone, ready,” Elder Sertha said as the last of the Caldonnae took up position along the rocks.
Numbers were supposed to help. No solitary runner ever made this crossing in one piece, but in big groups, sometimes, there was a chance. Prey mentality.
“Move!”
As one, the Caldonnae surged onto the lake.
Thomil felt the difference the moment his boots hit the ice. Normally, Blight did not announce its arrival to the senses, but here, there was a slight change in pressure, a promise of evil in the air.
White ignited the dark ahead of Thomil, catching one of the teenage hunters who had struck out ahead of the rest of the group. As the light hit the boy’s sleeve, he jerked to a stop, and when it flared to illuminate his face, Thomil recognized the Blight’s first victim: Drevan, an orphan of the last winter, a gifted small game trapper, a quiet boy… He was not quiet now. No one was when Blight pierced their flesh.
Magnified by the uncaring expanse and sharpened by the cold, Drevan’s shriek was the sound of nightmares. Skin unraveled from flesh and flesh from bone like unspooling thread. A few of the adolescent runners nearest Drevan stumbled to a halt in horror, even as the elders at their backs cried, “Keep running! He’s lost! Keep running!”
Drevan had left the shoreline at a sprint, meaning the whole tribe was behind him. They all saw him disintegrate, screaming, until the ribbons of light peeled the lips from his teeth, the skin from his ribs, and at last unmade his lungs. In seconds, the little trapper had crumpled to a pile of cloth, hair, and stripped bones. The blood that had spun from his body made the impression of a flower on the snow, mocking life.
“Forward, sons!” Beyern grabbed two of the young men who had stopped and hauled them back into motion. “Look back for no one!”
The next to die was Elra, an eight-year-old boy struggling through the snow near the back of the group. A woman—in his periphery, Thomil couldn’t see if it was Elra’s mother or one of his doting older sisters—wouldn’t let go of his hand, and the Blight took her too. Not sated with the body of a malnourished boy, the light spun straight to its next meal the same way it jumped from one wheat stalk to the next when wind brushed them together. Boy and woman unraveled one after the other, overlapping flowers on the lake’s surface.
Terror was thick in the air now. Thomil couldn’t blame the younger Caldonnae who retched and wept at the sight of their fellows in ribbons, but at twenty, he had lost enough loved ones to Blight that he was hardened to it. He forged ahead alongside his sister and her husband, pacing himself carefully, no matter what he heard, no matter whose screams pulled at his heart.
He tried not to recognize one scream as belonging to Landir, his last surviving friend from childhood and the last practitioner of their tribe’s traditional woodwork. He tried not to see the light claim Rhiga, who had breastfed him in his mother’s absence; Traehem, whose impeccable memory kept the tribe’s oldest songs alive; Mirach, who was the last descendant of the founding Caldonn line.
Mercifully, as the screams multiplied, they merged into one rending, all-encompassing howl in which the keenest ear could never discern an individual voice. Instead of letting himself wonder how many Caldonnae were still left running, Thomil focused on Arras several paces ahead of him and Maeva at his side. As long as they were with him, he could keep going. And if, at some point, they weren’t… well, Thomil had tried to steel himself for that too.
As they neared the middle of the lake, the remaining youths who had sprinted ahead were flagging. It was the seasoned adult runners like Thomil, Maeva, and Arras who pulled ahead now. Arras led their cluster, leading everyone, even with little Carra in his arms. All Caldonnae were winter runners, but even the best-conditioned lungs could only draw in so much air at these low temperatures before the cold overcame the runner. Thomil was starting to feel the freeze dangerously deep in his chest. He had just fallen a few paces behind Maeva in the hopes of slowing his breathing and easing the damage when, ahead of them, the white struck again.
Right between Arras’s shoulder blades.
Maeva’s “No!”—more plea than denial—couldn’t stop the inevitable. Arras turned back to his wife, and Thomil had never seen such mortal terror in those steel eyes. The hunter’s roar was just recognizable as words. “Take Carra!”
Driven by primal maternal desperation, Maeva managed an impossible acceleration over the last few feet of snow to her husband. She snatched Carra from Arras’s great arms just as he came apart in a spiral of light, blood, and unfurling muscle.
Little Carra shrieked as a stray loop of the light clipped her face, then she went abruptly quiet, unconscious—Thomil prayed to the gods, please, just unconscious. The light had only grazed her face; it hadn’t successfully jumped from Arras’s body to hers.
“Arras!” Maeva wailed as her husband fell to the snow in a red flower indistinguishable from any other. “My Arras…”
But the only thing she could do for him was keep running. Clutching a limp Carra to her breast, she staggered forward through her sobs.
“I’ll take her!” Thomil called over the screams, recognizing that his stricken sister wouldn’t make it under the dead weight. “Maeva, I’ve got her!” He fell into step with Maeva and pulled Carra into his arms without breaking stride. “Just focus on running.”
The frozen air had turned from a burn to a stab in Thomil’s lungs, but it no longer mattered what damage he sustained. Not now that he was responsible for getting Carra to safety.
The remaining runners were at least three-quarters of the way across the lake now. Almost there, and there were still some of them left. Thomil didn’t look, but he could hear their boots crunching snow whenever there was a break in the screaming. That snow thinned with their progress, growing wetter as the glow of Tiran’s barrier loomed closer.
The city of eternal spring radiated warmth into the surrounding air, which would have been a welcome reprieve if Thomil had not already burned his lungs raw. The echoing twang beneath his boots—falling too heavily now that Carra was in his arms—was meaningless to him until it grew louder, and someone far behind cried, “The ice! It’s giving!”
Thomil looked back just as the first person went through the lake’s surface. It was Beyern, the hunter—turned prey in the jaws of the lake. Jagged ice gnashed closed on him like teeth, and as the cracks shot outward from his position, the men and women behind Thomil stumbled—all six of them.
Gods, were there only six left?
No. That couldn’t be right… But the snow behind the breaking ice spelled the truth in a meadow of red flowers. More than thirty Caldonnae had been reduced to blood on the ice, leaving only six—and the ice beneath their feet was breaking. It happened in terrible succession, like the Blight jumping from one living thing to the next. The ice split along many seams, pitching the remaining Caldonnae into the water.
“No!” Thomil gasped as the indifferent lake swallowed his sister whole.
After Thomil’s mother had died giving birth to him, Maeva had been there to hold her new brother without selfishness or blame; her face was his earliest memory. When Blight had taken their father from the fire beside them, Maeva had scrubbed the blood and tears from Thomil’s face. After all their aunts and siblings were gone, Maeva had been there. The single constant.