What the Frost Left Behind

Talon had known the creature was trouble when his arrow pierced it and failed to slow it.

Anything living always reacted to steel.

Mortal things faltered when the shaft struck flesh, bone, tendon, or heart.

This thing had done none of those things.

It had turned its head as though its neck were made of river water instead of muscle, and stared directly at him from the dark between the trees.

The arrow had remained lodged in its shoulder.

Black frost spread from the wound, swallowed the wood, and dissolved it into glittering powder.

Then it had come for him.

Now he staggered through a winding mountain road with one hand pressed to his side.

He swallowed the taste of iron. It was thick in his mouth. As he moved, he tried to remember whether the village lay another mile ahead or three.

The snow here was deceptive. It looked soft from a distance, but it packed hard over stone and dipped without warning where the road curved.

Every step disturbed the wound beneath his ribs.

The creature’s claws had delivered a parasitic venom.

He could still feel the original strike if he thought about it long enough: not only the pain, but the strange after-cold that followed, a sensation unlike any winter wind or mountain storm.

Since then, the infection had spread in glacial filaments from his side across his abdomen and back, fine as cracks in lake ice and twice as merciless.

It numbed parts of his body sporadically.

The healer in Greyhaven had warned him, years ago, about creatures born from corrupted winter magic, but he had not listened carefully enough at the time.

Talon dragged a breath through his teeth and lifted his head toward the ridge.

It came down from the high pass in long, clean streams that smelled of pine bark, snowmelt, and old stone.

Greyhaven had to be beyond the mountains still, hidden where the cliffs folded inward.

If he could make it to the village, they might know how to remove what the creature had left inside him.

But if he failed, then by morning there would be too much of it in his blood to cut free.

His boot skidded on a patch of ice. He caught himself on a tree trunk and swore beneath his breath.

The parasite responded instantly.

Pain lanced out from the wound in a branching flash. His vision blurred at the edges.

For one ugly moment the muscles in his left leg seized so hard that he thought he might hear them tear.

He pressed his forehead against the bark and waited for the spasm to ease.

“Pathetic,” he muttered to himself.

During the first hour after the attack, Talon had heard it often: a drag of claws over bark, a low crystalline crack somewhere too near his shoulder, the slippery impression of movement pacing him just outside his line of sight.

The parasite in his side pulsed every so often with a sick, inward tug, and each pull carried a message clear enough to understand even without words.

“Marked,” he muttered.

He pushed away from the tree and forced himself onward.

Then the stiffness reached his hand.

His fingers spasmed around the curve of his bow.

A ribbon of dark frost crept under the leather wrapping and licked his knuckles with brittle cold.

Talon stopped again, cursed again, and peeled his hand open one finger at a time.

That was when he saw small tracks. He straightened too quickly and nearly blacked out.

Someone was on the road ahead.

The thought brought him to lucidity at once. He slipped a knife free from his belt and stepped off the path, angling toward the trees just as a silhouette emerged around the curve.

“A girl?” he whispered.

It was a young woman wrapped in a coat the color of winter clouds, with pearlescent hair tucked beneath a fur-lined hood and a woven satchel hanging at one hip.

She moved without hurry, like someone with nowhere she urgently needed to be.

Her boots barely seemed to disturb the snow. She had one hand lifted at her side, and a fragile spiral of frost twined around her fingers as if the cold itself had chosen to amuse her.

Talon’s grip tightened.

“Magic user,” he muttered, with immediate distrust.

He should have turned away. If he had been in his right mind, he would have.

Magic complicated things even when it came kindly, and he had no space left in him for complications.

But the parasite gave another hard pulse beneath his ribs, his legs threatened to fold, and before he could decide anything at all, she looked up.

Their eyes met.

Surprise flickered across her face first, followed by quick concern.

She changed direction immediately and came toward him.

He braced against the tree and brought the knife up.

“Stay back.”

She stopped, though not far enough for his liking, and looked at him with a calm that bordered on irritating.