Amelie Wen Zhao - Blood Heir

“W-walked.”

His heart almost sang at that word. That meant there had to be shelter within walkable distance. He’d made the right choice, coming back for her. “From where? Is there a town nearby?”

A shake of her head. “A d-dacha. I l-live there.”

“How far?”

Her body gave a spasm, and he bundled her closer to him. Their wet clothes might as well have been ice packs, but he knew the body heat would help. Her answer came in a breath that clouded in the air. “Two hours.”

Ramson glanced at the mist-covered sun that hung precariously low over the rim of the trees. For the first time, it looked like hope. He stood, adjusting his icy clothes and testing his muscles. They weren’t cramping yet, which was a good sign. “Can you walk, darling?”

The witch began to rouse herself, climbing to her feet, but almost toppled over at the effort. Ramson caught her by her elbows before she fell. “I’ve got you.” Earn her trust, reach the shelter. He hoisted her onto his back, immediately feeling the icy stiffness of her cloak. “Put your hands around my neck. The more skin contact, the less likely you’ll get hypothermia.”

She obliged, and he shifted her weight higher. Already, his blood was flowing from the strain on his muscles. That was good.

Ramson gritted his teeth. Putting one foot before the other, he began to walk. The muffled hush of the white landscape pressed on them, broken only by the crunch of snow beneath his boots and the occasional snap of a branch as he waded deeper into the forest. The witch gave him directions, her voice uneven as she trembled from cold.

Soon they were in the heart of the woods, surrounded by tall, crowding Syvern pines and frost-larches that cast their shadows over them. A hush had settled in the air. It felt as though the forest was alive and watching, the cold creeping steadily past his clothes, under his skin, into his bones.

The witch had fallen silent, her body still against his. Several times, he had to shake her to keep her conscious.

“Talk to me, darling,” he said at last. “If you fall asleep now, you’ll never wake up.” He felt her perk up a little at that. “What’s your name?”

“Anya,” she said, too quickly for it to be true.

Another lie, but Ramson pretended to nod seriously. “Anya. I’m Ramson, though you already knew that. Where are you from, Anya?”

“Dobrysk.”

He chuckled. “Talkative, aren’t you?” He knew the town of Dobrysk—a small, insignificant dot on the map in southern Cyrilia. Yet—despite her best efforts to mask it—she had the tinge of a northern accent in her speech, along with the faint lilt of the Cyrilian nobility. “What did you do in Dobrysk?”

He sensed her tensing up against him, and for a moment he wished he could take back his question. It had seemed like a good opportunity, in her half-frozen and semiconscious state, to find out more about her. Draw out her secrets and use them as leverage against her later. That she was an Affinite was his first—and only, for the time being—clue. Surely an Affinity as strong as hers would have merited a place among the Imperial Patrols?

The wheels in his mind turned, and he thought of the command in her tone, the judgmental look in her eyes when he’d first spoken to her, the tilt of her sharp chin. There was definitely noble upbringing in her blood—perhaps she had simply kept her Affinity hidden to protect herself. It wasn’t uncommon in Cyrilia, once a child’s Affinity manifested, for the ability to be kept hidden or subdued. That was the protection that power and privilege offered the rich. A safety, Ramson thought, that the poor simply could not afford.

Affinites without the means to bribe officials into silence were made to record it in a section of their identification papers. As legal citizens of the Empire, they were allowed to seek employment—yet the branding on their papers marked them as different, as other, as something to be steered clear of and, oftentimes, feared.

Cyrilia sought to control these beings with gods-given abilities with blackstone and Deys’voshk. As foreigners from other kingdoms began coming to Cyrilia, looking for opportunities in the richest empire of the world, merchants had quickly seen the chance to exploit them.

And then the brokers had appeared. They began to lure foreign workers into Cyrilia under false promises of better work and better pay, only to force them into unfavorable contracts and trap them in a distant empire with no way out. In time, the practice of Affinite trafficking had thrived, in the shadows of the laws.

Nobility or not, this girl was an Affinite, and on the run. And Ramson wanted nothing to do with that.

It was simply easier to look the other way.

In any case, this girl had something to hide. And if Ramson had one skill, it was to root out secrets, no matter how deeply buried.

Her stubborn silence was dragging on, so he reverted to a relatively innocuous question: “Does sunwine really taste better down south?”

They went on like that, Ramson talking and eliciting one- or two-word responses from the girl. Despite the chatter he kept up, he could feel his hands and feet turning numb and his muscles growing weary. Darkness had steadily crept in around them, and Ramson had to blink to make out which were the trees and which were the shadows.

Time seemed to go in circles, and he began to wonder whether he was going in circles himself. The unbearable cold was addling his brain; he kept looking over his shoulder, imagining the occasional crackle of a branch or crunch of snow. The Cyrilian Empire housed different dangers than those of his homeland; he’d heard of ice spirits—syvint’sya—that rose from the snows, so that lost travelers were discovered years later beneath the permafrost. Icewolves that sprang from thin air and hunted in packs. Ramson had never traveled without a globefire that burned steadily through the night to ward off the creatures of the Syvern Taiga. Now the darkness seemed to press against him.

Ramson stopped. His heart pounded in his ears … but there was something else. He listened, his palms feeling empty without the reassuring warmth of a globefire ball resting in them and lighting the way. The dark tended to yield to darker thoughts.

And then he heard it, that snap-snap-snap of twigs and the rustle of the underbrush, several dozen paces behind him.

Someone—or something—was following them.

Fear pricked at him. Ramson ducked behind the nearest tree, and after rebalancing the witch on his back, he stilled and strained to listen over the hammering of his own heart.

There. Rustling and crackling approached, as though something large was moving through the trees. Holding his breath, he dared a look from behind the tree and felt his legs turn to cotton.

An enormous dark shape lumbered by, so close that its musty wet-animal scent wafted past him. It paused to sniff the air and let out a deep-throated growl. As it turned its head to scan the periphery, Ramson’s heart sank. He recognized the massive body, the pale face, the glinting white eyes. A moonbear. The fearsome predator of the northern Empire was but a whisper on hunters’ lips, a prayer that they themselves would never meet one.

Ramson’s mind kicked into action. The moonbear relied on its eyesight and sense of hearing to hunt, which meant that as long as he remained quiet and out of sight, he had a chance at survival. Yet there was no way he could wait it out; they would freeze to death.

He felt the witch’s body slipping on his back. An idea came to mind—one so ugly that he was ashamed of it, but he considered it all the same. If he threw the girl to the bear and ran, would he make it? She was already unconscious, and it was unlikely she would recover unless they reached somewhere warm soon. A part of him almost let out a half sob, half laugh, as he thought inevitably of the popular Cyrilian joke. He was, literally, caught between the Bear and the Fool.