Walpurga's Shadow

The shriek of rusted iron hinges was the first thing that tore me from sleep before the chapel bells could even toll for matins.

Dawn light in Frost Keep did not stream in as golden beams: it was an ashen smear spilling through narrow arrow slits, freezing the vapor of my breath two inches above the coarse wool blankets.

Beside the pine chest, holding an unlit tallow lantern in one hand and a ring of heavy iron keys swinging from her belt, Walpurga Holm rifled through my belongings with the glacial patience of a customs inquisitor.

"Did you misplace something among my shifts, Mistress Holm?" I asked, propping myself on my elbows without bothering to draw the covers to my chin.

The old woman didn't flinch. She lifted a homespun petticoat with a mended hem, felt along the seams with two skeletal fingers hunting for secret pockets, and let it drop onto the stone flags without deigning to offer an apology.

"Nothing goes missing in this fortress, Lady Duchess," she said in that dry rattle that sounded like dry twigs snapping under frost. "We inspect what enters. The three betrothed who preceded you brought vials of holy water from Saint Ephrem, sachets of dried rue, and consecrated silver icons. All of them believed convent prayers could appease the northern wrath."

"I only brought three changes of clothing and two pairs of double-soled boots."

"And yet, my lord has not summoned the barber-surgeon at daybreak to tend to midnight burns."

Walpurga's gaze bored into my face. Her eyes were small, sunken deep into harsh wrinkles and murky as pond water, yet endowed with a clinical sharpness that was anything but senile.

In sunless noble houses, the larder keys weigh heavier than ducal crowns.

She paced toward the nightstand with deliberate steps, trailing her heavy black woolen skirts through the grit. From her deep pocket she drew a heavy brass ring, a household token stamped with the blind wolves of Frost Keep, and dropped it onto the wood with a hollow clack.

"The women who survive within these walls are those who never ask why the tapestries smell of smothered charcoal," the housekeeper warned, measuring me from crown to sole. "If you brought forbidden draughts to quell the master's blight, you had best confess before winter seals the mountain pass."

"I have nothing to confess, Mistress Holm. My only miracle is knowing when to hold my tongue."

Walpurga inclined her head in a grimace that stopped well short of a smile. She turned on her heel without another word and crossed the threshold, leaving behind the musty scent of aged camphor and the rhythmic clatter of keys against her withered hip.

The east wing library possessed neither carpets nor upholstered armchairs. It was a cavernous gothic nave as cold as a burial vault, where black oak shelves vaulted toward pointed arches piled high with tomes chewed by moths and damp rot.

Yet what unnerved me most was not the neglect, but the smell: it didn't smell of aged vellum or oiled hide, but of mineral ash and smothered hearths, as though a wildfire had swept through the words centuries ago without consuming the timbers.

I moved forward with cautious steps, wrapped tight in my woolen traveling mantle. At the center of the hall stood a lectern of wrought iron bearing a colossal volume bound in hardened sealskin.

I turned the thick leaves with care. They were the annals of the house of Frost: records of tithes, feudal levies, and, beginning from the year of the Great Frost, an endless ledger of incidents no court herald had ever dared publish beyond the fiefdom.

"Eighth day of the solstice: the pewter flagon shatters in the child-duke's hands. The metal dissolves into grayish powder in under three heartbeats. His wet-nurse suffers caustic blistering on both palms attempting to pull the scalding handle away."

The history of a curse is merely the accounting of other people's sins.

I read on, my pulse quickening. There was no mention of sorcerers or dark covenants. Only a single phrase repeated in iron-gall ink in the margin of every leaf: Ignis cinereus. Fire of ash. The elemental corruption that devours any living substance not consecrated by the original bond of blood.

"Seeking a chivalric romance to beguile your confinement, milady?"

The voice cracked behind me like a whip snapped over packed snow.

I whipped around, startled. Severin stood beneath the entry archway, wearing his gray traveling cloak trimmed in wolf pelt, his black deerskin gauntlets fitted tight to the forearm. His pale eyes were fixed upon the open tome on the lectern.

"I was seeking to understand where I have been traded, my lord," I answered without lowering my chin, though my heart battered my ribs like an iron bell.

"You have entered the mouth of a pit, Astrid. And in pits there is nothing worth reading."

He took a stride forward. The fury on his features was a leashed tide, a savage tension that corded his jaw. As he thrust his gloved hand toward the lectern to slam the book shut, the sheer friction of his rage seemed to bleed through the leather: a shower of grayish sparks erupted along the leaf's deckled edge, reducing the script in a smothered hiss to a drift of impalpable ash.

I stood motionless, watching the gray powder settle onto the stone flags without daring to blink.