NO ONE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO MAKE IT UP THE mountain so early. Last time I checked, the path had been buried in snow so thick as to make it invisible, the bridge near the waterfall still encased in ice. But one sole person might have tried to reach me, and this was where I’d told her to meet me when spring came.
“Ina?” I asked.
She turned as I emerged from the trees, pulling down the hood of an indigo cloak that fluttered around her boots in the breeze.
“Asra,” she said, her face lighting up.
Feelings that had lain dormant in me all winter rose as though they had wings.
“You’re back!” I rushed over to throw my arms around her.
We hugged and laughed breathlessly for a few moments, and when we pulled apart, I finally let myself look at her. Ina had changed since last summer. She was taller and a little more chiseled in the cheekbones, even more beautiful. The memories of her I’d held close for moons didn’t do justice to the sight of her straight nose, long flat eyebrows, and the barest hint of a cleft in her chin—the place I used to sometimes put my thumb before I pulled her in for a kiss. Her eyes were the same bottomless blue I remembered, and I never wanted to come up for air.
“Hello, you,” she said. The gentle tone of her voice made a flush rise into my cheeks.
Before I could speak, she pressed a kiss to my lips. Suddenly my insides were in my toes and my head was lost among the stars, all the words I’d saved for her through the dark nights of winter forgotten.
“I came as soon as I could,” she said. “I’ve hardly been able to think of anything else.”
“Me either,” I said, and fell into her arms again. My stomach fluttered like the wings of a butterfly. With the way she made me feel, sometimes I thought she was as magical as the fire flowers. All winter I’d been incomplete, and now I was whole. She gave me hope that I didn’t have to be alone forever, that maybe I could have a place in the community by her side now that Miriel was no longer here to forbid it.
“Why did you come so early? It can’t have been safe.” I examined her for any signs of harm, but she looked as radiant as ever.
“It was a hard winter.” She gestured to the valley.
Far below us, dozens of snow-covered A-frame rooftops poked up on either side of the river, barely visible but for the wisps of smoke rising from their chimneys. On the opposite side of the valley, where the hills were gentler than the sheer cliffs we stood upon, spots of scorched earth dotted the hillside like a disease.
Funeral pyres. Sorrow made a lump rise in my throat. Through the winter I had occasionally smelled smoke, and I had seen one or two pyres on my other trips down to the vista. A few funerals was a normal number for a village of Amalska’s size, but with fog hovering in the valley most mornings, I hadn’t been able to see how many there were until now. What made it worse was that more probably lingered under the most recent dusting of snow.
“There are so many,” I said, my voice nearly breaking. Those were people whose care had been entrusted to me. Unknowingly, I had failed them.
“We lost half the village to fever in the last two moons,” Ina said softly. The strained expression on her face gave away how keenly she felt the deaths.
“No!” That had to be as many as a hundred people. She must have lost friends. Maybe even relatives. A wave of guilt followed. “Is your family all right?”
“For now. They’ve been helping tend the sick, though, so who knows how much longer their luck will hold. We ran out of your tinctures almost eight weeks ago. And of course it’s been impossible to get up here until now. We tried, but one climber broke his leg and another fell to his death near the ice falls. We gave up after that.” Ina’s shoulders sagged.
“Eight weeks?” I was horrified. Even in the case of disease, the villagers should have had plenty of medicines to last the winter. Miriel and I had never left them undersupplied, even in years of weak harvest when they had little to offer in trade.
Guilt tasted bitter in my mouth. I should have moved to the valley last summer, but memories of Miriel’s warnings had held me back. When her time to meet the shadow god had drawn near, I’d pleaded with Miriel to give her blessing for me to join the villagers. If I moved there, I could help deliver babies born out of season, or get access to herbs that bloomed earlier down there than on our mountain. She refused to hear of it, reminding me that the gods had ordained my place in the world and that I needed to be wary of mortals. They would discover my gifts, she said. They would hurt me to help themselves.
But now all I knew was that my obedience had led to the death of half the village.
Ina nodded. “As if that wasn’t bad enough, half a moon ago we received a messenger pigeon from farther south with a report of bandits. Raiders barely waited for the ground to thaw before they attacked one of the villages north of Kartasha.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. Bandits were a summer problem. They traveled when the roads were clear and produce or livestock was easy to steal, not when the snow had barely melted and the nanny goats hadn’t even birthed their kids.
“My parents released a pigeon to the king in hopes of getting some support to fend them off if they come north. His reply said, ‘The crown does not currently have enough resources to support communities not in immediate danger.’” Her expression darkened. “I suppose the fact that our village is on a trade route only open in summer makes us less important. Or worse, dispensable.”
I squeezed her arm gently. “All communities matter. No one is dispensable.”
“You may believe that, but apparently the king doesn’t. The crown has done very little to quell banditry in the south these last few years. It’s gotten bad enough that I’ve been working on my own plans to do something about it if I’m elected elder.”
Her words worried me. Last year’s harvest had been a good one. Oversupplied with food and short on fighting bodies, a village decimated by fever would make a tempting target. If Ina’s parents had told him the whole story, why hadn’t he sent help?
“I can at least give you some potions for any who are still ill. Come home with me?” I extended my arm.
“Of course,” she said. She fell into step beside me, took my hand and gave it a squeeze, but then she let go.
Last summer, she’d hardly let go of me at all. But then again, it had taken time for us to grow close, and perhaps we needed time again. Ina had never been afraid of me as so many of the other villagers were, but she had been visiting the mountain daily for almost a moon before her curiosity about me shifted into something else. I would never forget that night.
We’d been sitting by the bank of a creek that murmured its soft music to us in the dark. I had been telling her the names of all the constellations I knew, from the huntress and her arrow guiding travelers north to the war steed in the west galloping his way across the sky with the seasons. Our conversation had eventually turned to more personal things, and she told me her deepest fear—that she would fail to take the place of her parents as an elder—and I revealed to her my secret—that I wasn’t mortal. After my admission, her fingertips brushed my cheek. I turned to her, surprised, and her mouth found mine—as gentle and inevitable as the way twilight shifts into darkness, her lips still sweet from the plums we’d eaten after dinner.
That had been the first night she stayed with me. I still trembled to think of it, the newness, the way she’d touched me and I her, the awkwardness that quickly fell away as we figured out how our bodies fitted against each other. We’d kissed until we couldn’t keep our eyes open, and in the morning I laughed watching her try to find everything she needed to make a meal to break our fast, stubbornly refusing to let me help. Her passion and determination were as addictive to me now as they had been then.
“Will you stay awhile?” I couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving yet, not with the heaviness of the news she’d brought with her.
She grinned at me sidelong as we walked up the path toward my cave. “I hoped you’d ask.”
When we got home, she sat down on one of the cushions in front of the hearth and took down her hair, unbraiding it until the black waves fell loose around her shoulders. I could hardly stop staring at her long enough to unpack my satchel and carefully stow my fresh picks in the deepest part of the cave, where they’d stay cool and preserved until I was ready to brew tinctures. I’d have to go to the lake for water to make more, but at least I could send Ina home with what remained of last year’s batch.
Ina patted the cushion beside her. Longing bloomed in my chest, burning more brightly than any of the blossoms I’d picked on the mountain. I walked over as though in a trance. How could one human girl hold so much power over a demigod?
“I missed you every day,” Ina said as I sat down.
“Did you?” I asked, and the look in her eyes made me forget what my mouth was for or how my limbs worked or what a thought was shaped like.
“Come closer and I’ll show you how much,” Ina whispered, her voice sweet as cream and honey.
When her warm lips touched mine, I remembered exactly what my mouth was for. The dark cloud of my worries and guilt temporarily receded as her closeness comforted me. She undressed me in front of the hearth, trailing hungry kisses down my neck until desire crashed through me in waves. We retreated to the back of the cave and spent the next hour rediscovering each other, charting new paths across each other’s bodies until they became familiar once again.
Afterward, I lay beneath thick piles of blankets as Ina ran her fingers through my hair, my worries creeping back in. It was midafternoon and already my eyelids were growing heavy. Yet I couldn’t afford to sleep, not now, not when the people of Amalska needed me.
“I should get those tinctures ready for you. You’ll need to leave before the sun gets close to the hills.” Emptiness crept in at the thought of her departure.
“Yes. My parents are under the impression that I’m out meditating and asking the spirit god for guidance. I didn’t tell them I was coming up here.”
“But what if something had happened?” I sat up. Her audacity shocked me.
Ina propped herself up on an elbow. “I told a friend where I went just in case. I might get a scolding from my parents, but they’ll be grateful for the tinctures. Besides, I wanted to see you.” She put a warm hand on my back, drawing shapes until gooseflesh rose on my arms.
I couldn’t help a small smile. “You shouldn’t disobey them. They already disapproved of how much time you spent up here last summer.”
“Bah,” Ina said. “I never heard you complaining.”
“Of course not,” I said. I wanted to tell her that no moment with her was wasted—that I loved her—but I bit back the words before they could escape. We had problems to deal with first. If we could make it to summer, banish the fever, and find a way to hold off the bandits . . . then there might be room for declarations and promises. I hoped there would be.
“Do your parents have a plan for handling the bandits if they attack?” I asked. I needed to be prepared if they expected me to play a role.
“They want to join forces with the nearby villages, like Nobrosk and Duvey. Once the fever has passed, they’re planning to invite some of them to help protect Amalska. We have land and goods to offer them in exchange, and stopping the bandits before they get farther north would benefit the other villages, too.”
“But what do you have to offer that isn’t already being traded?” It didn’t sound like enough. Many of the mountain villages shared or exchanged resources already.
Ina’s expression became guarded in a way I’d never seen before. Nervousness prickled across my skin like the bite of a stinging nettle.
“There’s one other thing.” She lay down on her back, staring up at the uneven rock of the ceiling.
An uncomfortable silence built between us. I pulled the covers tightly around myself as if they might shield me from whatever she was going to say.
“My parents want me to get married this summer,” she said. “To a boy from Nobrosk.”