When Beck was a child, a fever almost killed him. It was his first experience cheating death.
He would never forget the heat, the raging of his skin that burned so hot that the springtime breeze felt like a winter wind, the touch of his mother’s hand, a cold knife.
That was before she succumbed to the fever. Before his father, his friends, his elders all slowly faded away under its insidious grip.
While the others seemed to wither, trapped within the heat of their bodies, Beck became wracked with chills, his body shivering fiercely and his teeth chattering until his jaw ached.
Beck remembered that pain now as he hunched against the cold, his lips numb and goosebumps crawling up his arms and legs. He tried to swallow back the sick feeling that always came when he thought back to that time. To the haze of fever while he lay with all of the others in that sequestered room of the hospital.
The silence was stifling as death came quietly for each of them, one by one.
But it never came back for Beck.
He was sure his gloved fingers would be aching if he could feel them, having ridden as far and as long as they had through the slush and the mud, but home wasn’t much further now.
Tunnelled by ancient trees and their bare, overhanging branches, the road ahead was pocked with icy puddles, the company of horses behind Beck skittering about to try and avoid them.
They hadn’t passed another traveller since leaving the inn, so he was hardly paying attention to the empty road when his horse reared back.
His numb fingers grasped for purchase on the reins, a jolt going through him as he tried to right himself and calm his whinnying mare. She huffed a breath, feet stamping and kicking up frigid mud.
“Easy, girl,” he murmured in her ear, one hand gently petting her neck. “What’s going on?”
His breath caught when he lifted his eyes.
A woman stood in the road, her back to Beck and the retinue behind him. She was still as though she was made of stone, as if the ice on the wind had fixed her to the gravel road on which she stood. The only whisper of movement came from the black scarf over her head that swayed in the breeze.
“Miss?” Beck called out.
She made no response. He dismounted, the sting in his feet at the impact reverberating up his stiff ankles, and stepped towards her.
“Captain?” one of his companions inquired.
Beck held a hand up for them to hold steady, heart thrumming at the base of his throat. His breath came out in short puffs of steam as an ominous feeling crawled along his flesh. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. “Miss?”
Disconcerted voices muttered behind him and the familiar squeak of the carriage door pierced the quiet, but he was transfixed by the woman just ahead of him now, her dark hair billowing out from beneath her scarf. The hem of her black dress was soaked through with mud as if she’d been walking for miles, for days. Everything about her was in stark contrast to the white, wintery territory surrounding them, as if she were a blot of ink on a fresh piece of paper.
The crunch of snow beneath each footstep thundered in his ears until he stood just a breath away from her. Then silence engulfed him.
Silence like that of death.
“Miss?” he repeated softly, reaching a hand towards her. He felt a pull, like a string between them going taut.
As his hand brushed her shoulder, she turned her head just a fraction.
Beck startled, recoiling.
But before he could back away any further, she snatched his wrist and whirled to face him.
She may have been lovely at some point in time, her face young, lips full, and her eyes big and blue. Now they were glazed over, the whites of her eye yellowed and her lips cracked and peeling. Black tears stained her cheeks and her nose was crusted with dried blood. Her skin was the colour of ash.
Beck would have fallen were it not for the grip she had on his wrist. His knees went weak as the breath was sucked from his lungs. Her cold, lifeless hand burned him through his clothes, biting into his flesh.
Around him, the snow had melted away. The ground was barren and dry and the trees lining the road crumbled like charcoal. The mountain ahead loomed, its blanket of evergreen woods burnt away to unyielding rock. The others, his entire company of guards and the carriage they escorted, were gone. Snow fell from the sky but it didn’t melt as it landed on her lips. No, it flaked like skin.
Not snow—ash.
He was too terrified to scream as she reached towards him with her other hand, bones protruding and nails cracked and lined with grime. Beck sank to his knees as her skeletal palm covered his face. The smell of smoke and decay choked him, her fingers trailing over his eyes, his nose, his lips.
Her breath was cold and stale on his neck as she leaned closer. The burning in his wrist spread up to his shoulder, a whimper of pain loosing his lip.
“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, her voice crackling like splintering ice.
And then she let go.
He fell to his back at the sudden release, and within a breath, the gnarled trees were above him again, his clothes soaked through with slush.
“Beck?”
He blinked away the haze, swallowing the lump in his throat as he met familiar hazel eyes, wide with alarm.
“Jace . . . ” Beck began, voice trembling, “is everyone all right?”
Jace’s hand was at Beck’s shoulder, a stunned expression frozen on his features as he surveyed Beck. “Everyone’s fine. Are you all right?”
Nausea roiled in his stomach as he sat. He managed a steadying breath before glancing towards the other bewildered guards, to the princess, her face wrought with worry by the carriage.
“Yes,” he mumbled. The pain had faded from his arm as he took Jace’s outstretched hand. Everything around them was the way it had been before. “There . . . there was a woman.”
“What woman?” Jace asked, voice growing faint as he helped Beck rise unsteadily to his feet.
Beck fought back the rush of blood that made the world momentarily spin, turning as if half-expecting to still find her there. “She—she was standing in the middle of the road. She was right there.” He gestured shakily, raking a hand through his dirty-blond hair.
The alarm in Jace’s eyes hadn’t wavered. “There was no one there, Beck.”
The air was crushed from his lungs. He hadn’t imagined it. A sting still lingered at his wrist.
“Are you ill?” Jace asked quietly.
Beck tried to take a deep breath but it trembled the way the rest of him did. “I don’t know.”
“Captain Windborn.”
Beck looked to the woman still standing at the carriage with a fur trimmed cape pulled tightly around her. Her nose was rosy from the cold, bright blue eyes wide the way Jace’s had been.
“Is everything all right?” she called to them.
“I think the captain has come under the weather, Your Highness,” Jace replied.
Beck shook his head, still trying to reconcile with what he had seen that seemingly no one else had. “I’m fine. I just need a moment.”
She strode towards them, clutching her cloak closed against the brisk wind. “Captain, why don’t you rest in the carriage.”
“Princess—”
“Then we needn’t delay any longer,” she cut him off abruptly. “It would be best to make it to Gilden by nightfall, would it not?”
He swallowed, then nodded once. “Yes, Your Highness”
She nodded over her shoulder to the carriage. “Then let’s get moving, shall we? Oh—and leave your coat with one of your men, we don’t want the coach getting covered in mud.”
Beck’s cheeks burned as he lowered his gaze and shucked off his soiled coat. An outstretched hand was waiting to claim it as the cold bit into him through his clothes. “Jace, take the lead,” he muttered before falling behind Princess Sola back to her coach.
It was warmer inside the carriage, but Beck couldn’t shake the chill that had burrowed its way deep inside of him. His clothes were damp, his body quivering as he clenched his teeth down on the shivers that rolled through him.
“Here,” Sola said once they were sitting, handing him the blanket that had been laying across her lap when they’d departed.
“Thank you,” he mumbled, wrapping it around his shoulders as he peered out the window. He could feel her eyes on him.
“What happened back there?” she finally asked after a long silence, interrupted only by the rattle of the wheels and the plod of hooves against the beaten road.
He shrugged, not out of nonchalance, but to shake off the feeling that made his skin crawl. “I don’t know. I must have fainted.”
“You worried us.”
At that, he finally met her glistening eyes, her lips a thin line. Beck slouched forward, clasping his hands together to keep them from shaking. “I’m sorry.”
“Beck,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She only ever called him by his given name in hushed tones, only ever when they were alone. She reached across the small distance between them, so tight that their knees nearly brushed, and touched his hand. “If something is wrong, you can tell me.”
He gazed down at their hands, a rush of heat going through his stomach.
But “Nothing’s wrong” was all he said, though the words were hollow even to his own ears. Maybe he really was coming down with something. Maybe the whole thing had been a trick of his overly-tired brain.
Her throat bobbed as she gingerly pulled her hand back into her own lap. “Okay.”
Beck mirrored her, straightening as he looked out the window. He was exhausted, that much he would admit. They’d been travelling back from Alderholm for two days in the cold with nothing to protect them but the layers of clothes they’d piled on. The severe winds of the plains that spanned much of the distance between there and the Capital, Gildenloch, had cut through him like a blade. Not to mention their stays at seedy taverns during the nights on the road, with their threadbare beds and whistling windows that did little to stave off the chill.
But soon, he told himself, soon they would be home, nestled away in the mountains where springtime was drawing near, the snow giving way to wet forests and running waterfalls.
He’d travelled much of Elandria in recent months, escorting the Princess on her various voyages to meet all those whom she sought to gain favour with before her impending rise to the crown. She had been under the tutelage of her parents’ former advisors since she was in her youth. But at the end of the previous year, she had finally been entitled to her crown when she turned twenty years old. All that remained was her coronation.
Beck thought briefly back to when he was twenty and training with the Royal Guard. Sola had just turned sixteen then. She had seemed like a child.
His gaze flicked towards her once—nothing of that child was left. Her silvery blonde hair fell in soft waves around her face, her eyes as pure as the winter blue sky. Though, they had the same shadow over them that most parentless children did. The shadow Beck knew that he bore.
“You can rest,” she said as if she could feel the brief brush of his eyes on her, “we still have a few hours yet.”
Beck didn’t reply, he only leaned his head against the carriage door and shut his eyes.
He saw her face for a moment—the face of that woman in the road.
And then he was enveloped in darkness.