Brightly Woven

your garden. Get my bag and find me a bloody bowl, please!”
    “The snow—” Lady Aphra began. Yes, the snow, the snow. My mind clung to the word deliriously, even as my entire chest constricted with immeasurable pain, and I cried. The snow…
    Something hit the ground beside my face. I felt it shake the floor, but the voice that accompanied it was much harder to distinguish.
    “Pale…pulled her out…hands…”
    A pair of strong arms pulled me up from the floor, though my limbs were dead weight. I was a lump of skin and bones, lifeless, freezing. Something warm wrapped around me, something red that I could sense beneath my closed eyelids.
    I felt North before I heard him. That same tingling warmth that I associated with him seeped under my skin, even if just for a moment. My back was pressed against his chest, and his tall frame completely enveloped me. I felt his heart racing.
    “N…Nor…,” I cried. “Please help me, please, it hurts, it hurts. I can’t breathe. Please…”
    “You’re going to be all right,” he said fiercely. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”
    There was pounding and screaming all around me. For one horrifying moment, I thought that the shrieking was coming from me, but my throat and voice were frozen. I couldn’t breathe—I couldn’t breathe.
    “Shut…door…here!”
    “Storm…help…”
    “Get over here!” North barked. His face turned next to my ear, and I could feel his hand rubbing my chest for a brief moment. “Just breathe, Syd. I’m here. I know it hurts, but you have to breathe, you stubborn girl….”
    I was gasping, willing my hands to lift from my lap to pryoff the imaginary fingers that had encircled my throat. Everything was lethargic and cold and dark except for North’s glove and its hard, uneven circles. That glove and the slowing beat of my heart.
    “Mix the heartroot in now; just squeeze out two drops or it’ll kill her—can you possibly go any faster? Give me the bowl; just let me do it—here, now put it over the fire—have you never made a kulde antidote before?”
    “Wayland! Don’t…”
    “…the storm…get more…”
    “The girl…”
    “…Sydelle…look…she’s not…”
    “Be quiet, both of you!” North thundered, and the room was silent once again. North’s body was shaking erratically, and he was breathing against my ear, breathing hard as if for both of us. He grasped my jaw gently and forced it open. Something hard was pressed against my lips.
    “You have to drink this. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “Please drink it, please.”
    The warm liquid went down my throat, even as I coughed and sputtered against it. Disgusting. It tasted of death and dirt.
    North held me the entire time, forcing me to drink all of the bowl’s contents. Every single burning, foul drop.
    I felt…
    I felt nothing. And then everything.
    This time I knew I was the one screaming. Beneath myskin, everything burst back to life with a roaring blaze that consumed me, pushing its way through my veins and forcing out the tolerable numbness behind my eyes. My head was thundering in pain.
    Then North was holding the same bowl under my face, whispering in my ear, rubbing warm circles on my back.
    “You have to spit it up—you have to get it out of you, Syd,” he said. “Throw it up!”
    If I had been myself in that instant I might have been embarrassed, but I did exactly as I was told. I threw up until there was nothing left in me but dry heaves and thick tears.
    Somewhere a door shut, but all I could hear was North’s voice; all I could feel was his warm breath on the back of my neck.
    “That’s my girl,” he said. Sensation was tingling in my toes and fingers, but I still couldn’t move, paralyzed by the pain the cold had left behind, by its last grip on my body.
    That, and the solid, undeniable warmth that was North.
    The wizard fell back against the wall in exhaustion. He held me against him gently, as if I was glass—as if I could shatter and fall away from him at any moment and leave him breathless and alone once more.
    “That’s my girl…,” he whispered, resting his cheek against my shoulder.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    W hen I was a child, no older than five, I came down with an illness that left me bedridden for weeks. I have very few memories of that time. Flashes of my mother’s pale face, the wide rims of the doctor’s glasses. Mostly, I remembered the pain: the heaviness of my limbs, my head too weak to move.
    It was