Winter's Ball by Giselle Ava (ebook e reader .TXT) 📗

at Sir Tam. He was a simple man of no significant appearance. An average face with a little bit of fat filling out his jaw, blond straw-like hair with a few dawning threads of grey interweaved within it. He filled the entire corner of the room and his left arm blocked out one of the windows. Steel armour reflected the dun morning light through the ice-encrusted glass. Smoke rose from the chimneys outside, melting snowflakes which settled across the bricks and awnings. Sir Tam looked back at her with eyes that looked like winter itself, and he said nothing, just gave a very slight nod.

The first time she glanced at her pocket watch was at a quarter to eight that morning just before she knocked on the door of Yorik’s apothecary, right on the corner of a busy street filled with city folk, early visiting nobles, and armoured guards.

The man who answered the door was definitely Yorik but with an eyepatch over his left eye, a blistering yellow burn on his face, and no beard. He didn’t say anything, just stood aside and let her enter the dark, woody store. He shut the door behind her and then strode back to his desk. Sarina passed the shelves of ointments, chests covered in mould and dust, and followed him to the circle of light produced by a glass ceiling, where he immediately dug a vial from a drawer and handed it to her.

“Take a seat,” he grumbled.

She sat down and examined the blue label on the vial. This was the new experimental medication he had spoken of. One tablet when she needed it, no more than six per day.

“I hope these will be a little bit kinder to you,” Yorik said, indicating the pills. “I would expect them to have some of the same side effects that you’re familiar with, but I have found a way to tame them. There are...a few things I want you to be aware of though, and let me know after a couple of days how you’ve been faring with them...”

“Go ahead,” Sarina said. “Tell me the cost of normality.”

“The side effects may include minor delusions and possibly symptoms of psychosis, although you have to be aware that this is highly unlikely—”

“Great,” Sarina said cheerfully. She was used to Yorik’s side effects, so she thought nothing of it. She’d had it all before and, really, the alternative was to slip into the bottomless pit of darkness which she had been hanging above for most of her life. She tucked the pills away inside her coat pocket and then looked up at him. “What happened to your eye?”

“Oh this?” He stood by his desk, not sitting. “Just burned myself trying to concoct an anti-aging serum. Won’t be trying that again. I’ve had pus coming out of my eye for three days.”

“Ew,” Sarina said matter-of-factly.

“And avoidable, yes,” Yorik agreed. “How have you been?” He pulled out a chair and joined her in the middle of the grim room, in the uneven circle of light.

“Well, it’s that day again,” Sarina said.

“Does it bring back those memories?”

She nodded, staring into his one good eye, an amber bordering on outright orange. Motes of dust haloed his face. It appeared that this morning, unlike most mornings, he’d done a little bit more than just dunk his face into a basin and call it a bath.

“How does it make you feel?” he asked. “Angry? Sad?”

She saw those hollowed-out eyes. Blinked it away.

First it was nothing. The assassins had stripped the city of its color, had poked a hole in her heart, and like air from a leaking balloon, her emotions had slowly drained away. Then it was grief, hearing their voices in the hallways, her mother calling out from rooms that didn’t exist. It was fourteen months before she was able to step foot back into the library, and by then her empty heart was being filled with something else: anger.

Anger at the man with no eyes, because he’d taken away nearly everything from her. She would dream of him often, and of her headless mother, her throat slashed nearly all the way through. Sometimes he would visit her in her dreams, and speak to her.

He had seen her there, hiding like a baby, and now he was coming to kill her. And he would. He would drive the knife into her stomach and then slash her throat.

There was a time when she stopped thinking about him. It may even have been a period of some three weeks, but then, like a disease that’s been suppressed but not destroyed by one of Yorik’s concoctions, it came back. Her palms were filling with sweat.

They were there in every shadow. A man with a knife that he stole from the kitchens. A dwarf dropping poison into the water supply. It was Mikka himself with a dagger when she was sleeping. It was Sir Tam—who had not been there for her mother, or her father, or her brother—who would pull out his sword for the first time in seven years, and stab her with it.

And every winter’s ball, it was the man with no eyes, come to finish what he started. The circular black glasses, barely large enough to cover his disgusting eyeholes, his hairless face, resembling a monk from the north, hairless but for those cunning, thin brows.

She refocused her attention on Yorik.

“Haunted,” she told him.

“Haunted,” he repeated, same as always. She felt ashamed, that it should last this long, that she could not, even trying as hard as she did, she could not move on. That shadows should scare her throughout seven years of peace. That her body should sense danger even in the presence of allies. No, of friends. Sir Tam and Mikka. Yorik.

Despite everything, it still haunted her.

“Have you been doing the exercises?” Yorik said.

Sarina nodded, though she did them rarely—sometimes not even when the world seemed to fold in on itself, not even when she thought she might explode. But she