Page 26 of Cursed Shadows 5

I flinch.

“Samick abandoned his journey to my home village and took the two human children to his adoptive parents in Kithe. Those parents were all Samick ever knew, raised him from a youngling to a warrior. They took Kalice in, kept her, and Samick saw her as a sister of sorts. Saw the boy, Kason, as a brother. That lasted fifty years or so,” Dare sighs and, folding his arms, reclines against the dewy wall. His cheek turns to me as he looks down the alley. “Kalice never warmed to him. Kason did better.”

I arch a brow. For a beat, I let that sink in, then sputter the question with a polishing of contempt, “She never warmed to the fae who saved her?”

“Spared, as she puts it.” His chin grazes his shoulder. “Anytime Kalice looks at Samick, she sees the brutality hesparedher from. Their sibling relationship became little more than bickering, whenever he was home. He started to spend more and more time at Hemlock, though his home was only the next door over. Kalice collected faerie hounds,” Dare adds. “As I imagine,they make her feel safe. But those faerie hounds are hunters. And Samick was tired of them routinely digging through his belongings, ruining his work.”

His work.

My mind flickers with sketched throwing stars and carved weapons. He’s a black metal smith, by nature, by passion, by heart.

It is his true language, and the voice is his second.

Dancing is a hobby of mine, a love that I hold dear. But then there are those like Samick whose passion is ingrained into their very essence. They cannot be without it.

“Samick and Kalice bickered often, until one day he lost his patience. He is, after all, what he is.” Dare’s face is grim as he turns to look at me. “He froze a hound’s heart. Kalice attacked him, Kason got in the middle, tried to break it up… But Kason was touched by the ice bite.”

I know nothing of the ice fae. But I do know of the ice bite. And it stuns me silent for a moment.

Ice bite is rare, rare enough that I can only summon two or three mentions of it in scripture over all the years I spent poring over the scrolls.

The touch of ice takes a certain concoction of circumstances to produce it. The body must be hot from the inside, the flesh prickled, and the cold so sudden and frozen that it sheets an entire layer of outer flesh, but does not reach the lower layers. The bright side of it, if there is one, is that limbs aren’t lost to it, as they are with frostbite. But the downside is that an entire body can be sheeted with the ice, the frost, and frozen stiff—while the inside is still alive, heart still beating, eyes still seeing, ears still hearing… until being frozen stiff, unmoveable, kills the one who suffers… kills them in minutes.

I read of no cure or treatment.

But I did read of the ice bite as a Fae Trait in the dark ones—and now, I suspect we knew a little of the ice fae’s existence, but not fully understanding through the secrecy of Dorcha that those with the ability of ice bite are a fae species in their own right.

It is too much.

Too much for my tangled, fatigued mind to absorb.

“Kason died, of course,” Dare tells me, as though I am not drowning in this information. “Samick has not been welcomed back into his home since. His parents turn their cheeks to him on the street. Kalice keeps her hounds close and her distance great.”

“But why did he do that?”

Dare scoffs, harsh. “Samick did not chose to harm her or Kason. She attacked him at the wrong moment, when his hands were frost, and he is what he is at the end of it all. To Samick, it is as natural as breathing, as bleeding from a cut. You cannot ask why a beast eats to survive, why some pant as they run. It just is.”

Silence trickles down on us.

Not even the voders can be heard through the pulsing moment that steals the alley.

Then, I swallow, thick, and it’s audible.

I have no words.

And Dare is almost finished with his. I know that when he pushes from the wall and lets his arms uncross from his chest.

“It is not lust you sense in Samick for Kalice. It is rage. He acted from his heart… and it led to his own demise.”

He sees her as a human he never should have saved; as a sister he resents the existence of; as the very reason his adoptive parents do not look at him.

“He regrets saving her,” I murmur and cast a sorrowed glance at the space between our boots.

“Yes,” is all Dare says before he gestures to the door behind me. “There.”

The shift takes a moment in my mind.

I blink, a flutter of the lashes, before I turn my chin to my shoulder.

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