Free Frost by Kate Avery Ellison

stirred in the darkness, and my heart stuttered as I reached for the snow blossoms.
    But it was just a fox. The creature looked at me with wild, unreadable eyes, and I looked back, and then it slipped into the night while I shut and barred the door and returned to the dying boy at my fireside.
    The Farther’s fever worsened. He rambled about soldiers and prison cells while his sweat soaked into his hair and his cheeks grew hotter and hotter. He whispered and yelled, muttered and moaned. Ivy sat by him, and when he cried she flinched as if he were personally insulting her.
    “Please,” the Farther begged, grabbing for her hand during one particularly brutal round of fever-induced delusions. “Please don’t, please don’t.”
    “What do you want?” she asked, biting her lip. We’d found that talking to him tended to help.
    He hesitated. His eyes blinked open, and they swam with tears of pain. “Please don’t kill them,” he mumbled. “Kill me if you must, but please don’t hurt them.”
    I was stricken by his words, by the pain on his face.
    “Please!” he shrieked, and Ivy put her hands over her mouth.
    “Gabe.” I grabbed his fingers in mine and squeezed tight. They were hot and dry. “You’re safe now. Go to sleep.”
    His eyelids drooped. He looked down at our hands, clasped tight across the quilt. “Don’t let go,” he mumbled.
    “I won’t,” I said.
    And as long as I held his hand, he slept.
     
     

SEVEN
     
     
    IN THE MORNING, I put on my nicest dress—a long blue one with white flowers embroidered across the skirt and sleeves—and braided my hair into the traditional thick rope of hair that most Frost women wore. I tucked a few dried snow blossoms into the braid and then stared at my reflection in the dusty mirror that sat propped against the rafters in the farmhouse loft. If I was going to see the Mayor, I needed to look exceptionally presentable, so he wouldn’t doubt my capabilities when it came to providing for my siblings. Especially if I was going to confess to breaking a major community rule.
    When I descended the rickety ramble of steps that passed for a staircase, I saw the Farther sitting up by the fire, his fever gone and his hair in a snarl. His eyes were completely clear for the first time, and he had a bemused expression on his face, almost a smile. It softened the sharp angles of his face and made him look less threatening. And he was handsome, but in a quiet, intelligent kind of way, like he was used to working inside with old records and books instead of in the fields.
    I immediately hated myself for thinking he was handsome, but my rebellious brain continued to think so anyway. I also could not help but admire his uninjured arm, which was visible where the blanket had fallen away. It was surprisingly muscled, given his lean frame.
    His eyes swept the room as if he’d never seen anything like it before, his gaze lingering on ordinary and ugly things like the spinning wheel and the pot over the fire. “Are you done ogling me yet?” he asked, smirking, without turning his head to look at me. I wanted him to look—I wondered if he would scrutinize me the way he’d looked at the spinning wheel, an ordinary thing turned strange and wonderful in his eyes, and then my cheeks flushed at the notion. Or maybe that was just because he’d caught me looking in the first place. It was hard to be sure, because my emotions were in such a tangle lately.
    I descended the rest of the staircase with what was left of my dignity, pretending indifference. “I wasn’t ogling you,” I said. I didn’t have any evidence to offer to the contrary, though, so I changed the subject. “Your fever broke?”
    “I suppose so, since I am lucid and feeling better. Or maybe I have died, and this is the afterlife. Although you and your sister make a pair of strange angels.”
    I spotted a used teacup and a plate with crumbs on it next to his nest of quilts, and I deduced that Ivy must have fixed him