Frostbite

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Gwen's eyes were wide enough to match his. "Edan?" she breathed. "You—"

Edan took another trembling step. "It's really you," he said. It sounded as though he barely believed his own words. "You're... alive." His fingers slipped from Eira's shoulder.

Gwen surged forwards, gripping Edan's clenched hands and taking them into her own. She looked up into his eyes, still wide with shock, and smiled. "I am. I'm here. I'm still breathing."

"How?" was all he said. Edan's eyes were beginning to glisten. "I mean... what happened? Eira said"—he glanced to Eira and she gave him nod and the ghost of a smile—"that I should hear it from you alone."

Gwen sat Edan down beside her on the bed, placing her arms on her lap and taking a deep breath. And then she began to speak.

~

Eira listened to Gwen's story without interjection. She watched Edan's expression change with nearly every sentence—from alarm to relief to sorrow and back to relief. He was focused intently on her words, appearing to take in every single detail.

What Gwen recounted was identical to what she'd told Eira a few weeks ago. Only a few. It felt like far, far longer than that. Months perhaps.

Eira's eyes drifted over the both of them as Gwen was beginning to approach the ending of her tale. The sole people who'd managed to keep Eira sane in that accursed place—the two people who'd assuaged her gnawing loneliness. Never for a moment would she have thought
before that day last month, or even before today, that she could be in both of their company once more, even for a moment. It sent her back to those days where Gwen and Edan would discuss trivial topics while Eira  drifted off with her head laid against her arm on the table. Their voices—though speaking of disparate matters—lulled her back into a long forgotten, sleepy morning. Her head felt hazy, the hands of sleep grasping at her and trying to pull her under. Fighting it was futile; its grip too strong.

It was strange, she mused, as the world began to fade into the darkness of sleep and her eyelids drooped. Strange how she'd managed to happen upon a streak of luck. Two of the dearest people to her had found their way back to her side.

She wondered if that could mean that she would find Cerin once more—perhaps even sometime in the near future. As time passed, her hope for seeing him and talking to him had begun to slowly ebb away, but this thought renewed it.

He was somewhere close, that she knew. He had to be. The rebels were almost all concentrated in this city, and there was the matter of what she'd seen in the music hall. Now, more than ever, she was certain of what she'd seen. It was his face, even after almost five years, unmistakable. Cerin. Not to mention the boy Gwen had mentioned that night, the one who'd joined the rebels not long after Cerin had left home, who spoke of vengeance and went by his murdered brother's name.

It was as if he was directly under her nose, but in the instant she looked down, he flitted back into the shadows and hid from view.

She had a nagging feeling that it was because he simply didn't want to be found.

That theory brought around exasperation. Could it be that he thought he could shoulder it all himself? That it was solely his task to get to the bottom of the deaths of his brother and father and—presumably—seek vengeance against those who caused them?

She hoped that wasn't the case, that he wasn't intentionally evading her, but, if it were—a fact that was uncomfortably likely—it angered her all the more. If her surmising was proved, she'd reprimand him firmly. Owen and Graham were her brother and father as well, though not by blood but certainly in feeling. It was her task too. She wouldn't dispute it.