Cold Spell

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I have no idea what this means, and am a little relieved to see no one else does, either.

Flannery, for her part, is grinning through the blood running down her nose. I’m finally able to get a good look at her face. She resembles Brigit, at least in her eyes, though her body is both curvier and shorter, something like a gymnast’s. She runs past the crowd, encouraging them to cheer for her, but the people seemed mixed—the younger members are ecstatic and the older ones are scowling.

Brigit is talking furiously to an ever-growing mob of men, all yelling over one another. People start to take notice, quieting down so they can eavesdrop. Flannery, now on the other side of the fire and high-fiving a group of children, turns and cocks her head, listening.

“You’d better get control of your girl, Brigit. No man is gonna put up with this,” one man growls.

“We’ll handle it—”

“And what about my boy?” a man I recognize from Brigit’s tent shouts. “God help me if his nose doesn’t set right, Brigit. And besides, who gets the buffer now?”

“I get the buffer,” Flannery shouts, storming toward her mother. “I won. I get her.”

“Flannery,” Brigit warns under her breath.

“What’re you gonna do, add her to your damn menagerie?” an old man asks.

“You’ll watch the way you speak to your princess,” Brigit snaps.

“Maybe someone should’ve spoke to you that way, Brigit!” another says.

The crowd gasps, a murmur of threat, of indignation ruffling through them. Brigit purses her lips together and makes herself look taller, more regal than the man who last spoke. He seems to know he’s said the wrong thing, shrinking back a little, casting his eyes downward.

“Flannery?” Brigit says, voice steely. Flannery steps closer, cowed by her mother’s intensity. “Find Ginny a place to sleep. We’ll figure out a way to handle this when Jameson apologizes. Make sure you watch her—she’ll try to run.” Flannery walks over to me, her gait bold, confident. Bracelets pushes me toward her, and Flannery grabs hold of my wrist tightly. She leads me away, out of the crowd; I look over my shoulder to see Brigit walking back to her tent, proud, as if she’s uninterested in whatever squabbles the crowd of men might have.

“Where are we going?” I ask. Flannery doesn’t answer. “Hey,” I say again, more forcefully. “What are we doing?” She doesn’t answer, so I repeat the question again and again as we weave around RVs, generators, and charcoal grills.

“God, you don’t shut up, do you?” Flannery finally says. We reach an RV close to Brigit’s tent, a big, impressive one. Flannery walks up the steps, shoulders the door open, and leads me inside.

“I’m not… look, I’m not, like… yours or… I’m not going to be your…” I stumble across the words, embarrassed and confused.

“My own personal buffer?” Flannery asks, grinning wickedly. She laughs, loud and strong and a little lewd. “You are. I dunno what you’ll do. Maybe you can help me—nah. Never mind. You’d just mess that up.”

“I don’t… I don’t understand.”

“What’s to understand?” she asks, opening a cabinet and pulling out a bag of crackers, the fancy, name-brand kind speckled with seeds. “I fought, I won, so you’re with me.” She continues to mutter under her breath, in the language I don’t understand. She tucks the bag of crackers under her arm and walks down the RV steps. I consider standing my ground, refusing to follow, but I reason that the more we walk around, the more of the camp I see—and the more likely I am to discover a way to escape.

People are heading back to their RVs and tents; fires are reduced to embers, and a haze of smoke covers the area. A few people congratulate Flannery, and a few others cuss at her; she unleashes a string of expletives back without hesitation, which usually results in her and the other person laughing together. Children watch us from inside tent doors, clustered together like nesting animals, eyes admiring Flannery while regarding me with a sort of wary fear. We’re getting closer and closer to the edge of the camp, away from the bonfire light. The snow on the ground is still thick here, though there’s a trail, as if Flannery has walked this path many times before. I turn my eyes to the tree line, wondering how far I’d make it if I got away and ran right now. After seeing the Fenris, the forest is infinitely more frightening, especially in the dark. Flannery looks over her shoulder at me.

“Afraid of the forest?”

“Yes,” I mutter.

“You should be,” she says. “Go in there and they’ll eat you up.”

“I know about them,” I say. “The Fenris. And the Snow Queen—your mother doesn’t want anyone to know, but—”

“Quiet,” Flannery says, teeth flashing in the dim light. “You won’t make it far here if you go prying into our secrets before you’ve earned them. And besides, I heard all about you. Talking trash about Grohkta-Nap, questioning her power.”

“It’s not that,” I say, trying to pander to her a little. “I’ve just always thought she was the queen of the Fenris. But you say she protects your people from them.”

“If she sees fit,” Flannery says, pushing her hair over her shoulders—though there’s so much and it’s so thick that the curls flounce back across her face in seconds. “The snow slows the Fenris down,” she continues. “She brings it down on us, tries to keep them away from our camp.”

“And you don’t care that she turns boys into wolves.”

“That work for her,” Flannery says, a spark of admiration in her voice. “And they don’t back-talk and question her the way the men here question my mother. The Snow Queen has real power.” I’m about to say more when up ahead, something near the trees moves. I jump, afraid, but no, this is small, thinner, lankier than a Fenris. We grow closer, closer, and I realize it’s a deer, held captive by a fence made of chicken wire on one side and a very beaten VW bus on the other.

“Hello, menthroh,” Flannery calls out; her voice is calmer now, as if the frenzy of the fight is falling away. The deer’s ears flick toward us, and she immediately backs up to the far side of the pen.

“She’s afraid of me,” Flannery tells me, though she doesn’t seem too sad about this. She reaches into the bag of crackers, tugs out a few, and throws them to the ground at the deer’s feet. I see her silhouette and wide, eerie eyes flicker as she drops her head and sniffs, then ignores them.

“You feed her crackers?”

“I feed her whatever I can find that she’ll eat,” Flannery says, and turns. “Don’t tell my mother. She gets pissed when she hears I’m giving them our food.” I’m about to ask what she means by them when it becomes abundantly, ridiculously clear.

The fence holding the deer goes on for several yards, divided every few feet, and there’s an animal in every section. The deer, then a fox, then a dog—no, not a dog, a coyote.

“I had an elk once,” Flannery says forlornly. “But he trampled me and ran away.”

“I’m… sorry?” I say, trying to keep the shock from registering in my voice. She’s crazy. Not just strange, not just eccentric, but actually crazy.

“Nah. Good for him, being strong enough to break out,” Flannery says, tossing some crackers into a pen with a badger. “Besides, now I have room for a bear, if I can catch one. It’s hard—I need a really old one or a baby, and both are hard to come by. Especially since women aren’t allowed to go into the woods. Gotta wait for them to wander close to camp, see one by the highway, that sort of thing.”

Crazy.

“Why do you want a bear?” I ask, unable to keep the alarm from my voice this time.

“Because,” Flannery says, drawing a knife from her waistband and running it across the chicken wire so it makes a tinkling sound. The animals’ ears spring up and they begin to pace. “Wouldn’t you be afraid of a girl who can catch a bear with her hands?”

I nod—though really, I’m fairly afraid of her as is; she doesn’t need to catch a bear to scare me, though I’d believe Brigit and the rest of the camp might be harder to convince. We get to the end of the pens and walk to the back of the bus. It was once pale red—I think. Maybe blue, or green—the paint is chipped and reveals that it’s been many colors in its lifetime.

“This is Wallace,” Flannery says, sounding pleased with herself.

“Why Wallace?”

“That’s what it says,” she answers, as if I’m stupid to not realize. She points to an assortment of faded bumper stickers on the rear door. Only one is still legible, the one that reads WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT in red, white, and blue.

Flannery opens the rear doors and climbs inside. There’s a table and a few benches, and the pop-top roof makes it possible to stand up straight in certain areas. There’s not room to do much else, though, because on every seat, every ledge, and every little table are cages, their occupants hidden in the darkness. Flannery reaches over and flicks on an electric lantern, temporarily blinding me. When I manage to open my eyes, I can’t stop a gasp.

Possums. Raccoons. Squirrels. Some sort of mink, and, in a pen by what used to be a bed, a beaver. They scramble for food, and I’m overwhelmed with pity—they look well-fed, cared for, but something about seeing a wild animal in a cage unsettles me.

Flannery reaches into the passenger seat and comes up with several boxes of cornflakes, which she dumps into the animals’ bowls; they eat hungrily, the raccoons far more brazen than the deer outside.

Flannery raps on Wallace’s wall fondly. “It runs and everything. My friend Callum and I stole it together last year. Took us six months to get it working. And another three to get my mother off my back about having a van just for my collection.”

“She doesn’t like it?”

“She says I’m greedy, wanting more while others have less.” She casts a hand toward the camp, fingers lingering in the direction of the smallest tents. “Says it’s not our way, that I’m acting like a buffer.”

“We’re not like that,” I say defensively.

“You’ll have a hell of a time convincing me of that,” Flannery says, laughing loud. “But I wager I’ll have a hell of a time convincing you we’re more than just thieves and vagrants, so we’re square.”

I’m not sure we’re square at all, seeing as how I’m being held prisoner, but I keep my mouth shut. Flannery sticks her fingers into the possum’s cage for a moment; when he ignores her, she speaks again.

“Maybe she’s right. More proof I’ll be a shit queen.”

“Shit queen of what, exactly?” I ask, voice rising in something too akin to disdain for Flannery’s taste. She whirls around and glares, and I see her fingers itch for her knife. It makes me jump backward; I trip over the console between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, and my elbow hits the gearshift. I wince as she laughs at me, looking down. I’ll probably have an imprint of the little numbers on the shifter bruised into my skin.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I grumble, finding my feet. “I just don’t get it. Who are you people? What are you doing out here?”

Flannery relaxes and smiles—her smiles look so wicked. “We’re the Pavee. Tinkers. The Other Folk.”

“I don’t know what any of that means.”

Flannery snorts, puts away the cornflakes, and flips off the light. “We’re Travellers,” she says. “Well, mostly. We broke off from the other Traveller groups years ago, started a new clan when we came down to Kentucky.”

“And so you’re the… the princess.”

“The Princess of Kentucky,” Flannery says matter-of-factly. “But I’m shit at it, you know. So shit, in fact,” she says, pausing dramatically, “that my mother thinks if I don’t get married, have a husband to back me up when I inherit her title, that the clan’ll overthrow me, take my crown before she’s even cold in the ground.” Flannery jumps out of Wallace and waits for me to do the same.

“Is your mother married?” I ask as my feet hit the dirt.

“Nope,” Flannery says, snorting at the hypocrisy. “My dad ran off a thousand years ago, but when they tried to take my mother’s crown she fought back. I could fight back, too—hell, I’m stronger than my mother, braver, and I can handle a knife better. But she doesn’t care. Thinks I’m weak. Says she’ll just arrange the marriage herself if I don’t pick someone soon.”

“Would she really do that?” I ask.

“Damn straight,” Flannery says. “She can’t just leave well enough alone.” Flannery spits on the ground and walks away. I follow her; we cross back into the more populated area of camp, though most people are inside now, silhouettes in their lit windows. There’s a group of men drinking around a small fire in a pit; one points us out to the others as Flannery and I grow closer.

“Oy, there she is! The Princess of Kentucky herself, and her prize!” He waves a bottle of liquor at us so emphatically that he topples over and nearly rolls into the fire.

“Better watch out, Flannery,” another one yells. “Them boys won’t forget about this. Might be inclined to teach you a lesson.”

“They’ll have a hard time doing that from the ground,” Flannery says coolly, and we keep walking. The men are too drunk to be insulted, laughing and whistling. We’re nearly out of earshot when one man calls out, loud enough that his voice shoots across the camp.

“Should’ve killed the buffer girl straight out. I bet we have to, to settle this whole thing.”

Flannery keeps moving, while I struggle to keep breathing. She glances back at me, dark hair flying into her face from a breeze.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t let them kill you.” I nod meekly, feeling at least mildly comforted until she adds, “If you need to be killed, I promise I’ll off you myself.”

Everyone has a memory they treasure. A bright moment in the past to return to when things are too dark to live in the present. When I was small, it was a memory of dying Easter eggs with my mother. Then, when I needed something bigger, more powerful, it was the memory of finding the rose garden with Kai. Thousands of blooms in front of a graying twilight sky, a summer breeze, the feeling that we’d found our very own version of Narnia.

But now all I can think of is Kai destroying the roses, the things he said to me, the way Mora sneered at my pain. So in the ever-darkening present, I turn to a different memory instead, one that’s still pure, beautiful, perfect.

The second time Kai and I kissed.

The first time we kissed, we were excited, dreaming about the music intensive, about New York and the adventures we’d have there. Everything felt big, everything felt grand, and it was like kissing was the only way to get the joy out of our hearts and into the world.

But the second time, we weren’t distracted. There was no letter, no dreaming, no plans. There was just me and Kai, and the knowledge that one kiss was a simple diversion, but two kisses was a pattern. It was evening in the autumn, the trees red and fiery and the air crisp. We were on the brick bridge leading into the park, watching the dogs in the fenced area below roughhouse. There were dogs barking, and there was the sunset, and then there was Kai’s hand taking mine. He turned me toward him, and I reached up, wrapping my arms around his neck without thinking, and we were kissing as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

The memory is enough to light the darkness.