2.
I was on fire. Heat rose from my skin like a fire from a furnace.
Then I was frozen. My blood had turned to icewater. Shivers went through me in waves.
The strangest of sights passed before my eyes.
Harry died again, and then rose up, and his head was the head of a grinning gnoll. He lifted up Sasha, whose white fur was matted with blood. Then my poor cat raised her head and opened her mouth, and four and twenty blackbirds came pouring out from between her needlelike little fangs.
Dad stepped through a picture frame and vanished, telling me that I had to follow him, but when I tried to step through the picture frame it fell to pieces at my feet. Frantic, I tried again and again to pick up the pieces and put the frame back together again, but they kept crumbling to dust in my fingers.
Then Teddy appeared, unrolling a scroll that crawled black with spiders. He threw a fireball at the mountain. It came down on top of us. "A thousand apologies!" he exclaimed, as the snow buried us both. "What a mudgin I am!"
There was something above me, smothering me, unending white that wouldn't move. I screamed in a blind panic and tried to fight free.
A pair of hands held me down. "Relax," a deep voice said. "Whatever yer seein', 'tis not a real thing. Ye're safe." Something clinked. "Now quit yer flailin'. Drink this down, there's a good girl."
Then someone grabbed my jaw and forced a cool, odd-tasting liquid past my lips. I choked and sputtered, but my tormentor didn't stop until I'd swallowed the stuff down. Then he let me be.
The visions passed. My world swayed and creaked. It melted into one long, delirious blur.
Sometimes, I opened my eyes and saw the sky going past. I watched it for a while, floating in a fevered haze.
There were clouds in the sky. I didn't like them. They reminded me of snow.
After a while, my eyes drifted shut as if I had lead weights attached to my eyelids. The world went away again.
The next time I opened my eyes, I saw a ceiling.
The beams were dark and rough-hewn. The spaces between them were plastered white.
I felt like the inside of my head had been scraped out and filled with iron filings. And I felt like I'd had my veins pumped full of molasses. And I felt like some deranged clown had made a pair of balloon animals out of my lungs.
In other words, I felt like hammered shit.
I realized that I was lying beneath a pile of blankets. Weakly, my pulse suddenly jumping into my throat, I tried to lift my hands to push the blankets off of me. I suddenly hated, hated, hated that feeling of having all of that weight on top of me, hated it beyond all reason.
I heard a startled exclamation. A chair scraped. "Ye're awake!" a feminine voice exclaimed. It lifted into a shout. "Mother! She's awake!" the girl called.
Footsteps thudded into the room. "Well, finally," another woman's voice said, sounding relieved. "And here I was thinkin' that she was set to sleep the year away." A cool hand touched my forehead. "Fever's broken, thank the Hearthmother. How do ye feel, lass?"
I managed to turn my head enough to see the person who was standing at my bedside.
I saw a broad, full-lipped face framed by golden braids. My nursemaid was obviously a woman, but her jaw was very square, and her features looked like they'd been chiseled out of granite.
It was her eyes that really caught my attention, though. Mannish as her features were, her eyes were gorgeous – a bright, emerald green that was almost gemlike in its clarity.
My cracked and crusted lips parted. "Who're you?" I croaked.
The woman smiled at me. "My name is Toli," she said. "Toli Hurst, wife to Nathan Hurst and mother to Becka Hurst. On behalf of us all, I bid ye welcome to our homestead."
Then she pulled up a stool and sat. "Now," she said. "Since ye're obviously well enough to be askin' questions…what would ye like to eat?"
