The stone boughs overhead knitted shut with a wet, splintering groan, sealing out the whistling gale and trapping Jael inside. The fallen scout groaned, his hands twitching in the glass dust. Korvan did not wait for the intruder to stand. Thick roots sprouted from the stone-hard floorboards, coiling around a heavy stool to hoist Jael upright, binding his arms and torso in knotted wood. Korvan then sank down beside the low bench, skin gray from the venomous strike he had intercepted earlier. A ragged, whistling wheeze escaped his mangled throat. Briska ignored the scout's twitching eyelids and knelt beside the giant. Exertion offended her, but letting her mattress die was worse. She drew a copper-rimmed salving knife from her hem, peeling back Korvan’s shredded leathers. The wound across his collarbone bubbled with curdled black shadow-rot. Working with precise, minimalist motions, she scraped the frost-scum away, her palms pressing tallow into the torn meat. Korvan’s hand, massive and calloused as bark, came up to loosely bracket her wrist. He wasn't stopping her; he was steadying her. His pulse drummed against her thumb—thick, stubborn, and entirely too warm for an undead world. A sputtering cough broke the silence. "You... you miserable, deaf mute bitch," Jael rasped, his chin lifting from his chest. Glass dust glittered in his beard. His boots scraped violently against the floorboards. "Cut these off me! Do you hear me? Pravil brought the entire Sunder-Covenant behind him. Fifty lances. Fifty marrow-flayers! He carved the tracking sigil into your collar while you slept in the caravan! You think this rotten spruce will stop him? He’s going to rip the veins out of your arms while you watch him gut this half-breed dog!" Briska didn't pause in smoothing the tallow over Korvan’s clavicle. Her eyelids drooped. The screeching was shrill. It made the base of her skull throb, right behind the ears where she preferred empty, velvet quiet. Beside the washbasin sat a wicker basket of firm, frozen tubers gathered from the root cellar yesterday. Without turning her head, Briska extended her left hand. She measured the distance purely by the echo of Jael's spit striking the floor. She picked up a russet potato roughly the size of a cobble-stone, balanced its center of mass on her palm, and flicked her wrist. A dull, wet thunk cracked through the room. The vegetable caught Jael squarely between his eyebrows. His head snapped back against the post, his eyes rolled into his skull, and his jaw went slack. A soft, snoring wheeze replaced the threats. Silence returned. Perfect. Beautiful. Briska wiped her palms on Korvan’s clean tunic, stretched her back until her spine gave three neat pops, and collapsed sideways across his chest. He didn't shove her off. His broad ribcage rose and fell in measured swells beneath her cheek. The ether-tether connecting their ribcages hummed, sending slow ripples of gold through her sleep-fogged perception. His flesh was hot where the poison had burned away, feverish and heavy like a sun-baked stone. She let her eyes shut, burrowing into the crook of his collarbone, determined to reclaim the ninety minutes of rest she had been cheated out of. Sleep took her fast, but sleep brought teeth. Her dream was not mist. It was salt and grease. Briska stood in the courtyard of House Varik, eight winters younger, paralyzed as the black iron doors of the manor tore from their hinges. The scent was unmistakable: cured lard, pine pitch, and blood. Her mother was kneeling on the frosted flags, hands raised to weave a shield, but Pravil was already behind her. Pravil, smiling that serene, fatherly smile he always wore when he brought Briska candied nuts from the market. He had not used an iron blade. He had used a curved harvesting hook. *"You are the keystone, little rabbit,"* Pravil’s whispered voice echoed through the corridor of memories, dripping with false warmth. *"The bloodline must be squeezed dry of noise before it can open the gate. I will show you how to run. I will teach you the rules so well that you run straight into my pantry."* He hadn't let her escape out of pity. He had salted her footsteps. He had driven her into the Nyravan Taiga like a hog into a chute, knowing only the pure, desperate exhaustion of a prodigy could trigger the warding stone at the heart of the ancient forest. Suddenly, the memory warped. The courtyard vanished into an icy gorge. Briska wasn't in her own skin anymore. She was looking down from a terrifying height, staring through unfamiliar, burning eyes at a younger Pravil standing over a snowbank. Pravil held a hook in one hand and an iron brand in the other. Under his boot lay a massive youth with broad shoulders and graying hair, pinning him to the frost. *"A warden who cannot speak can never call upon the root,"* Pravil whispered, his face inches away, eyes dancing with sickening delight. *"Bark takes a hundred years to heal. Let us see if your throat does the same, boy."* The memory screamed as the silver blade slashed through cartilage and sinew. Briska felt the choking, metallic drown of blood in her own lungs, the sheer agony of a voice stolen and ground to dust beneath a tyrant's heel. Briska bolted upright, tearing herself from Korvan's chest. Korvan was awake, his pale irises fixed on her face without blinking. His hand was pressed to his ruined throat, chest heaving in sync with hers. The ether-tether between them was blazing an incandescent white, thrumming with shared outrage and the ghost-pain of severed cords. He had felt her mother's death. She had tasted the steel that silenced him. He reached out, his blunt knuckle grazing the tear track on her pale cheek. He understood. They were both trophies Pravil had failed to butcher on the first attempt. A grinding roar tore through the Chalet before she could retreat back into apathy. The floor beneath their feet bucked. Rugs slid across the planks as the center of the chamber split in two, exposing the hollow belly of the ancient world-tree beneath. From the chasm rose a jagged pillar of black amber, humming with the force of an avalanche. At the top of the pillar sat an ancient control altar, ringed by serrated briars of blood-iron. Carved runes flared into blinding red light across its polished surface, and an ominous pulse echoed through the wood, bypassing the ears to vibrate directly against their teeth. Briska’s genius intellect, always working in spite of her desperate desire to do nothing, translated the forgotten script in an instant. *THE WARDEN SLEEPS UNTIL LIFE EQUALS RESTORATION.* *TO CLOSE THE ROOTS FOREVER, ONE FULL FOUNT MUST EMPTY.* It was not a riddle. The Chalet’s ultimate defense, the barrier that could swallow Pravil’s fifty lances into the frozen earth, required a living battery. It demanded an entire reservoir of ancestral blood drained into the amber hollow. It demanded a sacrifice to awaken. Briska stared at the hollow groove carved into the stone, sized perfectly for a slit wrist. She looked down at her hands. To run again would mean endless running, endless camps in the snow, endless noise from men like Jael hunting her until her limbs fell off. To seal this place would give Korvan peace and lock out the world forever. All she wanted was a warm, quiet corner where she could finally close her eyes. And the altar was asking for the one thing she couldn't afford to lose if she ever wanted to sleep again: her life.

Potatoes and Phantoms