WinterMaejic by Terie Garrison Page A

I’ll really be able to wear him out.”
    I winced inwardly a little. At some point, I would have to admit to Grey that I didn’t actually know where we were supposed to be going. And then I wondered whether Grey might like to stay with the mages—and me—when we found them. If we found them. But then, what reason might there be for him to want to? Surely he wanted to get back to his life, the one he’d had before I interrupted it.
    All of a sudden, I wanted very much to be friends with Grey. Sure, I knew quite a bit about him, but he knew nothing about me, nothing important, anyway. I wanted us to be able to sit and talk, maybe watch a sunset or tell each other what we saw in the clouds. To sit up late over cup after cup of tea, speaking of the things that were most important to us. To introduce him to my family, my friends. Even if I shouldn’t, I wanted to tell him about how I could use maejic—to dance a day away, to lift a boulder the size of a house, to create an image from a few stray strands of thought. Or had done once.
    But maybe I’d never do any of those things again. Maybe Anazian had stripped me of everything it had meant to be me.
    Chase, far ahead of us, started up a racket of barking that resounded through the forest around us, snapping me out of the morass of thought I’d fallen into. He came tearing up to us, his manner frantic. Grey stopped, and so did Hallin.
    “What’s wrong, boy?” Grey asked, taking Chase’s head in his hands and looking searchingly into the hound’s eyes. Something cold touched my neck, and a shiver went down my spine. Before I could figure out what it was, a few white flakes settled on Hallin’s black neck. Grey laughed and rose to his feet. “You ridiculous animal! Behaving as if you’ve never seen snow before.” Shaking his head, he took Hallin’s reins, and we went on.
    At first the snow was a pleasant diversion. As a child, I’d always loved the first winter snow. There was something enchanting about seeing the world obscured by a blanket of white. Not that it remained pristine for long with a brother like Breyard. When we were young, he’d rush out, before Mama could bundle him up properly, and begin to prepare for his assault. Ignoring Mama’s shouts for him to come back, he’d scoop up great handfuls of snow and make snowball after snowball, stacking them neatly by the garden wall to be ready for the impending battle. Once I was big enough to make missiles of satisfactory size, he enlisted me to help him. It was his plan to win the first snowball fight. Village tradition, going back several generations, was that the first battle each Winter was a complete free-for-all. The top two combatants were duly assigned the title of “general,” and they picked their armies from the rest of the boys. These armies spent the Winter battling for snow supremacy. Breyard had been general for the last three years before he’d left to study at Roylinn.
    As my mind drifted, the snowfall grew heavier. Grey peered up into the sky to try to read the weather in the clouds.
    “This is very strange,” he said, coming to a stop. “There was no sign of a snowstorm coming or I wouldn’t have left. Maybe we should go back.”
    I shook my head violently.
    “Perhaps you’re right. Maybe it’ll stop soon. At least it’s pretty. But it’ll be cold camping tonight.”
    I hadn’t thought of that, but the thought of turning back threatened to send waves of panic through me. We couldn’t turn back now; we just couldn’t. Every step closer to the mountains was one step closer to people who could help me.
    We kept on through the day, not stopping for a midday meal. I wasn’t hungry anyway, and Grey just ate as we went.
    It kept snowing, and all afternoon we made our way through a fresh, wintery landscape. If we’d been out in the open, the snow would probably have been more than six inches deep. Since we were in the woods, it wasn’t quite so bad, but it still slowed us