Faerie Winter - Janni Lee Simner [10]
Like all the upstairs rooms, the bathroom was cold, because houses built Before had fireplaces only on their lowest floors. Ethan lay naked and shivering in the claw-foot tub, his eyes squeezed shut. Mom rubbed his forehead with a damp cloth while Kate wrapped bandages around his blistered hands. The rest of Ethan’s body wasn’t burned, not even his chest, in spite of his charred sweater. That made little sense. Did magic somehow protect firestarters from their own fires?
I was staring. I looked away, resting my bucket beside the tub, while Seth and Kyle waited in the hallway. Kate finished wrapping his hands and nodded at me. I began pouring the water in.
Ethan screamed at the touch of cold water on his fevered skin. I drew the bucket back. He jerked upright, huddling over and glaring at us all through wild eyes.
The bandage on his left hand had come loose. Kate tightened it and gently took both his hands in hers. “Keep going, Liza.”
I poured the water more slowly this time. Ethan rocked back and forth, shivering still. “Not my fault,” he whimpered. “Not my fault.”
No one said anything wasn’t their fault unless they feared it was. I took the empty bucket into the hall. Kyle walked past me, head held high, hands barely touching his own bucket as it floated in front of him. Seth followed close behind him.
With three of us working—four, counting Kyle—it only took a few trips to fill the tub. Somewhere in the cabinets Kyle found a trio of faded green rubber frogs and balanced them on the tub’s edge. Ethan didn’t seem to notice. He stopped whimpering and stared, wide-eyed, at the ceiling.
“It’s all right,” Mom whispered to him, over and over again, just like she had when I was small.
Like me, this stranger knew better. “Not all right. Never all right.”
I thought of Ben’s burned body. “What happened?” I asked him. Mom gave me a sharp look. “We have to know,” I said.
“Time enough for that later.” Kate still held Ethan’s hands, keeping them out of the water. “Fever’s already down a little,” she said.
Ethan moaned. Mom made shushing sounds. “You’re safe here.”
The boy frowned, as if safety were a child’s tale he’d long ago stopped believing.
Once we got Ethan into bed, he fell into a fitful sleep. Mom kept watch over him while Matthew, Seth, and I headed off to other chores. Kyle followed me into the forest to gather acorns hidden beneath the snow. I let him. Gathering was a task a child could help with, now that the trees slept. In years past the oaks had held their acorns close or else flung them at passersby in hopes they’d root in skin and bone, but this autumn they’d fallen like rain from the trees—not only small acorns, such as those Hope wore, but larger ones as well. Soaked, acorn kernels made a bitter flour, one that had gotten us through a couple of hard years when I was small. Famine food, Kate called it. I didn’t look forward to eating such again, but if the spring crops didn’t come in, the acorns would give us a little more time, until they ran out as well.
Kyle really did help with the gathering, at least until he found a glowworm melting a trail through the snow and stopped to talk to it.
“Don’t touch it,” I warned him. Usually glowworms didn’t hold much heat, but with so much leaf litter for them to feed on this winter, they were burning hotter than usual.
Kyle gave me a long look, as though he couldn’t believe I’d think him so stupid, and turned back to the worm, leaving me to finish filling the acorn sack myself. When I was done, the worm was gone, but Kyle’s name was spelled out in worm trails in the snow. My stomach ached with hunger by then, and I wished I’d eaten before heading out after all.
As we returned to town, Kyle’s mother marched over to us and grabbed his arm. “What trouble are you making now?” Brianna demanded.
Kyle stared at the ground. I pointed to the acorn sack. “He wasn’t any trouble. He was a good helper.”
Kyle’s mother gave me a smoldering