Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [78]
When I opened my eyes again, I felt rested and refreshed, and the quality of light streaming in had barely changed. I put on my corset and stretched, and then I smelled something burning. At first, I rubbed my eyes leisurely and thought of a giant kitchen downstairs, with a woodstove of gargantuan proportions exhaling fire and smoke like the mouth of Gehenna: hypothetical but nevertheless terrifying. The smoke persisted, and it was only when I tasted ash in back of my throat that it occurred to me the fire was not related to the kitchen, and promised not a meal but a disaster.
I put on my uniform, grabbed my satchel, and pushed the door. It remained closed. I jiggled the handle, my mind still fuzzy after sleep but growing sharp once I realized the door was not stuck but deliberately locked from the outside, and saw tendrils of smoke seeping under the door. I threw myself against the door; my cork shoulder did not hurt, but the door did not budge either. After several attempts, I gave up primarily because the thick veil of smoke made my eyes sting and my throat constrict with irrepressible cough.
My room was on the second floor and I rushed to the window, coughing and calling for help—not too loudly, because even though my life was in danger, I feared that outright panic would be unbecoming for a hussar. I yanked at the window, but it was frozen solid.
Irrational fear flared up then—the realization I was trapped, alone—for the first time in days, I was alone—and that I had no one but my own self to help me. Terrible visions crowded by mind—charred remains, red blisters opening like flowers in a twisted coal form no one would ever recognize as human, would never recognize as me . . . I had to slap my own cheek to regain a semblance of sense.
With my face burning from the slap as well as heat, I put my shoulder to good use again, managing to shake loose the frozen frame. As the heat in the room and my own exertions made my face bead with sweat, I pushed the window open with what felt like an effort almost too colossal for my arms. The window swung open, and I looked into a small back street, empty save for a bundled up old woman on the corner, who was screaming (very unhussar-like) for help, gesturing at the thick pillars of smoke pouring out of the windows of the first and the second floors. I panicked at first but soon realized the inhabitants and other visitors must’ve escaped through the front door. I hoped that I was the only one locked in.
Thankfully, tall snowdrifts had built up by the back wall of the tavern—the snow seemed to have been shoveled against the wall, all the way up to the first floor windows. I crossed myself, tossed my satchel out of the window, and jumped. My breath caught at the sudden hard impact—the snow was packed tight, and felt little softer than the pavement below it. My right ankle shifted inside my boot with a sickening grinding sound and a wrenching sensation, and I staggered away from the building. My right foot throbbed with pain and refused to support even an ounce of my weight. I cursed through my teeth, picked up my satchel, and hopped on one foot down the street, along the two long tracks worn by the wheels of carts and carriages. I headed for the corner, where I hoped to find a way into the front street, to make sure that Jack was there, alive and unharmed. Worry gnawed at me as I hopped, painfully, laboriously—this was the first time since we had met that I needed Jack and he failed to come to my aid. One hand resting against the solid, packed snow, helping to maintain my balance, I rounded the corner, to the sound of shouts and the sight of orange flames reaching from the windows of