Aflame (Awakened #2)

Chapter 1

The water waited, asking to be pulled up from the springs beneath the arena, to be chilled and frozen into the icy floor beneath Valkyrja’s boots.

To be crystallized in the air, built into snowflakes larger than what nature ever produced on its own.

Who was she to ignore it? A smile on her lips, she expanded the crystals she’d helped form into a sculpture suspended in the air and sent it spinning.

Her brother batted them away, turning her work into powder with a flick of his hand and a sigh not as indulgent as usual. “Pretty and useless, Kyrja. Focus.” A word he said so often, she heard it in her sleep.

Focus. Will. Act.

No need to wonder why Einar’s tone was sharp today though.

Just as there was no need to dart her gaze toward their small audience to feel their family’s attention.

Mamma, always encouraging. Fodur, always cold and impassive and untouched by the feeling that would melt the ice he needed to rule Fjordlandi.

And of course, Krystiana, always taunting. “Pretty and useless—that ought to sound familiar.”

Kyrja rolled her shoulders, telling herself her older sister’s words slid off as well. Himmel knew she’d been hearing similar insults all her nearly-thirty-five years.

Her brother, older than her by two decades, caught her gaze and silently bade her to follow the instructions he’d given her countless times since she’d been Awakened to the Blessing on her fifth birthday.

He, as the eldest child of the king and the Heir—an official office that, so far as she could tell, gave him nothing but headaches and responsibility—had been given the honor of slicing her finger with the Awakening Blade.

Of watching the bowl for the telltale flourish of magical blood in the water.

Of slicing his own finger and lowering it into that same bowl, so that his blood moved to her wound and Awakened the magic within her.

Life before that moment was but hazy, snow-drifted memories. But life since that moment—that moment when a new sense had crashed through her, Awakening her to the Blessing of the snows and ice—had been sharp as an icicle.

Einar didn’t ask if she was ready now, just pulled water up from the springs under the arena floor and froze it as it came, drawing it up and up and up into a deadly stalagmite. Her job, of course, was to cut it down.

Focus. She drew in a deep breath and looked at the ice not with her eyes but with that other-sense.

The one they called magic. Felt the ice forming, hardening into something tougher than Therion steel, heard its song shift and change.

Will. She had to want to disrupt that song, to break the bonds, to scatter the ice… and this was always her problem.

Her brother reminded her constantly that the raw magic in her veins had been strong, as strong as his or Krystiana’s.

It was why, he said, he’d asked to be the one to teach her, while Fodur focused on Krystiana’s training until it ended ten years ago, at the appointed time.

As Kyrja’s would do in another month, when she turned thirty-five.

Thirty years of training. That was what the law of Fjordlandi granted to those Awakened to the Blessing.

And for most Blessed, that was all it took to come into their own.

To fist the magic in their mental hands, to shove down any emotion that would fracture their ice, and to gain a ranking among the other Blessed through the fierce competition called the Proving.

Perhaps, if they were strong enough, to Challenge another Blessed and win a seat on Fodur’s High Council.

Thirty years had only been enough to make her think the whole system pointless.

The constant struggle for power was exhausting, and she’d never even taken part in it.

Had no need to—she wasn’t the Heir, wasn’t the spare.

She was just Mamma’s pet—the child her mother had petitioned for, to love as she saw fit.

Something she’d never been allowed to do with her first two children, who belonged, by rights, to the king and Fjordlandi.

Kyrja stole one quick gaze at her mother, who sat on the first bench in the stands with her usual soft smile on her lined face, silver overtaking the dark of her hair, furs wrapped around her in an effort to keep her warm among the ice. Mamma sent her a wink.

She should will it, for Mamma. To make Einar proud and prove his training hadn’t been wasted. To shut up the chuckling Krystiana. And always, always to try to earn even one spark of approval from Fodur.

But King Isidor didn’t give approval unless it was earned. And Kyrja had never managed that impossible feat.

Act. The final part of Einar’s silent command, and though she’d utterly failed at step two, she moved onto step three anyway, trying to do exactly what he’d taught her.

To grab the whole chunk of ice in her mental fist and pull, tug.

To shatter his creation. To replace it with her own, though he fought her every attempt.

Sweat beaded on her brow from the effort, froze over, frosted her skin.

“Enough.” Fodur waved a lazy hand, and she could feel his magical signature—the strongest in all of Fjordlandi—cut into Einar’s ice and send it shattering.

No more effort for him than batting a lazy snowflake from the air.

“We have no more time to waste on this, Einar. If your mother’s pet wants to paint snowflakes on things, let her. ”

Kyrja stiffened. And, when one of those chunks of ice came straight for her, had no trouble willing that to break to pieces and turn to a shower of snowflakes. The one part of her training she’d mastered early, after a few too many pelts to the head.

Einar, frowning, turned toward the stands. Fodur only came to observe her progress once a month, but she should have had that final cycle to finally, somehow prove herself. “She is entitled—”

“One more month is not going to make a difference. Her magic is as untethered as the Great Forest, and if you haven’t addressed that by now, you won’t.

” Fodur cut a hard, glinting gaze her way.

“And it hardly matters in comparison to the other concerns vying for our attention. I need you back in the High Council chambers to witness the Accord with Ellas, and then we have that meeting with the leader of the Red Hands.”

Kyrja winced at mentions of both Ellas and the Red Hands.

Ellas, because their nearest neighbor was a kingdom as terrifying as it was intriguing, with a king who won his throne not by magical strength, like in Fjordlandi, but by sheer cleverness.

Having no magic, Ellas had resorted to technology in its stead, and their war machines…

well, Kyrja had never actually seen them, of course.

But the tales she’d heard made her wonder why Fodur would be entertaining a new Accord with King Stefanos at all.

He usually avoided anything more than trade agreements with the man, given the Ellesian’s propensity to twist things to Ellas’s advantage in unforeseen ways.

And with an Accord, one was legally bound by international law. To break it would be to bring the weight of all the kingdoms down upon one’s head.

As for the Red Hands… Kyrja sent a questioning look to her brother. “You granted an audience to the rebels?”

Einar sighed and cleared the floor of the remainder of his ice, returning the rink to a smooth surface, ready for whichever Blessed trained here next. “We must entertain them now and again to keep them quiet.”

Mamma had stood, and apparently their words traveled to her across the ice. “Perhaps,” she said, voice soft as a snowfall, “if you actually listened to their requests, you could truly solve the problem instead of making their resentment grow.”

Fodur turned toward the door as if he hadn’t even heard his consort’s advice. “Einar, meet me at the palace within the half hour. Krystiana, the storms to the north need your attention—it is unacceptable that you’ve let them slip again.”

Even as Krystiana stiffened, her mocking smirk hardening to a straight line at the reprimand, Kyrja waited. Waited for whatever demand or chide Fodur would give her.

He said nothing else at all. Just strode from the stands, toward the side door, and out into the snow.

Kyrja’s fingers curled into her palm. It shouldn’t hurt still, should it? The fact that he’d given up even speaking to her, only issuing commands about her to Einar?

In the air far to the north, she felt her sister’s magical hand stretch, gather, pull more insulating clouds over the land.

Without them, Fjordlandi would freeze solid.

Without the breaks in them in just the right places, their greenhouse domes wouldn’t have sunlight enough to grow the food the whole kingdom needed to survive.

She knew her sister’s task was difficult…

but it was also critical. Whether one lived in a city open to the elements or beneath a dome, Krystiana’s control over the storms meant life to them all.

Thinking to offer a bit of encouragement, Kyrja said, “Krysti—”

“I’ll see you at dinner tonight. Try not to fail any more between now and then.” With a flick of her pale-blond braid over her shoulder, Krystiana followed their father’s path out of the practice arena.

Mamma sighed and rubbed at her temples, sinking back to her seat on the bench.

Einar slid to Kyrja’s side and settled a large, cool hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t let them bother you.” His voice was a low rumble, comforting and familiar.

He’d always been the one to try to shore up her shaky foundations with his solid, dependable ice.

“You are a Fjordic princess, Kyrja. You are Blessed.”

“For all the good it does me.” She flicked a frosted design, intricate and whimsical, onto his tunic.

He chuckled and brushed it off. “Proving my point, as usual. Your mastery of the details shows you could match the rest of us. If you wanted to.”