Chapter 26
CHAPTER 26
LARA
“ I ’m beginning to think we’re supposed to go through the frightening sections,” Harai says.
Well, fuck .
So much for no one being able to convince me.
I wrap my arms around myself. “I hate to admit it, but you could be right. That kind of thinking would definitely be right up an Icecaix’s alley.”
“If we’re going to try it,” Harai says, “I think we should all hold hands.”
I don’t miss the look she gives her sister and Izzy. Apparently one person is cheering on their flirtation.
“I’ll go first,” Rhaela says, holding her dagger in one hand and taking Izzy’s hand with her other. Izzy takes my hand, and I take Harai’s.
As soon as we step onto that path, everything goes dark. The blackness in that section of the maze is absolute. And in the dark, I begin to hear other people talking, some of them calling out to me.
It’s reminiscent of the wolf things that tried to get to me in the forest, and oddly enough, I find that comforting.
“Ignore whatever they’re saying to you,” I say. “They can’t get to you if you don’t answer them.”
I really hope I’m right.
The voices swirl around us like leaves caught in the icy wind, each one hitting with precise cruelty.
“Come back to the kitchen, child,” Adefina’s voice coaxes, though something’s wrong with it—too sweet, too concerned. “You were safer there. Happier. Remember how warm the fire was? How simple everything seemed?”
I grit my teeth against the temptation. It’s not real. Not her.
“Did you really think you could escape?” Roland’s sneer cuts through the darkness. “Everything you are belongs to someone else. Always has. Always will.”
His laughter echoes, bouncing off invisible walls until it sounds like a crowd mocking me.
My fingers tighten around Izzy’s hand. No. He’s wrong. He doesn’t own us anymore.
“Lara,” Ivrael’s voice whispers, so close I can almost feel his breath on my neck. “Let go. Give in. You know you want to submit to me completely.”
Heat floods my cheeks even as ice crystals form on my lashes. That voice—God, it sounds exactly like him, hitting every note that makes my body react against my will.
“Poor little hybrid,” Lady Uanna’s vicious, sparkling tones drift past. “Playing at being important. Did you think the duke actually cares for you? You’re nothing but a tool to be used and discarded.”
Through our joined hands, I feel Izzy flinch as new voices target her.
“My sweet, sweet sister,” my voice—but not my voice—calls out. “You’ll never be strong enough to save us. Just like you weren’t strong enough to save Mom.”
“Shut up,” Izzy growls, but I hear the pain beneath her anger.
The voices layer over each other now, a cacophony of our deepest fears and secret shames:
“You’ll freeze here in the dark...”
“No one’s coming to save you...”
“Did you really think you could change anything?”
“You belong to the ice now...”
“Just another servant playing dress-up...”
“Your blood will feed the crown...”
I try to block them out, focusing on the solid reality of Izzy’s hand in mine, Harai’s fingers gripping my other hand. The voices aren’t real. The connections between us—those are real.
But then Kila’s tiny voice pipes up from the darkness: “You abandoned me once. You’ll do it again. Everyone leaves in the end.”
That one hits so hard I stumble, my boots sliding on the ice.
Because isn’t that exactly what I’m planning? To leave again?
The guilt threatens to choke me as the voices press in closer, each one finding another crack in my armor to slip through.
The voices fade away, and for a moment, I believe maybe the worst is over.
But then a cold wind begins to blow, first swirling around us, flirting with the dress I’m wearing, tugging at the ribbons I’ve used to pull my hair back. It picks up strength almost immediately, blowing harder and harder, carrying an even deeper chill than I felt before.
“Why would the Caix do this?” Izzy asks from in front of me. I can barely make out what she’s saying past the whistling of the wind and the chattering of my own teeth.
“Because they’re the Caix,” Rhaela says as if that explains everything—and she’s not entirely wrong.
“The Icecaix definitely tend toward cruelty.” I pitch my voice to carry over the wind.
The wind picks up even more, and a cold rain begins falling. Within seconds, it turns into driving sleet, and I want more than anything to cover my face. Instead, I turn my face down toward the ground and close my eyes, discovering it isn’t any darker inside my eyelids than it is out in the maze. The four of us continue to trudge forward.
That doesn’t last long, though.
As the rain and sleet mix on the ground, the slush hardens almost instantly into ice and turns treacherous.
I feel it as Izzy loses her footing and begins to slip. I probably ought to try to hang onto both Izzy and Harai. Instead, I let go of Harai and grab hold of my sister with both hands.
But that just means Izzy takes me down with her, and we land hard on the ground, limbs tangling as we slide across the ice.
When we finally come to a halt, I lie still for a long moment, catching my breath. Finally, I sit up. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” Izzy says. “Rhaela? Harai? Are you all right?”
Neither of the firelord twins answers us.
“They couldn’t have gone far,” I say, pulling my legs out from under Izzy’s. I scoot away from her and feel around me, hoping to get some sense of which direction I’m facing.
No matter what direction I turn, I don’t touch anything other than the ice beneath us.
“Are you near one of the walls?” I ask Izzy. “I can’t find them.”
Now my sister doesn’t answer me, either.
“Izzy?” I call out her name several more times, but she still doesn’t respond. The unrelieved darkness presses in on me and I shiver.
That’s when the voices start up again.
“You’ll be trapped here forever, you know,” says one to my left.
“All alone,” it continues, speaking directly into my right ear.
“You were always meant to stay in the Icecaix lands,” a second voice says from behind me.
“And you’re never going home,” a third voice says from above.
It’s a trick , I tell myself, then I say aloud, “You’re just trying to scare me.”
Eerie laughter echoes from all sides, and I have to fight to keep from hunkering down, covering my head, and just waiting it out until Ivrael comes to find me.
But that won’t get me out of here anytime soon.
No, I decide. Better to pick a direction and walk. At least that way I’ll end up bumping into something sooner or later.
Almost immediately, the toe of my boot catches on something—maybe just a place on the ground where the ice is rougher—and I stumble, then slip again. My feet come out from under me, and I land hard on my ass.
I am so damn tired of the Caix knocking me down over and over. I feel like I’ve spent every waking moment of the last year being knocked on my ass and crawling back up to standing.
I’ve been sold, bought, traded to the kitchen help. I followed orders, let myself be dragged back when I ran away, and agreed to be part of Ivrael’s plan to save his fucking magic.
My anger wells up inside me, building higher and higher as it crawls up from the depths of my being, finally escaping my throat in one frustrated, angry, wordless scream.
The sound echoes around me, bouncing off the ice walls that I knew had to be there. It reflects back at me, then refracts, splitting into repeated reflections of itself, a fractal of sound.
Instead of fading out, it builds as it did inside me, growing louder with every iteration until I cover my ears, bending over and huddling in on myself protectively. Still the sound batters at me, striking me over and over, raining down on me like clenched fists pummeling my back.
Just when I think the sound of the scream can’t grow any more painful, an explosive noise crashes through it, shattering it into pieces like thunder shot through with lightning.
For a moment, a beautiful silence blankets me, soothing in its absence of sound.
Within seconds, though, I hear crackling, the sound of ice breaking. I open my eyes, and tiny cracks appear in the darkness above me, branching out as light shines through them.
The darkness begins to fall away, first in small chunks, then bigger ones disappearing. Like ice turned to water, the darkness melts into light, revealing not only my sister and the firelord twins standing nearby, but a small doorway.
“Is it more maze?” I ask Izzy as she peers out through the newly created doorway.
“Nope,” she says with relief, and pulls the door wide. “I can see the manor from here.”
“Thank God we’re out of here,” I breathe, my legs shaky as I stumble toward the door. My throat feels raw from screaming, but at least that darkness is gone.
“Should we try to find the center?” Harai asks, squinting up at the towering ice walls. “We came all this way?—”
“Are you insane?” Rhaela cuts in, her hand hovering near her knife. “That place tried to break us. We should get back to the manor while we can.”
I watch Izzy’s face as she considers both options. I can practically see the wheels turning in her mind as she weighs the risks against potential benefits. “Let’s go ahead and step outside for now.”
We all follow Izzy, then cluster together by the doorway as Izzy holds the door open. “I’m afraid it’ll disappear if I let it go.”
“Good thinking,” Rhaela says.
“The center might have information we need,” Izzy says slowly. “About the maze, I mean.”
About what Ivrael’s really planning, she means.
My body tenses at the thought of the duke, remembering how perfectly his voice was recreated in that darkness. How it seemed to caress my skin even while threatening to destroy me.
I shake off the sensation, forcing myself to focus.
“Or it could kill us,” I point out, rubbing my arms where goosebumps have formed. “Those voices knew things. Personal things.”
Things I haven’t told anyone. Things they all heard.
“The maze is reading our minds somehow,” Harai says, voicing my suspicion. “Or accessing our memories.”
“All the more reason to figure out how it works,” Izzy argues. “If Prince Jonyk has something like this at the palace...”
She doesn’t finish the thought. She doesn’t have to. We all know how dangerous it could be if the prince has a way to dig through our minds, to find our deepest fears and use them against us.
“Of course, if you’re confident in your ability to break the prince’s ice maze by screaming…” Harai looks at me questioningly, and I shake my head.
“Fuck no. I don’t even know how I did that. Or if it was even me.” I glance at the doorway, my stomach churning. “If we go back in, we need a better plan than just holding hands and hoping for the best.”
“I have some ideas about that,” Rhaela says, and Izzy perks up immediately. I catch Harai biting back a smile.
“Tomorrow,” Izzy suggests. “I’ve had enough for tonight.”
“I like that plan,” I say instantly.
The firelord twins give each other a long look, communicating something without words, though I can’t tell what.
Izzy’s anxious gaze shifts to Rhaela, and something in my chest tightens. Getting close to the firelord twins could help us later, but I hate seeing her vulnerable to potential heartbreak.
Finally, Rhaela speaks. “We agree. Tomorrow. We’ll try again then.”
I heave a sigh of relief.
My throat still feels raw, tender from that primal scream that somehow shattered the darkness. My fingers drift up to touch my neck, and I swallow hard.
I need to tell Ivrael.
The thought comes unbidden, urgent, like an itch I can’t scratch. Which makes no sense—why should I tell him anything? He’s the one who threw us into this nightmare in the first place. And yet...
My body seems to vibrate with the need to find him, to describe how the ice splintered, how the darkness cracked and fell away like sheets of black glass. How my scream echoed and built until it became something else entirely.
Something powerful.
Stop it , I order myself, digging my nails into my palms. He’s not your confidant. He’s your captor. Your enemy.
Then why did his voice in the maze affect me so deeply?
Why does his touch always break down all my defenses?
Heat floods my cheeks at the memory, and I turn away before Izzy can see my reaction.
But my sister is focused entirely on Rhaela, their heads bent close together as they discuss plans for tomorrow. The sight sends another pang through my chest—sharp, bittersweet. I want her to be happy, but damn, the timing couldn’t be worse.
My attention drifts back to the maze, to that moment when everything changed.
The ice responded to me. To my voice, my anger, my power.
His ice responded to me.
Suddenly I can’t breathe. Because if Ivrael’s ice maze responded to me, what does that mean? What am I becoming?
The compulsion to find him, to demand answers, wells up stronger than ever. My feet actually shift toward the manor before I catch myself.
No. Whatever this is—this pull toward him, this strange new power—I need to keep it to myself. At least until I understand it better.
But as we head back toward Starfrost Manor, my skin prickles with awareness. Like the ice itself is watching. Waiting.
Like it knows something I don’t.
When we move inside, I find myself telling Izzy I’ll meet her in our rooms later—that I’m going to tell Kila and Adefina good night.
Instead, despite all the reasons I tell myself not to go to him, as soon as my sister is out of sight, I move toward Ivrael’s study.