Chapter 6
Once Dalla had calmed herself and rode out the attack, she drank several glasses of water that kept refilling on her nightstand. A bath was drawn, and she sank into it with heavy bones.
Even if the dagger Dalla brought could kill Kolfrosta, Dalla wasn’t sure she wanted to use it. Nothing in the way Kolfrosta treated Dalla revealed ill intent or anything remotely deserving of the loss of life.
She wasn’t here for vengeance. That was never why Dalla had the dagger made.
Most of her family alienated her for her entire life.
They kept her out of politics until Kolfrosta started picking them off, and then Dalla had been thrust into their roles.
It did not seem necessary to care so much about the bloodline.
Why not let another family take over? Someone who deserved it more?
Was it so important to her parents to uphold their legacy?
And what legacy, furthermore, were they upholding?
Dalla felt stupid that she had not understood the full extent of her conversation with Puck.
To choose who lived and died every year was unfathomable.
That the people who gave her life were complicit in this made her want to scrub off her skin and become someone new.
Not once had it occurred to her that her power was meant to be used for such a thing.
After her bath, Dalla slid into the comfortable sheets. She’d been allowed to live tonight, but the summer fairy would arrive two nights from now to kill Kolfrosta.
What did Kolfrosta do with Dalla’s family when the time came? Were they handed over to Puck to do with as he would? Did Kolfrosta allow him to do the dirty work of killing them?
Dalla had to make sure she was still alive when Puck came. That was the only way to buy herself another year to protect her younger brothers.
Hours of tossing and turning later, Dalla slept.
She had only one dream—Kolfrosta, approaching her from a long distance away over an endless snowy landscape in the dead of night.
In the dream, Dalla was frozen in place.
When Kolfrosta stood before her, she reached for Dalla’s face with a gleaming silver ring adorning the middle finger of her hand.
From experience, Dalla braced herself for the warmth of Kolfrosta’s skin, but the ring touched Dalla’s cheek with a coldness so deep it burned.
Dalla woke cradling her cheek, which held a phantom of the pain. The sun was streaming through the windows, and for a moment she did not know where she was.
And then she remembered. A creeping suspicion overcame Dalla, and she rose from bed and tried the door. Locked.
Very well, then. No need to panic; someone would let her out eventually.
Busying herself getting ready took no time at all. She sat, and she waited. And waited some more. And then some more.
Her stomach grumbled.
“Am I allowed to leave?” she asked the empty room.
No one responded.
“Please? I am very hungry. Would you take me to get something to eat?”
The plea worked: the lock undid itself with a mechanical noise, and then the door creaked open.
Dalla stepped into the hallway. The maze of doors made her dizzy. Asking for food had gotten her out of the room, but that did not mean the invisible servants were going to help her.
So Dalla began to open the doors.
One door revealed a room that extended impossibly high into the ceiling. The chittering of birds greeted Dalla. They came in unusual colors and sizes the likes of which Dalla had never seen, and the floor was suspiciously absent of bird droppings.
Another door revealed a room with musical instruments. Another, a room of statues so hauntingly lifelike that Dalla shut the door immediately. The next was another bedroom decorated in a fish theme.
And the next room was a library.
Dalla stroked the chestnut shelves with her fingertips.
Books with leather spines and gold print sparkled at her from every surface, illuminated by the twinkling lights falling from the ceiling.
The library was well-kept and free of dust, and the smell of books and polished wood overcame her senses.
She pulled a book from the shelf—to her delight, an adventure story about a pirate.
Did Kolfrosta read these sorts of stories?
Dalla trailed through a maze of ceiling-high shelves and climbed a winding staircase to a second story.
There were books on every subject she could imagine.
Bird identification and growing crops, ruling a country and keeping bees.
Romances and tragedies and comedies. Dalla brought the ones that interested her to a table and flipped through them with reverence.
A bittersweetness tinged her awe. She would not be able to stay long enough to read every book, to explore every nook of this wondrous palace.
Dalla’s stomach grumbled again, reminding her of why she’d left her room in the first place.
She looked at the unruly pile of accumulated books with guilt.
It would take hours to put the books back where she found them, if she could even teach herself the organization system and remember where things were supposed to go in this massive place.
“Sorry,” she whispered. Her voice broke through the library’s quiet spell.
“I don’t think I can return these books. ”
One of the books lifted into the air, and then another, until a steady stream of books came and went.
“You haven’t abandoned me after all,” Dalla said to the servants. “If only you would show me somewhere to break my fast.”
Only a few minutes later, a tray was placed before Dalla with a cup of ale and a loaf of steaming rosemary bread.
Dalla dug into the food ravenously as she observed the rest of the books being put away.
There was an odd humanness to the act that gave her pause—some of the books went one way and then pivoted around, like the servant had gotten the placement wrong and had to look elsewhere.
This made the servants seem less like enchantments and more like people.
Dalla finished her ale and, satiated, went in search of somewhere else to explore.
Finding a path back to the hallway was not easy, but she did it without the help of the servants, which gave her some hope. Perhaps she could navigate this strange place on her own and escape if needed.
Dalla walked down the hall some way, ignoring the closed doors that called to her like sirens to sailors. She could have spent a lifetime perusing the wonders this palace had to offer. But she only had until Kolfrosta awoke.
Around a turn, one doorway in particular stood out to Dalla. The trim was different than the other doors, looping in a skillfully carved vine pattern.
She opened the door. A riot of colors greeted her. The walls themselves were painted with flowers, and ornate paintings littered every surface, propped up against walls and each other. Among the clutter, Dalla was drawn to a painting that took up an entire wall.
The painting was of Kolfrosta. She wore a skin-tight purple dress that fanned out around her feet, and the artist had given her eyes an uncharacteristically elfish look.
Even so, Kolfrosta was striking, and the painting must have taken a long time to finish.
At the bottom of the painting were the words a gift from the faerie queene.
It wasn’t until she saw the inscription that Dalla realized she assumed Kolfrosta was the sole artist.
Unease stirred in Dalla as she examined the painting closer.
Kolfrosta was undoubtedly beautiful, but the attention to detail indicated the artist knew Kolfrosta quite well, perhaps intimately.
Her skin, rather than the midnight hue Dalla saw in person and in her dreams, was the cloudy blue of day, and the flecks of snow under her skin sparkled on the surface.
The hills of her breasts were done in such great detail that embarrassment crept into Dalla’s cheeks.
Kolfrosta’s slender wrists were exposed, and her hands tapered into well-shaped fingernails.
A silver ring adorned the middle finger of her left hand.
Dalla gasped. She fumbled at her hip for the dagger she’d commissioned and held it up to the light.
Both the ring and the dagger bore the same exact snowflake pattern. Dalla’s breath caught. In this painting, Kolfrosta wore Dalla’s missing ring.
Dalla jumped into action. She left the room and shouted down the hallway: “Take me to Kolfrosta! Take me to her now!”