Chapter 16
Two Weeks Later
Who knew that winning thirteen Challenges at once and then pushing back a lava flow in the arena would be the easy part of becoming queen?
Kyrja nearly snarled when Henrik put yet another crystal on her desk, which already looked like the inside of a geode.
She’d have told herself that he was only doing his job and not trying to make her life difficult, but honestly, she couldn’t rule out sabotage.
It was exhausting, being able to trust so few people.
She had Arne as an ally now, and the Aflame.
But the Blessed? They continued to be a thorn in her side. And Henrik’s loyalty was to his Blessed kin.
Of course, she had requested he compile lists of every act in her father’s rule that didn’t meet the standard of justice for both Fjorders and thanes…so the mountain of crystals was her own fault, in a way.
She forced a smile. A confident lift to her chin.
“Thank you. That will be all.” And held it together until the door closed behind the smug-faced scribe.
Then, only then, did she groan and let her head fall to the desk—though she took care not to disturb the style Dania had already fashioned for her for dinner.
“You only have two more weeks to fill your High Council.” Dania had been coming to the palace every day after the clinic closed and, even knowing it meant hours her friend was taking away from her family, Kyrja couldn’t bring herself to tell her to stop.
Even if Dania did just drag her into her bedroom, pick out one of the new gowns that kept arriving daily to replace her destroyed wardrobe, and dismiss the maid and do her hair herself for the evening meal.
As if they were still two schoolgirls playing, rather than a physician and a queen.
Which gave her the perfect opportunity to point out all the things Kyrja was doing wrong.
Or “not yet doing right,” as Dania diplomatically put it. Every day, she came armed with new suggestions from her brother and, apparently, his lecture hall full of university students he’d long been leading in the “thought experiments” Fodur would have had him sacked for, if he’d known about them.
How had Fodur not discovered it? How had he not realized that some Fjorders, at least, were being taught to think beyond the strict lines of society?
To view thanes as something more than animals?
When she’d realized Sven was engaging students in those exercises and not just speaking of them in the privacy of Dania’s home, Kyrja had been genuinely flummoxed.
How had no one, in the ten years he’d been teaching at the university, reported him? The fact that they hadn’t—either convinced by his arguments or simply eager to have the conversations—lit a flame of hope in Kyrja.
Some of her subjects, at least, were open to change. Open to dialogue about it. Open to a society that didn’t require them standing on the backs of the thanes to get ahead.
Kyrja picked up a pink crystal that had lists of potential High Council members on it—several of whom had been stopping by every…frosted…day. She’d granted Laila an audience on the first day, and the woman had sounded sincere. But how was she really to know?
Some of the Fjorders were excited at the prospect of a new society.
Excited at the thought of getting to elect members to the Great Council who would serve everyone, not just those at the top of the political and social ladder.
But the Blessed? There was a limited pool of them, and competition among them had always been fierce.
The High Council, filled only with the magical, wielded far more power than the much-larger Great Council with its elected officials.
The Blessed had always said whatever they had to say to the monarch to secure favor.
How was Kyrja to know if Laila was merely doing that, or if she believed the things she said?
Kyrja sighed. “I don’t know how to fill positions.
I don’t know who I can trust. Every Blessed either hates me for turning the system on its head or wants to ingratiate themselves so they can be on the new High Council.
I have installed the Aflame, but that’s only half the seats—and three of them said outright they wanted to be replaced as soon as I found someone else. ”
Her friend raked a lock of hair back from her face. “Then ignore it all and come back to the clinic with me. Inoculation days are horrible without you.”
Part of her wished she could. Wished she could turn back time, go back to being the princess with no responsibilities or duties beyond the ones she’d designed for herself.
Perhaps she’d been “pretty and useless,” but at least she hadn’t fallen into a guest bed each night exhausted, only to rise feeling like she’d spent the last six hours shivering on an iceberg.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “You could always abandon your calling and take up a second career in politics. You’d have four uncontested years on the High Council.”
Dania snorted. “And then every Blessed left free would Challenge me, and you’d have an icicle for a best friend.
” She checked the time, groaned, and stood from the chair she’d adopted as her own in Kyrja’s office, where they always ended their too-short time together.
She brushed the wrinkles from her skirt. “I’m sorry. I need to get home.”
“You don’t need to apologize.” Though Kyrja was sorry too.
Sorry enough that she was tempted to ignore the leagues-long list of things she’d yet to acquaint herself with and walk to Dania’s house with her, just to hear children’s voices raised in an argument about something simple, like whose turn it was to fold the laundry. “Tell the girls hello for me.”
Dania pulled her into a hug, holding on long enough that a bit of the overwhelm had no choice but to retreat. “Come visit soon. You need it. I’ll invite Sven, and you can hear all his grand philosophizing for yourself.”
Kyrja squeezed her best friend back and pasted a smile on her lips. “I will.”
Dania moved to the door but paused with her hand on the latch. “You can do this, Kyrja. You’re the best thing that’s happened to this nation in centuries. The Giver wouldn’t have given you his anointing if it weren’t so.”
She didn’t dare to reply aloud, even with a simple thank-you. Had she tried to speak, her doubt would have dripped from her voice, and Dania would have rushed back over for another hug, and the whole goodbye process would have had to start over.
So she waited until the door clicked, solitude descended, and then she pushed away from the cluttered desk in the study she’d claimed for herself—one that hadn’t been used in half an eternity, so far as she could tell—and trudged over to the window.
The shiver that coursed up her spine had nothing to do with the frost in the corners of the panes, the snow spinning lazily down outside, or the cold radiating off the glass.
It had everything to do with the mental grip she had to keep at all times on the Ice Prison and the thirteen prisoners who seemed to take shifts in trying to break through her locks, so that she never had a moment’s rest. She and Daemon were working on a plan to replace the ice with lava, but they hadn’t managed it yet.
So for now, keeping her father and his cronies imprisoned fell solely to her.
Not to mention the storms, the expanse of ice that needed to be maintained around nearly their entire shoreline, and managing the channels for the ships that were petitioning to enter Reykstoll harbor in record numbers.
All the world, it seemed, wanted to meet the new queen.
At least she’d been able to release care of the volcanic mountain range encircling the island entirely to the Aflame.
Daemon had insisted they could manage the range without her—that, in fact, her father’s continued control had been to keep them from escaping, not because they couldn’t work without his interference.
So far, their word had held true. There’d been no eruptions, minor or otherwise, no vents where they shouldn’t be, no earthquakes to interrupt construction of the newest dome.
But it had only been two weeks. Yes, they’d bent the knee to her at the Coronation Ball ceremony, but she’d seen at a glance that Nik was the one to lead that, and that Daemon, their actual leader, wouldn’t have done a thing to keep the arena from burning to the ground if she hadn’t doused the fire with ice.
Which, yes, was the whole point of the exercise. She didn’t hold it against him.
Still. Daemon was an unknown quantity. Nik she trusted with her life.
His mother she trusted simply because she had a feeling Elianne would follow Nik above Daemon.
The others? They could be playing nice right now for their own purposes.
Testing their limits. Reacquainting themselves with the world of the surface none of them had seen for decades.
They could be plotting her demise even now.
Or maybe she was paranoid from lack of sleep.
A knock sounded on the door, and Kyrja sighed as she called out, “Enter.” It would be either Nik or Perla, come to tell her the others had gathered in the dining room and were waiting for her.
Nik today. He entered with a smile that looked as tired as hers felt. “Ready?”
To laugh at whatever the visiting princess’s method of the day would be for irritating Daemon? To listen to the updates from the Aflame? To focus on how this new friend of hers kept his mother at arm’s length, instead of her own family drama that kept picking at her ice in the prison? “Absolutely.”
As long as she didn’t think too much about the work left undone on her desk.
She followed Nik into the hall, securing the whole room with the ice lock she’d installed upon claiming it. Viggo came to attention and fell in behind them once they started down the corridor.