Chapter 25 #4
He took my wife. So I’ll take his. And his son, and his daughters.
I’ll take them, and I’ll leave him to realize the cost of his frosted policies.
If anything can break his heart of ice, make him feel, it will surely be this.
And you, Nik—he’ll never see you coming.
You, with all that cleverness you keep in that head of yours, will be his undoing.
He’ll bring you in thinking you’re like everyone else, another slave to be executed.
But I know you, son. I know you’ll do from the inside what I always failed to do from without.
In here you’ll find all the evidence I gathered through my years of searching, along with that bracelet to melt the prison bars. Use it, Nik.
I met a rebel a while back, out on the plains. Coming from the way of the outcasts. He said something that has been burning inside me ever since. Something I pass along to you.
Strike the flint. Fan the flames of freedom. Make them bleed.
Pab
Nik lowered the paper. Looked over to Raf.
His friend wore the frown that said he was concerned, not for himself but for Nik. “Did you know? That he was sick? Dying?”
Nik could only shake his head. He knew Pab hadn’t been a young man, not by thane standards. But if he had only months left, why hadn’t he told him? He hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.
Feeling a bit numb, Nik reached into the box, pulled out the bracelet.
The outside looked like nothing—bits of metal, dull and worn.
The kind of recycled rubbish thanes always used to make jewelry from, since it was all they were ever given.
But on the inside, which would be invisible against his arm, he saw mechanical bits.
It took only a moment’s fiddling to make it spark, producing not a flame but pure electricity that arced from one side to the other.
“Careful with that,” Raf said.
But Nik passed a hand through it, testing its heat, its intensity, casting his friend a crooked grin when Raf squeaked a protest before remembering that it couldn’t hurt him.
Then he tossed it to Raf with a shake of his head.
“Useful for starting a fire on the Ice Plains, for sure—so you should keep it. But it wouldn’t have worked in the prison.
It’s not hot enough, not for those bars of ice.
” Still, it made him feel a little better, sort of.
To know that Pab had named him for a purpose.
That he’d had a plan. That he’d wanted Nik to be arrested, but only so that he could escape and find his mother.
He’d have thought Nik would go immediately to the inn, find this before the bomb went off, already be wearing it when the guards came for him.
He couldn’t have known they’d be delayed when they had to give the polar bear a wide berth that morning.
Nor that they’d run into a princess that afternoon, and that their worlds would collide in a whole different way.
That he’d be working at the palace in the aftermath of the attack, not hiding in the Gala Inn.
Raf sighed and slid the bracelet onto his wrist. “I went through all the documents. I don’t know how he got his hands on them, but they seem real.
Transfer orders from the inoculation clinic in the village, results from a few blood tests, marked abnormal.
Not just for your modur, either—for dozens of people over a couple decades.
I thought…I don’t know what I thought. That maybe, if there was Blessed blood among us, it was the result of affairs, maybe, like Brother Gylfi suggested.
But now…it’s this new magic, isn’t it? You inherited it from your mother. ”
Nik nodded.
Raf leaned back. “Then maybe he’s right. Maybe she’s still out there somewhere. Maybe we really can find her.”
“I already did.” Nik pulled out the stack of papers, flipping through them more to get a sense of number than any particulars. He knew for a fact there’d only been six Aflame given to the volcano fully Awakened. Six. Out of dozens.
Dozens of people reported as Sent to Helviti. Sent like Isidor had tried to send Nik, primed but not Awakened. Condemned to death for their blood. Innocent people, most of whom looked as though they’d been discovered in the Test.
What made the six—or the five anyway, discounting his mother—different?
“Wait.” Raf gripped his shoulder, pushing so that Nik turned to look at him again. His eyes were wide as the moon. “You found her? Your mother. And this didn’t even rate as something to tell me?”
Nik winced. “Of course. I would have—was going to. I figured I’d bring you completely up to date when we had time to talk without a whole village for an audience. She was in the volcano. Knew me right away.”
“Of course she did. You’re the image of Tristan.” Raf shook his head. “You must have been…”
“Confused?” Nik breathed a laugh. “Still am, to be honest. I don’t even remember her, Raf.
But there she is, wanting to pick up and…
I don’t even know. Be my mother? My friend?
I don’t know how to be the grown son of a woman I don’t remember when she clearly remembers me and feels things for me I don’t know how to return. ”
“Frost. Your pab was right. He really did steal her from you.” Raf shook his head, looking dazed yet again. “And all those others? Were they all down there? Inside the volcano?”
“No.” He turned to the papers again, but he didn’t even know the names the other Aflame had been born with. He flipped anyway, until a series of words jumped out at him the right number of times.
Rebel. Condemned to Helviti for eternity.
He huffed out a breath. “Stupid.”
“What?”
“The only ones he let live down there were the rebels. The rest, the innocents, he shoved into the volcano with their Awakenings half-finished, so that they’d burn.
Which was stupid. Why keep alive and give power to the people who already wanted to threaten you?
” Yet even as he said it, he knew. “Isidor honestly believed he was sentencing them to eternal torment. He thought he, and Einar after him, could keep them confined to Helviti forever, until they eventually died. That they could make a race of slaves of us, punish us for centuries instead of with a quick death.”
Raf grunted. “Why wouldn’t they think it?
They’ve already made a race of slaves of the thanes, haven’t they?
” He sounded more bitter than Nik had ever heard him.
At the look he sent him, his friend shrugged.
“I’ve had weeks to go through those documents, Nik.
Your father was right. This is something different.
Something more. The Giver sent us a gift—us, the thanes, not the Fjorders—and they’ve done their best to kill everyone they find with it.
Kill them or enslave them. It’s a wonder they haven’t started Testing us all, to see who among us has this blood so they can completely wipe it out. ”
It was, at that. And had Isidor or Axel before him understood this new magic, Nik had no doubt they would have. The only thing that had saved them was the kings’ hubris. Their belief that their Blessing was so superior to what they called the Curse.
As for why his mother had been the first of the Tested women Isidor had decided to save, to train, rather than to sacrifice to the lava?
Maybe it had only been recently that Isidor decided it was worth seeing if their magics could be combined.
Maybe he’d run her blood against his in the Test and its results had been promising.
Or maybe she’d caught his eye in a way the other women in these files hadn’t—she was beautiful, Nik had to grant that.
Even Stefanos had been instantly intrigued.
Weird. Too weird to dwell on. He had to shake that from his mind—because even if she had been a stranger, she was his mother.
He put the papers back in the box and fit the lid onto it.
“He couldn’t have known how it would play out.
But Pab did exactly what he meant to. Took Isidor’s family.
Reunited me with my mother.” He looked down at his palm, where the mark would tell the tale for the rest of his life. “He struck the flint.”
Raf chuckled and leaned back against his pillow. “Bet he never imagined it would be Princess Valkyrja to fan the flames of freedom though, hey?”
“That’s Queen Valkyrja now. And no.” He shoved to his feet, moved to the other pallet, and brought the fire back to glowing coals. “No, there’s a lot Pab didn’t imagine.”
He’d been right that Nik disapproved of his methods—disapprove was far too mild a word. He would never condone violence, never seek it, would certainly never advocate for it himself.
And yet, even this, the Giver had used. Would use. Until Fjordlandi was forged into something new.
Something worth bleeding for.