Chapter 31
Kyrja had granted herself one glance back toward Nik—and had regretted it immediately when she saw the ice crack beneath him, saw him plunge into the icy sea.
For a moment, she’d hesitated. Reached her magic toward those waters where her beloved was, even as she knew, knew he’d tell her to keep her focus ahead, on her father.
Then she’d felt the heat in the water, the disturbance. Felt new land displacing the sea as quickly as the ice had.
The Giver had Nik in his palm. She had to trust that.
She had to focus on Fodur.
He didn’t make it difficult. He stood right out in the open, no ice fortifications around him.
Still wearing one of his signature long white jackets with the silver and blue embroidery over silver trousers, still with his ice-blond hair groomed perfectly back from his forehead.
Still with that look of unadulterated disdain on his face when he spotted her.
She knew she looked a fright. As always, a disappointment to him. Her hair was a wild tangle of dark curls, her flame-and-ice dress was stiff with dried salt and smudged with soot from the fire the other night, she wore borrowed fur boots on her feet, ice blades still beneath them.
His lips curled back from his teeth as he surveyed her. “You are as ever your mother’s daughter, Valkyrja.”
She lifted her chin. “Thank you. I do believe that’s the only compliment you’ve ever paid me, Fodur.”
Still sneering, he lifted a hand and then spun, bringing his arm down as if throwing a snowball.
Ice hurtled through the air from his mountain of it, toward Harroby.
She slashed a hand, breaking it into smaller chunks, and then smaller. “Have you entirely lost your mind? What are you doing?”
“Resetting the kingdom.”
“What?” She dared to come only a few feet closer. If it came down to grappling, she knew she didn’t stand a chance. “If you shatter the dome, you’ll kill thousands now and uncountable numbers in the years to come. People will die of starvation.”
“The thanes will. Not the Fjorders. I’ll leave half the domes, enough to feed those who deserve it.”
He meant to take out not only Harroby, but others too? “Fodur—”
“This is your fault!” He spun back to her, not even attempting to mask the hatred in his eyes.
“Two weeks on the throne and you have ruined everything. Appointing the Cursed to the High Council? Promising thanes two-thirds of the seats on the Great Council? Asking students to think up new systems that will grant them equality? Passing edicts to allow thanes entrance into academies? Lifting all my bans on the kyrkas? Centuries of work, Valkyrja! Toppled in days!”
“Centuries of corruption, Fodur, that have been killing my kingdom from within.”
“Your kingdom?” He scoffed, stalking closer.
One instinct, the one he’d carefully hewn in her for the last thirty-five years, told her to back up. To run away, to give ground, to bow to him. Her father, her king.
But he wasn’t the king. He’d lost that distinction, and she wasn’t going to hand it back to him. She lifted her chin, squared her shoulders. “My kingdom. I am the queen, the Giver’s anointed. I am the one he chose to lead our people now.”
He lunged for her, and though she raised her magic to combat his, it was his hands he used, wrapping them around her throat.
Before he could squeeze, she called moisture onto her skin, froze it, fortified it, thickened it. Ice as strong as a wall, as prison bars. She didn’t try to break his hold with her arms, didn’t try to lunge away, didn’t risk cracking that ice.
But she met his gaze. And her eyes burned at what she saw there. “Why, Fodur? Why do you hate me? I’m your daughter.”
“You’re my curse. Your very existence ruined everything.” He squeezed harder, and hairline cracks formed in her ice.
She fused them again. “How? I don’t understand.”
“Your mother’s pet—her request.” Apparently giving up on her throat, he shoved her.
Ice-bladed skates still on her boots, she merely drifted back a few feet. “You’re not making sense.”
He pulled water up from one of the cracks in the ice, hardened it, sent the blade toward her heart.
She turned it to snow. “Why was Mamma’s request cause to hate me? You agreed.”
“Yes. I agreed. Because she’d done her duty well, given me two fine heirs, against all odds.
Einar and Krystiana were everything I could have hoped for.
She was a pleasant enough companion. So I made the deal.
Gave her you. Committed to a union that would last the rest of her pathetic life.
And what do I find a few short years later? ”
It took her a moment to process his words, the timeline. Perhaps she wouldn’t have, had the water not roared, the ice groaned, and a steaming, lava-seeping mound not risen just then from the sea beyond Fodur’s icy imitation, a dripping, steaming Aflame atop it who made her heart pound.
Nik—and that was the answer. “Elianne. You found her when I was a child. But why did you even test your blood against hers? You were already wed—”
“Don’t be an idiot as well as a fool, girl.
Your mother had a few decades more to live.
When the physicians told me about the anomaly in Elianne’s blood, showed me her image, I was curious.
And the results of the Test told me exactly what I’d suspected.
We would have created something powerful together.
A child capable of rivaling the Daryatleans, the mer, anyone.
” He pulled another chunk of ice from his volcano, into the sky.
“And if it weren’t for you, she’d have been my wife already. I’d have that heir, instead of you.”
His wasn’t the only magic tangled up in the flying ice this time. She needed more than brute strength to break it up. She focused not on the mass but on the pieces, calling them apart.
Snow showered down.
Fodur growled and lunged for her again. She skated away, just barely evading a swipe of his hands. “But you already had two heirs. What were you going to do with Einar? Krystiana?”
He waved that off. “Your siblings were reasonable. They understood the need of a strong Fjordlandi. They would have stepped aside, accepted seats on the High Council and left it at that.”
An incredulous laugh slipped out. “You really think Krystiana would have bent the knee to a younger sibling?”
“If that sibling were strong? Absolutely. It was only you she never would have acknowledged.”
Kyrja clenched her jaw. Krystiana had been wrong.
Fodur was wrong. She wasn’t the weakling.
She’d proven it. “You speak of a strong Fjordlandi, yet you’re hurling ice at our largest dome, ready to set our progress back centuries—and for what?
Because I want to give all Fjordic people the chance to be educated?
To chase their dreams? Because I want to hear their needs and meet them?
A strong Fjordlandi will be a free Fjordlandi, Fodur. ”
“A strong Fjordlandi is a fierce Fjordlandi. You would ruin all we’ve built with your thane temperament—”
“Who’s the one throwing a temper tantrum like a child, tossing ice about? You say my passions make me weak, yet you are no less ruled by yours.”
He snarled. “They need to be reminded of their place. Let half of them starve, and then they’ll remember that they need us, need our rule.” He strode toward her, face back to its usual mask.
She skated backward, fully aware of what he was doing, where he was pushing her. Closer and closer to his ice mountain. She could feel him pulling more chunks upward, ready to spew them, could feel the very different trajectory this time.
He meant to crush her, like Tristan’s bomb had crushed their family. To hurl something big enough, fast enough, close enough that she wouldn’t have time to work her way through it, to unravel all the different Blessed touches within.
It was a good plan. She could grant that.
Blasting a single chunk of ice to dust was doable, yes, but the entire mountain of it?
She’d never attempted anything of that magnitude.
For all she knew, bursting it apart would send shards hurtling toward the dome and she’d be doing the very thing she meant to stop.
And there were so many people at work. It wasn’t like the Challenges in Helviti, where each Blessed had been working alone to attack her. This was unified. Each magical thread undergirded Fodur’s, strengthening the attack.
Other signatures filtered into her awareness too.
Hovering in the snows, waiting. For what?
Why weren’t they also in the volcano? Though as she took a moment to recognize them, none were Fodur’s inner circle.
They weren’t the ones already working with her, either—they were the ones who hadn’t yet declared an allegiance.
Was it possible that they weren’t here to help him?
She wasn’t given time to sort them all out. A chunk of ice spewed from Fodur’s mountain. She reached into it, felt those undeclared others doing the same, felt the fight against Fodur’s allies at the basic level.
Nik’s volcano rumbled, groaned, and the ice under her—now underscored with new volcanic ground—shook.
The sky ripped, cracks nearly deafening her, and she couldn’t help but look away from the block of ice threatening her, to the lightning flashing and dancing from the top of the true volcano’s cone, into the clouds.
The forks seemed to chase each other, trip over each other, illuminating the whole world with their electric charge.
One branch of light found the ice chunk soaring her way and vaporized it. Though she was still too far from Nik to make out his expression, she would have sworn she heard him screaming.
He wasn’t alone anymore. She caught a flash of red, bright as lava, leaning over him. Where had Elianne come from?
Fodur seethed a curse that blistered the air. “How can you not see what you have done? Unleashing that on Fjordlandi? He’ll destroy the entire kingdom!”
As lava began to belch from the cone, shooting its stream higher than she could see, a frisson of fear clawed its way up Kyrja’s spine.
She didn’t doubt Nik’s intentions at all—she knew very well he meant only to destroy Fodur’s ice volcano, to stop him.
But the way Elianne was bent over him made her wonder if Nik was still in control of his creation or if it had taken from him more than he had to give.
Giver, help us. Save us.
As she watched, Nik sagged, Elianne scrambling to catch him.
Kyrja’s heart stopped. Or pounded. Her own blood filled her ears so much she could hear nothing but her own panic.
“Nik—Nik!” Without even thinking it through, she shoved up a wall of ice between her and Fodur and took off toward the mountain, her skates eating up the now-uneven surface.
She lifted and lowered the ice as she went, then broke off the skates when she reached still-steaming rock.
The heat knocked her backward. She went sprawling onto the ice behind her, which was quickly melting.
Turning to new steam that threatened to scald her.
She reinforced that ice, letting go of still more control elsewhere without even pausing to consider what it was, trusting that whoever was helping would continue to do so.
Maintaining enough chill to survive in the face of an erupting volcano took more than just a thought, it took focus, will, action.
Even so, she could manage it only inches at a time, then feet. But then it wasn’t the heat that arrested her.
It was the sight. Nik, crumpled, held in his mother’s arms, the world aflame behind them.
Something about it took her back, back two months.
Into the Grand Kyrka, that first day she dared to step foot into it.
She was staring up at the stained glass, parting the clouds so she could see light arrow through the mosaic.
Seeing the story she’d heard only whispers of before then but couldn’t forget now.
The Giver’s only-born son, willingly sacrificed for his people. For them, for her. Held in the arms of his mother.
Tears stung her eyes. It wasn’t the same, she knew it wasn’t. Nik didn’t have the power to save the whole world, and she had to believe he wasn’t dead, just overcome. She had to believe it—because she knew this man she loved had no power over death, not like the Giver she was still coming to know.
And his mother was no silent mourner. She lowered him to the ground, and even from this distance, Kyrja had no trouble seeing the rage on her face. Elianne started down the incline, screamed, and its notes pierced the air, broke through the rush in Kyrja’s ears.
For a moment, it seemed Elianne’s wrath was focused on her. And why shouldn’t it be? She was the reason Nik was here, why he’d been taken by Stefanos, why he’d been tossed into this fight with her father.
But no—it was Fodur on whom Elianne had focused, Fodur who was building himself a road of ice and skating across it, aimed at Nik’s mountain.
Nik. He wasn’t…he couldn’t be dead. But why else would Elianne have left him there?
“No. No, please. Giver, no.” Kyrja stumbled forward, pulling ice with her at every step, beating back the heat.
She heard the sizzle, saw the steam, and didn’t care.
She would protect herself solely because she had to, to get to him.
Elianne took a different path down than Kyrja took up, lava flowing in her wake. The eruption continued, ash billowing into the air now along with the red-orange liquid rock. Rivers of it streaked down the mountain, faster than it should have gone by nature, all courses leading to the same place.
Fodur’s ice mountain hissed, steamed, cracked as lava met it. She felt its ice shaking, melting, fissures forming. Felt Fodur and his allies struggling to maintain it. Felt her unknown friends picking at their magic, making holes for the lava to seep through. Felt the battle rage.
Let it. Let them battle it out. She’d reached Nik’s prone form, and she dropped to her knees, focusing all her own magic on the patch right under her. “Nik!”
She pressed icy hands to his hot face, his neck, her deepest fear uncoiling a bit when she felt the flutter of his pulse. Not dead. Praise the Giver, not dead. A sob of relief catching in her throat, she leaned down and pressed her lips to his.