2. ICE QUEEN, BURNING VEINS
Chapter two
ICE QUEEN, BURNING VEINS
PORTIA
Imake it three steps into the dark before my legs remember they belong to me.
It's him. After all the years of being told to wait, of memorizing a face from a portrait that did him no justice and a scent from a vial sealed in wax, the real thing has just looked at me across a garden and asked for my name, and now my entire body has declared open war on itself.
My dragon is not purring the way the old stories promise.
My dragon is screaming, coiled up tight beneath my sternum with every claw unsheathed, certain past the point of argument, furious that I am still standing here instead of crossing the distance, certain of one single word and repeating it like a drumbeat. Mine. Mine. Mine.
Mate. The word tastes like smoke and lemongrass and the one thing in this world I am forbidden to reach for yet.
I press my back flat to the cold stone of the garden wall and breathe the way my tutors drilled into me before I was old enough to question why a child needed to learn to slow her own heart.
In through the nose for four counts. Hold.
Out for six. A queen does not shake. A diplomat does not betray the temperature of her own blood.
The trouble is that no tutor ever prepared me for what it does to a body to stand within arm's reach of the person it was built to belong to and then walk away on purpose.
My hands are trembling. My breath is fogging in air that is not cold enough to fog it, because the heat is coming from inside me.
A shimmer breaks across my collarbone without my permission, scales surfacing through the skin, iridescent and catching what little moonlight reaches this corner of the hedge.
Damning. If a single courtier saw them, the careful fiction I have built would collapse in an instant.
I clamp my palm flat over my own throat and press until the scales recede and the skin goes smooth and human again.
It costs me. Everything tonight is costing me.
The law is not cruel for cruelty's sake, I remind myself, the way I have reminded myself ten thousand times.
The law is the thing that has kept me breathing this long.
A dragon may not claim a wolf heir, may not so much as reach for the bond, before his first full royal shift beneath the ancestral moonstone.
Reach too early and the bond locks crooked, half formed, a wound that never closes instead of a tether that holds.
I have seen what an early bond does. I watched it kill a cousin slowly from the inside, the two of them fused wrong, neither able to live and neither able to let go.
So I lied to him in that garden. Not yet, I said, smooth as still water, as if I were nothing but a visiting dignitary passing through a grieving court, and not the creature his wolf has already chosen to die for.
I should be relieved he does not remember me.
That was the gift the sea gave both of us, in its terrible way.
He was five years old the last time the water had him, and I was barely older, and the thing that passed between us in that black and freezing dark is a secret heavy enough to sink a throne and start a war between two kingdoms. He cannot know.
Not yet, and maybe not for a long time. Not until the bond is real and locked and clean, and he is strong enough in himself to survive the weight of what I would have to tell him.
Some truths are a blade. You do not hand a blade to a man who is still learning to hold his own crown.
A sound pulls me out of myself. Gravel underfoot, the measured tread of boots, the king's men closing in on the prince from the direction of the palace.
Good, I tell the screaming thing under my ribs.
Good. Let them take him inside, behind thick walls and locked doors, away from me and from this pull, where the bond cannot finish what one accidental meeting in a dark garden has so dangerously begun.
I draw deeper into the shadow of the hedge and watch.
Four guards reach him and fold down into bows so low the air itself seems to bend around the gesture.
Your Highness. The title settles over his shoulders like a yoke he never asked anyone to lay there, and even from this distance, even through the dark, I can see the exact moment his body takes the weight of it.
He does not straighten under it the way a man born to rule would.
He braces under it, the way a man carries something that does not yet fit his hands.
It makes something in my chest ache that has nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the boy I once knew for the space of a single drowning night.
So. The heir has come home tonight. The event that every court from this palace to the far gates of Dragonia has been waiting for, scheming around, sharpening their knives in anticipation of, has finally happened, and it happened in the space of one ragged shared breath in a garden where no one of importance was watching.
No one but me. I am, for this one strange suspended moment, the only living soul who holds the whole shape of what is coming.
The heir is home. The shift will follow.
The bond will lock. And every faction that wants him controlled or dead or crowned to their own advantage will move the instant they understand what I already understand.
My dragon strains toward him as the guards turn him back toward the lit windows of the palace.
The bond, hazy and unlocked and aching, tugs at the back of my ribs like a hook set in a line that someone on the far end keeps reeling, gently, insistently, toward a body that does not yet know it is the fisherman.
I dig my nails into my own palms until the small bright sting of it gives me something else to feel, until I taste the warning copper of blood at the back of my throat from biting down on my own tongue.
I will not follow. I will not follow. If I follow him into that palace tonight my control breaks, and if my control breaks the scales come, and if the scales come this entire court learns that there is a dragon hybrid standing in their grieving midst on the night they buried their queen.
He disappears through the tall doors. The pull does not lessen with the distance.
If anything it sharpens, the way a sound you have been ignoring gets louder the second you try to leave the room.
Bond-sickness, the early shadow of it, already reaching for me.
I press the heel of my hand against my breastbone as if I can hold the ache in place by force.
"Soon," I whisper into the empty dark, to him, to the dragon raging quietly inside me, to the law that has owned every hour of my life since I was old enough to understand what I was born to be. "Not yet. But soon. I promise you. Both of you."
I peel myself off the cold stone of the wall.
I order my spine to straighten one vertebra at a time.
I gather the ice back over the fire the way I have practiced since girlhood, smoothing my face into the cool unreadable mask that has carried me through rooms full of people who would use any crack in it against me.
By the time I step back onto the lit gravel path, walking unhurried toward the palace as though I am only another mourner taking the night air, there is nothing in my expression to suggest that anything inside me is burning at all.
But it is. It is burning, and now that I have seen him, I do not think it will ever fully go out again.
Dearest Readers,
She lied to him. Let us be honest about that straight away, because I will not have you thinking our Portia is a saint. She looked into the face of the one person in this world made for her and she said "not yet," and she walked away, and she had her reasons and her reasons were good.
But here is my question, loves. She says the law kept her breathing. She says she watched an early bond kill a cousin from the inside. All true.
So why does she also say there is a secret heavy enough to sink a throne?
What happened in that black water, all those years ago, between a drowning boy and a girl barely older?
Turn the page. I am not telling you yet.
Your author.