Chapter 43
forty-three
Nilah Dune
The grimoire was open on the desk, full of words I didn’t understand. Full of words I wouldn’t have cared to understand had I not felt so fucking helpless.
“Again,” I told myself, as if saying it out loud was going to make a difference, when I knew it wouldn’t. The fact that Vair was still just a marble cube in my hands proved it—but I did try again.
There were magics that required spells, like the sorcerers did them. And I was sure that, because Vair had been a gift to the Ice Queen from the sorcerers, it would require some kind of a spell to bring him back to the way he used to be—if that was even possible.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t know shit about sorcerer magic or how to read spells, and it was still too early to go knocking on that woman’s door, wherever she slept.
A seer.
No—my seer, she said. The Seer of the Ice Queen.
The Ice Queen being me, in case you missed it.
I continuously did, and the reminder sent ice-cold chills all the way down my spine.
The magic rushed through me like a beast. I closed my eyes and I called for every ounce of it—and I had a lot. No way could I explain the rush that had come over me, the pain followed by an explosion of power that had ignited in my every cell, had set my bones, my flesh, my very soul on fire.
Then it had put it out again, but the magic had remained, ready to be ignited at my call.
Magic fit for royals, activated inside me by the seer—because she was going to stay here now.
Forever. She belonged to the Frozen Court, she said, and before she left the throne room the night before, her nose had been bleeding.
She’d been smiling, and she kind of looked high, but her nose had been bleeding because she’d tapped me on the forehead.
Go figure.
And then there was just me and Maera. And Vair.
The magic spread onto the cube, and it almost recognized it, like it had felt it before.
It searched it, merged with the surface, slipped inside it to the very center, and this was Vair.
There was no doubt about it in my mind that he was here, right in my hands—but every time I heard him calling my name, I lost him.
He slipped away. Faded again into nothing.
It was like I’d found the door, but I had too many keys in my hands and I had no clue how to find the right one to unlock it. It could take me years to try every single one if I went at it alone.
But with the seer…
The muffled sound that came from somewhere outside my bedroom door startled me. My body froze suddenly. Even though my eyes were open, I didn’t see anything, only heard. Focused so hard that for a moment I wondered if maybe I was out of my own body.
And while I was, for that split second, I felt the humming of every vein in the moonstone that made the walls of this bedroom. I felt it, and it called my name.
How strange.
The throne room had somehow magically descended onto the second floor of the Ice Palace when I came back.
It had been very high up the last time, and Vair had said it used to be on the ground floor, but now it was on the second.
The bedroom and the cabinet of the queen remained across from one another on the sixth, though, and this is where I’d chosen to stay, even before the Ice Palace had the chance to make the choice for me.
It was familiar, this room. I’d stayed here.
I’d come apart and then back together again here.
I’d sat at this beautiful desk and had slept on the large bed, had worn the clothes in the closet hidden inside the wall. It almost felt…mine.
And it was very quiet here. Too quiet, sometimes, so when I heard the sound coming from outside, I knew something was off.
I thought it was the help. I thought there would be people come to bring me breakfast or something, though I wasn’t hungry at all.
I even considered it would be the seer come to see how I was, and I could take advantage of the opportunity and have her read from the queen’s grimoire for me, and maybe I could finally bring back Vair.
Because it had to work. I had the magic now. I had plenty, and I had voice and eyes and ears for the both of us.
But then I heard the howl.
There was only one werewolf that I knew of in the Frozen Court, and that was Maera. She’d stayed in a guest room across the hallway on this floor, too, and the night before, before she went to bed, she’d promised me that she wasn’t going anywhere until everything had settled.
I thought for sure she wasn’t going to have to shift anymore, but then again, I hadn’t really had the time to think anything through properly.
Because Rune was gone—and how was I to cope with the fact that I might not see him again for weeks or months or years?
I was sitting on a crystal throne now, and I had no idea what the hell to do next.
Way in over my head here, so I’d collapsed, my brain had shut down right away when I lay on the bed, and I hadn’t woken up until just before sunrise.
But Maera had no business shifting into a wolf now, which was why, at the sound of the howl, I was moving, running out the door with my skin glowing, the magic humming, barely containing itself inside me.
I didn’t see her until I was in the middle of the wide hallway and I looked through the doorway that revealed to me the other side of the floor.
No guards—though I could have sworn there was a pair when I came to sleep last night.
And Maera was standing with her front paws atop the bloody chest of a man as she raised her head up again and howled at the ceiling.
The closer I got the more blood I saw, all the weapons on the floor, knives and swords, a shoe, a broken vase, a ruined canvas of a painting of roses—and the man with the golden hair lying on his back with his neck torn all the way, his unmoving eyes wide open and on the ceiling.
Maera licked her bloody teeth and stepped off his body when I was close enough. Her yellow eyes had darkened, and she looked at me as if she wanted me to understand exactly what she was thinking.
I did.
This man here was a Seelie fae. He wore black clothes, but his hair and his eyes and the pointy tips of his ears were right there for us to see.
And he had come here to kill me.
I knew it without having to speak the words out loud or have Maera confirm them.
I knew that Lyall had sent this man here for me, and I was already shaking from head to toe at the idea that he’d actually made it all the way up here.
He’d climbed all the way up to the sixth floor before Maera found him.
I fell on one knee against the marble and reached out a shaking hand toward her. “Are you okay?” Because there was blood on her fur, but I couldn’t tell if it was hers or the fae’s.
Maera’s answer was a loud growl that echoed in the tall ceiling, and then she jumped to the other side of the body, and she took off running back where I came from.
Again, I followed her like I didn’t know if I was in charge of my own body. My legs moved and I was in the bedroom again, and she was across from the doors, on the other side, two paws against the windowsill in the middle, howling at the blue sky.
No—not the blue sky.
“Oh, my God…”
The whisper left my lips before my fingers fell over them as I took in the crowd of people, all of them with silvery white hair, that had gathered outside the walls of the palace.
The outer gates were open, and more people were trying to get in all at once, pushing and pulling each other, trying to get closer.
Every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps. It felt like the sky suddenly fell right over my head, and I had no hopes of ever carrying its weight.
The end had never been closer.
My eyes insisted that Lyall was there, in the fucking gardens that I’d gone through with Vair when I left the Ice Palace. Others were there as well, so many people, mostly Ice fae with their white hair and blue eyes.
They were all looking at him.
I walked out the doors with Maera to find soldiers wearing silver armor, what few there were around the palace, turning to Lyall.
I found the seer in her silvery white dress there by the corner near the stairs of the entrance, her wide silver eyes scary all on their own before I even noticed the expression on her face—that of pure horror.
Lyall was holding a speech in front of the Ice Palace.
“…do you see how empty your streets are—your homes, your tables? How your throne has sat abandoned, waiting, yearning for a hand strong enough to claim it? King Helem was not fit for that duty—I think we can all agree on that—but me?”
He smiled, and I felt the malice of it deep in my bones.
My God, I could hardly believe my eyes and ears when I moved forward, on autopilot still, and listened to the next words coming out of his mouth.
“With me, you rise,” Lyall said, then turned his head slowly toward me as I stopped on the second stair in front of the palace doors. “With her…” His finger rose, pointed at me. He smiled again—this time like he’d already won. “With her, you will all fall.”
Impossible, insisted the voices in my head.
This entire thing—fucking impossible. How was Lyall here, and how had he gathered all these people?
Why were they all pushing and elbowing each other to try to get closer to him, and why were his soldiers, dozens of them, standing near the wall of shards of the palace—and why were they all staring at me like that? !
“Look at her.” His voice. That fucking voice that made my skin crawl. “A mortal girl playing with powers she neither understands nor knows how to control. Her colors might fit, but she is not like us!” He roared. “She is not your queen!”
The people cheered.
The people clapped.
My knees shook.
“I should know because I made her. I saved her life, and I brought her here. She betrayed me because that’s what she does. She’s an imposter, a mortal, a thief—her place is in Nerith, not among kings and queens.”