Chapter 14
Draven
Breakfast came and went in the most chaotic manner imaginable.
The maniacal laughter between my wife and her sister evaporated the moment we sat at the table Mirelda had prepared. Jagged ice surged from Everly’s clawed fingertips as she reached for her teacup, shattering the delicate porcelain and turning the scones into frozen blueberry bricks.
The violent bursts of mana didn’t deter Lumen and Astra, who crowded in around our chairs with their haunches raised, their eyes glowing with protective intent.
Noerwyn flinched whenever they so much as twitched an ear, dropping her fork or spoon onto her plate with an ear-splitting clatter.
But that, of course, was only the crescendo to the symphony of obnoxious chewing coming from the Skathryn perched triumphantly in the chandelier, gorging herself on berries and dropping their thin skins directly into my tea.
Twice, I considered breaking my fast alone from the refuge of my own breakfast nook. And twice, the onslaught of my wife’s mana reminded me why that wasn’t an option.
On both occasions, my mana wrapped around hers, siphoning away the excess before it could overwhelm her… or destroy more of the palace’s finer tableware.
The process was becoming smoother each time, and I was beginning to recognize the subtle shift that preceded each breach. The pressure in the air that tightened like a bowstring just before the inevitable snap of ice and shadows.
Each episode ended the same way: with Everly bracing herself against the table and insisting she was fine, and with me fighting the impulse to bar every door and shutter every window until the world could no longer reach her.
But that was not an option.
I could not keep her sealed away in this tower and hope to keep my kingdom from crumbling, and I certainly could not present her to the court in this volatile state. Even if neither of those things were true, her mana was poised to destroy her from the inside out.
We needed a solution soon. A place less volatile, where she could learn to master her mana… or at the very least, expend enough of it to move through the palace safely.
Until then, I refused to be further than my own suites. Even then, the doors between us were open. I set up in my study, preparing to draft several letters.
First to Healer Amias, hoping he had more to offer on Nevara’s condition than Noerwyn had shared.
Next to the Lord General, for troop assessments and a final death count.
And finally, one to my castellan, to evaluate our supplies and determine the extent of repairs needed along the outer walls after the Korythid’s attack.
Thalos dipped his massive pale head as I secured the letters to the satchel strapped to his back. He gave a quick wag of his tail, one that was far too energetic for the gravity of the day, and then bounded off to deliver them.
It wasn’t long before a messenger arrived at the door with a letter from Amias.
Dread churned in my gut. His response had come too quickly to contain anything helpful. I dismissed the messenger with a curt nod, shutting the door behind him before returning to the desk.
Frost bloomed from each place I stepped and coated my fists as I broke the wax seal. I forced my focus toward the healer’s cramped, angular scrawl and paused unwittingly as Everly’s laughter wove from her bedroom through my hallways.
It was soft and bright. A thread of warmth in a world drowned in blood and ice… perhaps all the more alluring because of it.
For one dangerous heartbeat, I almost let myself imagine who we might have been to each other if the world hadn’t carved me hollow long before she entered it. But even that fleeting thought felt indulgent. Reckless. I crushed it before it could fully form.
I dragged my attention back to the page.
The message was brief—four curt lines in that harsh, utilitarian hand of his. All of them merely reiterating what Noerwyn had already shared.
Useless.
I crushed the parchment in my fist and hurled it into the cold hearth. The absence of flames did nothing to dampen the urge to set the whole thing alight simply for the satisfaction of watching it burn.
A sharp pulse of frustration surged through me. Images I’d tried to outrun clawed their way forward:
The Korythid’s serrated stinger plunging through Nevara’s spine.
Black venom spilling from the gaping wound.
Her iridescent hair dulling, her nails darkening to something obsidian and wrong.
Her breath rattling, shallow, fading.
Damn her for this.
Damn her and her precious Shard Mother for taking my Visionary when I needed her most.
How in all the frozen hells was I supposed to do this now?
Without my Visionary.
Without my sister. Let alone when my wife was on the verge of combusting from her own ill-thought-out decisions.
Suddenly, across the hall felt much too far from her.
The storm pressing against the windows thickened in response, thick clouds swallowing the wan sunlight, sleet pelting the glass like fistfulls of pebbles. The weather always listened when my control slipped.
Refusing to let it run unchecked, I forced myself toward the desk again.
I pulled a fresh sheet of parchment toward me and dipped my quill, drafting a letter to the Archmage.
Isren,
Once again, your expertise is required. Winter’s condition grows precarious, and the events that have taken place since your departure have only made that clearer. I expect your immediate return—or I will take action to locate you personally.
—D
Before I could place the letter in the mailbox outside my window, a palace phoenix materialized on the sill, a creature carved from frost. Its wings unfurled with a whisper of icy crystals, scattering flecks of shimmering frost into the air.
They never flew in storms like this.
A sign, perhaps, that the Shard Mother had finally chosen to spare her favored one.
Or that she had simply decided to test us again.
Either way, I hissed a curse at the sky as the phoenix evaporated into a cloud of snow.
A firm, measured knock hit the study door.
Eryx. I would have known it anywhere—the controlled, deliberate raps, as if he was bracing the world for whatever he was about to say.
“Enter,” I called.
The Lord General stepped in, snow melting along the battered furs at his shoulders. He gave a stiff dip of his chin.
“Your Majesty,” he said, his tone more formal than usual. “I’ve compiled the initial reports from the attack.”
I gestured for him to proceed.
“The casualty count stands at seventeen dead, thirty-four injured. Eight more are unlikely to survive the night.” His mouth tightened.
“And morale in general?” I pressed.
“Deteriorating.”
“We have lost more soldiers in worse battles,” I began, and a muscle worked in Eryx’s jaw.
“And they are exhausted,” he replied tersely. “But it’s not just that. The Korythid is unlike anything we have fought before. Not just in size, but its behavior, too. The intelligence and spite… The intentionality. It has shaken the ranks.”
He shifted on his feet, his usually calm presence thrumming with furious energy.
“Between that and the loss of the Visionary, they are calling it an omen—”
“We have not lost the Visionary,” I snapped, the room growing colder as ice raced out from my body to cover the floor and wall behind me.
Eryx paused, his deep blue eyes crinkling with something too understanding for my taste. A scar tugged at the corner of his mouth as if debating how to respond.
Then his careful mask slipped back into place and he squared his shoulders.
“Unless you know something I don’t, it doesn’t seem likely that she will make a recovery,” he said in a more subdued tone, though there was still an undertone I couldn’t quite read.
I ground my teeth, shoving down images of Nevara in the infirmary, unmoving. It would have been bad enough that he brought this to me only a day after the attack, that he hadn’t found a way to stave off rumors a little longer, like he usually would. But Eryx wasn’t finished yet.
“That’s not all,” he added.
“Of course it isn’t,” I growled.
He hesitated just long enough that I knew he was choosing his next words carefully. “It won’t be long before reports spread about the shadows.”
His face was carefully composed, but there was a calculating gleam in his eyes. Over the course of my lifetime, Eryx had gone from an instructor and a protector to something more familiar, but he was every inch a General now, studying me for any sign of deceit.
He had seen Everly’s power.
The temperature in the study dropped several more degrees, and ice slowly stretched from the wall up the ceiling to coat the chandelier.
“The ones that spilled across the battlefield when she landed,” he continued, his tone too casual for the words. “I’ve fought enough Unseelie to know their mana when I see it.”
An accusation and a confirmation in one. He knew that she was Unseelie, but more than that, he knew that I knew as well. That I, too, had fought enough of them to recognize their mana, let alone realize when I had one in my bed.
My fingers drummed once against the desk—controlled, cold. “Is this a question, Lord General?”
“A concern,” he said, too mildly. “One Commander Astreval and the rest of my soldiers share. They’re wondering why the Unseelie’s shadow-mana was present so close to when a monster breached our wards for the first time in living history.”
My vision frosted and narrowed to a thin blade of ice.
“And what exactly,” I asked softly, “do my soldiers think it means?”
Eryx dragged a hand over his square jaw. His posture squared, shoulders locking as if bracing for impact.
“That perhaps,” he said, his tone sharpening, “the Unseelie are more involved than we’ve been told.” He let the silence hang between his words. “Perhaps even… closer to the throne than is wise.”
Another crack of ice rang out. A crystal from the frozen chandelier fell and shattered on the floor near his feet, but he didn’t so much as flinch.
“To question their queen would be treason,” I warned.
“I am stating what the soldiers are already whispering. You asked for morale, Majesty.” A bitter curl tugged at the corner of his mouth. “This is morale.”
A dangerous quiet stretched between us.
When he continued, his voice was lower, warier. “They want reassurance. Clarity. Answers.”
“And you?” I asked.
Eryx went still. The movement was deliberate, soldier-trained. Light caught along the shaved sides of his head as he lifted his chin, pale blue hair bound back in a tight topknot that spoke of order and restraint, not vanity.
“I want to know who I’m expected to defend this realm from. The monsters clawing at our borders… or the ones slipping under them in shadow.”
My mana snapped inside me—cold, violent. A territorial snarl just shy of breaking the room.
“Another word like that,” I said quietly, “and I will freeze the tongue from your mouth.”
His hands curled at his sides, but he didn’t step back.
“If there is nothing else, you are dismissed, Lord General,” I bit out each word.
Eryx flexed his jaw again, his nostrils flaring once before he added, “And what about the order to kill all Unseelie on sight?”
A spike of fury ran through me as I tried to discern his meaning.
Did he think I would rescind it based on his assumptions of who Everly was? Or did he dare to refer to harming my wife?
Something stirred beneath my skin, the bond alerting me that she was closer than before. Close enough to be listening in on this conversation. For how long, though, I didn’t know.
I thought briefly of every winged nightmare that had threatened our lands and threatened my wife. The female who showed up at her father’s estate. The males who tortured her in that cave. Her uncle, the head of the Skaldwing clan. Even her shards-damned mother with her murky intentions.
Every creature who might carve Everly open simply for existing.
My answer came out low and lethal. Final.
“I will keep any order that protects my people and my wife. The order stands.”