Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Winter is days away.
The trees have surrendered the last of their leaves and stand brittle against the sky.
The ground has gone stiff and hard, as if it is bracing for the ice and snow that will blanket it soon.
Frost laces the stone walls of the Synod every morning, and even the light is thinner now, washed out and weary.
With winter imminent, a strange quiet has descended across the Synod—a false kind of peace.
The Kher’zenn don’t attack in the winter. The Elder says the cold weakens their draegoths. It makes them slow and sluggish. They’ve never attacked after the snow falls. I look up at the bleary sky, heavy with the promise of snow, and cup my hands over my mouth, blowing out a warm exhale.
For the first time since I’ve arrived, warriors laugh freely.
The tension that used to spark in the air—as man and beast kept a constant eye on the horizon and on the sky above—has dulled.
Even Ryot has eased up slightly. Maybe, for once, he doesn’t feel like the world is about to end.
We’ve shifted from combat drills to survival training—how to endure, how to survive the cold, where to find food, how to dress a wound in the field.
Before, we were preparing for the Kher’zenn.
Now, we’re preparing for the spring—when I’ll climb Elandors Veil to claim a faravar of my own.
And when the worst of winter sets in, Ryot will leave. He’ll fly with Einarr to Selencia. He’ll see the rot that’s been festering for years. He’ll see the broken villages, the hollow-eyed children, the empty granaries.
He’ll finally see what I’ve been trying to make them understand—that Selencia is dying behind them while the Altor keep their eyes trained across the sea.
Every day that we wait, another mouth goes unfed; another body weakens under the harvest that was stolen; another child cries themselves to sleep.
Because the Kher’zenn aren’t the only ones who threaten to destroy us.
Humans can be just as brutal as the monsters from our nightmares.
We’re perfectly capable of ending ourselves.
We don’t need death demons to do it for us.
Time is a knife against my people’s throat, and every delay cuts a little deeper.
So, for once, I welcome the bite in my toes, the sting in my nose, the way the cold gnaws straight through my skin.
Because every shiver, every breath that freezes in my lungs, brings us closer to the day help might finally come to my people.
I spare a fleeting glance for my blackened fingertips—the chill bites deeper there than it ever did, but Elowen says there’s nothing to do for it.
I shove my hands into the pockets of my new fur coat and continue my walk to her herb garden, which is tucked on the east-facing side of the Synod.
It gets bright morning light, but I don’t like coming here—the grandeur of Edessa in the valley below symbolizes everything I hate about this place, about these people.
It reminds me of everything my brothers are lacking, things as simple as food and warm coats.
But I need some kind of root that treats frostbite, which Ryot says I must learn to identify and harvest myself.
If I can’t treat frostbite in the field, he said, I won’t survive the climb up Elandors Veil.
I expect to find Elowen elbow-deep in the soil, muttering about how no one respects her tinctures, and I plaster a friendly smile on my face for my friend.
But that’s not what I find when I turn the corner.
King Agis is there, kneeling in the dirt in front of a young girl with blonde, curly hair.
She’s an absolute miniature of him, probably 12, and she’s grinning at the King of Faraengard with trust, excitement, and a look that says she’s the powerful one in that relationship.
He holds both her hands like he’s loath to let her go.
“Father,” the little girl placates him, “don’t worry. I’m ready for this. I’m ready to train with Elowen.”
Her coat is a little big, giving her room to grow over the winter. And he … he’s staring at her like she hung the stars, as if she lit the moon with her bare hands and guided it into the night sky. Seeing it steals the breath from my lungs, because that’s how my father used to look at me.
It guts me.
King Agis is the reason Levvi and Alden and Irielle are dead. The reason my parents are dead. The reason my people starve and huddle and scrape. I hate him. I hate him . But now, he doesn’t look like the architect of all my nightmares.
Here, he’s just a father with his daughter, and I don’t know what to do with that. Elowen, standing behind the little girl, laughs and places a hand on the child’s shoulder. There’s a deep kindness and compassion as she stares down at King Agis.
“I’ll take good care of her, Father.” Elowen says.
Father.
I’d forgotten Elowen is a princess of the very realm I hate—not only my friend, not only the healer with dirt under her fingernails and a friendly hug. She’s his daughter. The same blood that ordered The Collection, that turns homes into ashes and children into corpses, runs in her veins.
I stumble back, desperate to get away from this, but my steps are clunky and the frost crunches beneath my feet. The king’s head snaps up, and his eyes find mine. The father disappears before my eyes as he comes to his feet, regal and proud and so fucking arrogant.
He scrutinizes me like I’m nothing at all and, somehow, also a threat to everything he’s ever worked for.
Elowen steps forward, reaching for me, “Leina—” But King Agis holds up his arm, blocking her, holding her back from me as if I’m a threat.
I’m not a threat to Elowen.
Right?
“I hear you’re excelling in your training, Leina of Stormriven,” he says.
I stiffen my back, tearing my gaze from Elowen, from the empathy in her eyes, and the confusion puckering the young child’s brow. “Keeping tabs on me, King Agis?”
His face is a wall. Not a smile, not a frown. Nothing. “I would be stupid not to.” He steps toward me and looms. But I keep my eyes trained on his, reminding myself that I’m not a serf anymore. I’m a godsdamn Altor, and I bow to no one. Not even him.
“And you’re not stupid,” I say, my voice shockingly level.
It occurs to me, as if I’m observing both of us from a distance, that I’m a wall, too.
Any warmth, any hint of softness, of humanity, is gone—buried under an avalanche of ice.
He studies me for a beat, the kind of silence that prickles along your spine.
Then he tilts his head slightly, like I’ve confirmed something for him.
“No,” he agrees. “Which is why I tend to remove threats before they become untouchable.”
Elowen stiffens, her hands dropping to the poultice she carries at her belt, as if there were any herbs in the world that could deal with this. “Fath—” she starts, but he raises that hand and cuts her off again.
I ignore her. So does he.
“I believe you’ve already tried that,” I taunt. I smile, but not with warmth. I make sure of it. Something flickers behind his eyes. Not anger. More like interest, as though I shifted from annoyance to complication.
“You've survived things that would break most,” he admits. He smiles now, too. “That kind of tenacity is admirable.”
“How is the investigation of the treatment of Selencia progressing?” I ask, taunting him.
“Slowly,” he says, his voice smooth. “Bureaucracy is a stubborn thing, even for a king.”
He’s taunting me back, but he’s much better at it. My stomach twists. We both know what he means—nothing’s changed. The people are cold. They’re hungry.
His smile is a blade wrapped in silk, and the sting of it aches even as he turns away. I’m already forgotten. He offers Elowen the faintest nod, and then he leans down and flicks a finger down the girl’s nose. She giggles like the world is still bright and whole.
That small gesture, the tenderness of it after everything he said, makes me tremble.
“You listen to your sister, now,” he says to the child, sternly, but you can hear the softness under the words. “You’ll make an excellent healer, Siofra.”
“Yes, Father,” she says, with a reverence that’s reserved for the best of fathers.
Without sparing me another glance, he leaves the herb garden, making his way back toward Edessa.
“Leina, I’m so sor—” Elowen starts when he’s turned the corner.
But like the king, I hold a hand in the air and Elowen stops—she wrings her hands in front of her chest, but she stops. I don’t look at the girl. I don’t meet Elowen’s pleading eyes.
“I need frostroot,” I say, my voice hard. Whatever softness I’d managed to salvage these last few weeks is gone.
Elowen hesitates for a heartbeat before she nods. “Wait here, Siofra,” she tells the girl, who looks at me with distrust and dislike, then Elowen leads me toward a row of dormant plants. Elowen kneels, grabbing one of the plants by the base of its gnarled stem.
“It looks dead,” she says, pulling a little knife from her belt. “It has to shed everything to survive the harshness of winter—leaves, petals, even the softness to its stem. It becomes something hard, something the cold can’t kill.”
She uses her knife to prick the stem. Bright green gleams beneath the brittle brown.
“But it’s alive,” she finishes. “It protects what matters by letting go of what doesn’t, and then it waits. It endures.”
She looks up at me, her eyes full of meaning. I hate that I understand. I take a step back, confusion and fury roiling in my chest.
I want to scream at her that I’m not a plant, that I’m not some silent thing that should have to bury itself to weather extremes.
But that’s the nature of endurance, isn’t it? It doesn’t care for fairness, or what we must become.
Her gaze doesn’t waver, but I do.
For the first time, I wonder—when does survival become unworthy of its price?