Chapter One #3
For the first time, Avette’s lovely, cool countenance gave way to the heat of quiet fury. Her cheeks were kissed with pink, coal eyes blazing.
“The Merrow King,” she half-hissed—then caught herself, and smiled sweetly. “Is mine. The crown is mine. Eisalaan is mine, by blood and by the right of succession. And I believe you will find, Your Grace, that the loyalty of this Court is mine too. Is it not?”
This last, she directed above his head. Silas noted a ripple of soft noise behind him, an uncomfortable shuffling of their silent, bewildered audience, met by that same flicker of hot rage in the Sorceress’s eyes.
She stroked, almost absentmindedly, at the pendant around her throat. Her sweet voice rang louder and stronger than before, but beneath it was a noise like crackling static, splintering and overlapping.
“Is it not?”
The splintering grew, and for a bewildering moment, Silas could not source the sound—not until a biting cold washed beneath the soles of his boots, and the shock sent him skidding back, almost impaling himself upon Captain Doran’s blade.
Silas fought to remain upright as the ice spread.
It spilled from beneath Avette’s feet, spiralling and swirling in a glassy shimmer that crept across the tiles, climbed the walls, closed over their heads—and reached for the small crowd in growing, jagged stalactites.
Panic swept the room, soft and quiet as the creeping ice.
Another ripple sounded around the walls, this time followed by a series of soft thuds. Silas did not need to turn to know what he was hearing. But turn he did, sliding on the ice just as his heart slid down his chest.
Kneeling.
More than half of Selma’s court were kneeling on the frosted stone floor; some with their heads bowed to avoid Avette’s gaze, some openly sobbing—but kneeling just the same. Silas felt his stomach swoop at the sight, falling further and further as a vast and yawning pit tore open inside him.
No. Get up, he pleaded with them. Don’t do this.
Among the few standing was Lady Imogen. At her feet, her fellows were pale and shivering. Even upright Imogen did not seem to fare much better, but she caught his eye, and he forced a smile at the immovable resolve in hers.
Brave girl. Brave, like his own Adeline.
“You,” called that sweet, steely voice behind him.
Imogen held his gaze for one long, defiant moment longer, then turned to face the Sorceress. Silas followed her, fear now clawing at him in earnest; fear not only for Adeline, who he prayed was far away, but for Imogen, now in Avette’s sights and well within her reach.
Avette watched the girl, alight with sudden interest. He noted the birdlike cock of her head as those eyes drifted over Imogen in all her finery, a magpie catching the glint of sunlight off a rare jewel.
“Your name?”
“Lady Imogen Kiely.”
“Kiely,” Avette echoed. “An old name, that one. It means grace and beauty, which is fitting, I think. You could not remain standing in this moment and be named Quinn, for wisdom.”
Imogen said nothing, and for a moment, neither did the Sorceress. Silas watched as she toyed with the pendant, her lips tilting with faint amusement while glints of glowing blue streamed through her pale fingertips.
“You do not bow,” said Avette. Not asking so much as noting, as though she’d merely commented on the colour of Imogen’s dress.
“My queen is dead,” Imogen said, in that same mild tone.
Too bold.
Avette’s smile remained amused, though her fingers tightened around the pendant. Her voice was almost drowned by the slow creaking of ice layering ice, long blades of stalactites reaching for the courtiers below with slow, tangible longing.
“Your loyalty is admirable,” said Avette. “Though, as noted, not entirely wise.”
With trembling gasps of cold and fright, several more fell to their knees, eyes cast to the icy, daggered ceiling growing ever lower, ever closer.
And still, Imogen was unmoved. Avette’s smile did not falter, but rather set in place, hard and cold, as though her own magic had once more frozen her where she stood.
“Imogen,” came a small voice, thin and broken. Mareda, her teeth chattering with the seeping cold. She raised her head in a stuttered, shivering movement to turn imploring eyes to her old friend. “Just—Imogen, please, just—”
“No.”
Avette’s ice mask shattered, dark eyebrows arching as her pretty smile went flat.
“No,” she said slowly, as if tasting an unfamiliar word. Her dark eyes swivelled to trap Silas in her sights once more. “Where is your daughter, Your Grace?”
Silas was thrown by the sudden shift in her attentions, but managed to croak out a shivered; “Gone.”
“Gone where?”
He snorted. “You cannot believe I would tell you. And so, I’m afraid, you’ll never know, since you’ve made it clear the cost of silence is my murder before your loyal and certainly not coerced court.”
“Murder?”
Silas turned a pointed glance to the ice shard hanging above his skull. Avette’s laughter seemed to twine around the stalactites.
“Oh, dear Duke! I’m not going to kill you.”
Silas said nothing; her words hung on some unseen precipice. Perhaps she was not going to kill him, but she was not going to let him walk free from this hall so easily.
“Where is your daughter?”
“Gone.”
Avette nodded, a gleam in her eye that said she’d hoped he’d refuse.
“Well, I suppose I have no other option but to believe you.”
A trap, but Silas returned her nod. “I suppose not.”
“And I suppose you have no other option,” she went on, “but to kneel.”
Silas felt his numbed lips curve, trembling around the chatter of his teeth, into a wry smile.
“I’m fine where I am.”
Avette’s smile came more easily.
“Then you may remain there.”
He could not feel his toes to begin with, and so at first, Silas did not feel the frigid doom consuming him.
Not until his knees went weak, and the impulse to move, to find balance, was met with a solid wall.
His body was not answering. Silas glanced down, but by the time the yell of horror rose within him, his chest was already encased in the same ice that had crept up his legs.
The cry was crushed inside him before it could find purchase, the only thing falling from his lips a white gust of panicked breath as the ice clouded his vision.
And then Silas knew no more.
He could not move. Could not see. Could not think.
He was nothing and no one.
So he did not hear Avette’s triumphant little sigh, nor see the tilt of her head as she admired him, a living statue of hard ice and shimmering, white frost. He did not see her turn from him to the crowd of kneeling courtiers, did not hear their strangled screams, white gusts of gasping breath forming clouds around the rows of daggered stalactites.
And he did not see Lady Imogen take her glittering skirts in one hand, and finally drop to her knees.