Chapter Twenty-Five
Kai
They were not the rooms he’d been given when he first arrived at the Silver Palace, though perhaps he should have been glad of that.
He was not sure he would have been able to sleep in the place where he had nearly been murdered, where he came so close to leaving Adeline to that same violent fate; where Simon had saved their lives mere weeks before losing his own.
Not that he was sleeping much, as it was.
The chambers he was shown to were barren, and quite as cold as the rest of Avette’s dilapidated ice palace. It was not the crisp cold of the Eisalaan he’d left behind, with its winds that kissed your cheeks pink and its endless snow blanket glittering with each crunching step.
No. This was the cold of the Laune, and Kai drowned in it each and every night.
By day, he sat in the same sparse chambers and stared at the jagged patterns of frost framing the door and window like silver scorch marks.
He had noticed the frost was thicker in places that Avette frequented; that the throne room ceiling had groaned with solid ice that hung like the maw of a ravenous snowbeast over their heads.
But the more Kai stared at the marks around his door, the more convinced he became that they were growing.
Spiralling further and further into the walls day by day.
Sometimes, he swore he could hear the creaking over the constant whistle of the wind outside.
He wondered if that slow, insidious spread spoke to the spread of Avette’s magic.
If she was losing her leash on that power—or if he was just slowly losing his mind.
One pitch-black night, he had finally fallen unconscious with sheer deprivation, and shivered awake to the unmistakable crack of splintering ice.
This time, there was no mistaking it; the silver marks around the door had blossomed.
And when the handle turned, and the door flew open, he understood why.
Kai bounded from the bed and immediately swayed, exhaustion and the dizzying effects of the brutal cold slamming into him all at once and turning his knees to rubber.
His foot slid uselessly out beneath him, and he grabbed at the bedpost for balance, wincing when the chilled metal clung to his palms.
“Careful, my heart.”
“Fuck you,” he hissed, even as he struggled to drag himself upright.
Avette tsked, her black gaze flicking disdainfully over him.
“Foul language is so unbecoming. And after all that time I spent teaching you courtly manners to impress my father. What a waste; no better than housetraining a mongrel, really.”
“Fuck you, Your Majesty.”
She hummed, barely bothered to feign amusement as she circled the room, dragging her finger along an empty dresser and leaving a spiky trail of frost in her wake.
“Very clever. Is that how you speak to my cousin? The one you’ve so clearly defiled?”
His heart gave a painful lurch at the mention of Adeline, but his scowl did not falter.
“Why are you here?”
It was a fair question, he thought. It had to be over a week now that he’d been rotting here, preserved only by the cold and the ever-dwindling stew delivered to his room once a day. But Avette just sighed, beleaguered.
“I am here to ensure that you understand what is expected of you. Tomorrow, we address Eisalaan in open court.” She paused to regard him with a sideways flick of her eyes, then gave a delicate wrinkle of her nose. “Of course, you will need to be bathed and shorn before then.”
“Why?”
“Well, you look and smell like a wild beast, and they are expecting the handsome Drowned Prince of their charming little fairytales.”
“Why am I addressing your people?” he said flatly, though not without venom.
“You know precisely why,” she said. Her pendant pulsed bright blue, a snap of irritation.
Kai just shook his head.
“You don’t want to marry me, Avette.”
“You would not have been my first choice,” she admitted, tone mild even if her eyes glittered with dark malice.
She glided slowly toward him, the movement so eerily smooth he could only imagine she was bearing herself across the room on a path of ice.
“Does it hurt your feelings, my heart, to know I would have preferred a man to a waterbeast?”
Her voice softened as she drew near. Lower than breath, an intimate hush. She reached up to trace his jaw as she spoke and left splinters of ice flaking between each stubbled hair.
“Tell me, does my cousin mind the gills? Personally, I was rather alarmed to find that they flicker as you spend yourself.”
Kai could not help but tense; at the ice touch, at the blinking of her pendant, at her nearness, at the whisper of that voice that had haunted him for nearly six hundred years in the cold, black lake.
But most especially, at her fascination with Adeline.
The reminder of their past intimacy, gusting in his ear on a silken breath, made his stomach roil.
Her opinion on his gills, on the other hand, meant remarkably little, though he knew this would once have been a knife between his ribs.
Avette knew it, too, it seemed. Had counted on it, perhaps. She took his stillness for hurt, and a soft smile parted her lips.
“Oh, you more than made up for it.” Her fingers trailed over his chin and down his throat, coming to rest on his collarbone, where her chill seeped and throbbed painfully in the cold spot where his borrowed pendant had lain. “You had quite the talent for distraction.”
Distraction.
He did not want to think of Adeline in that moment. Wanted to screw his eyes shut against the memory of her standing before him in the water, that teasing smile on her face. The way she’d distracted him, as only she could. Because he wanted her, always.
And Avette wanted—
Everything. Power, admiration, lust. If it could be had, she’d covet it.
It had cost him everything to learn this one simple weakness.
Because it was a weakness, even if she had managed to leverage it to her advantage.
So perhaps it could be his advantage too, even if the prospect made his stomach lurch like a ship in a hurricane.
He welcomed that nausea; used it. Swallowed back the bile and let her read the bob of his throat however she liked.
“It helped,” he said tightly, “that you needed such distraction.”
Avette’s eyes swept up from his collarbone, a long, dramatic brush of those spider-leg lashes that had once so entranced him.
Kai ground at his back teeth, forcing his jaw to tick.
Conflicted; the jilted lover, the old flame in need of just the right kindling.
He dropped his eyes to her lips and back.
His chest heaved with the breathtaking heat of his rage, but he could see, even now, how easy it might be to confuse it for another kind of heat entirely.
Could see it in the slow, smouldering flutter of Avette’s eyes, just two blazing coals in her pale face, ready to raze or consume whatever she beheld.
She tempered that fiery intrigue with a haughty tilt of her chin, but her whisper barely parted her lips.
“Needed it?”
He dropped his gaze to her mouth again, voice thick with a simmering fury that only worked in his favour.
“Begged for it.”
“A queen does not beg,” she said.
But when he forced his gaze up, hers had already lowered, lashes sloping as she watched his lips. The glow of her pendant stuttered with her caught breath, and Kai felt its light in that old, dry ache within his veins. His blood begged for connection with the mother, his fingers twitching for it.
A moment longer. Just a moment longer.
“I suppose not,” said Kai, not bothering to fight the tremor in his breath. “A queen takes what she wants.”
And with a final flash of challenge in her dark eyes, Avette did just that.
She leaned in, a too-sharp tug on his shirt that dragged him closer than he’d intended to go.
He could feel the radiating chill of her lips hovering over his own in the endless, frozen moment before his hand finally landed on her throat.
And squeezed.
Avette’s eyes flew wide just as the waters crashed into his veins, the force so great he very nearly buckled beneath them.
More potent than the power that had reared him, more powerful by far than the magic conducted through his own pendant.
Avette clawed at his hands, and he did not feel a thing, for he had the whole of the world’s oceans within him, and that was an agony beyond anything he’d ever known.
If he didn’t unleash them, he would be torn apart by those unearthly currents.
His pain was Avette’s too, her mouth rounded in the same silent scream that shrilled through his skull.
The Mother’s roar was deafening, the magic splintering in his grasp as he gathered it frantically to himself, driving into his bones and making his soul ache.
It was maddening.
It was intolerable.
But Avette floundered in his grip, and Kai could not let this chance pass him by.
He couldn’t. So he bit down hard enough to taste iron and held on tight; to Avette and the pendant and the power.
Drew the waters from the frost around him, from Avette’s thundering pulse, from his own crashing blood—poured all that he could gather into her airways.
Her hands went limp, pawing uselessly around his wrists. His palms flexed around her throat, both of them, unrelenting and thrumming with the rush of the water beneath his skin.
Avette’s eyes bulged as she drowned, brow pitching with panic, her face so expressive, so raw with existential panic that she looked—Adhlas help him.