Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Callan
Winter had claimed the northern borderlands.
From my horse, the world looked like glass; fields encased in silver, rivers frozen mid-current, trees split under their own ice.
The villages of the northern reach had once been bright with harvest banners and the scent of mulled cider.
Now their windows—what windows were left standing—gaped black, their wells frozen solid.
Despite the ice, the air stank of death.
Another village destroyed by Winter’s wrath. We’d put out the fires that morning. They still smoldered beneath the freshly fallen snow.
I dismounted in silence, boots clanging against brittle ground. Even with a layer of snow, the earth here was hard—stubborn, dying, unwilling to thaw. My breath puffed in clouds. The wind howled through the skeletal orchards like it was grieving.
My men waited beyond the ruins, camped in a valley that should have been high with corn. The tents gleamed dull gold beneath the pale sun, but nothing alive stirred. No birds. No insects. Not even the sound of water rushing through the streams.
A voice broke the silence behind me. “Majesty?”
It was Holt, shivering in his armor, his breath white in the air. “What are your orders, sire?”
“We’ll return to camp,” I said.
“Your Majesty.” He swallowed. “We can’t hold the line another night. The men—”
“The men will hold,” I said, willing it to be true. “Reinforcements will be here in three days, and more rations to go with it.”
He hesitated. “I don’t know if they have three days.”
I swung my gaze to him sharply.
“Their morale is weaker than their swords, Your Majesty,” he was quick to add.
“I’ll speak to them,” I said, turning my horse away from the razed village. “Let them rally behind their love for their kingdom.”
It was all we had left.
My tent stood apart from the rest, large enough to remind everyone who I was supposed to be.
The canvas was embroidered with the crest of Autumn—a stag crowned in gold leaf, though the threads had dulled, brittle with cold.
Inside, a fire warmed the space, but it did nothing to chase away the Winter queen’s brutal bite.
I sat at my campaign desk, staring at a map of what used to be our northern provinces. Every mountainside village below the Concordian Ridge was marked in red. Every line of defense already gone.
All we had was this camp. At least until the new additions arrived in a few more days.
More Autumn soldiers; our strongest fae.
The legions who hadn’t yet been required to donate their power to my father’s vanity.
And The Withered. Or a small contingent of them, anyway.
The few who had agreed to work with me toward our common goal, though its outcome remained to be seen. As did our fragile alliance.
Even Lemuel did not know of that partnership.
“Majesty?”
The flap opened, letting in a gust of snow, and a soldier bent nearly double with it. His armor was rimed with frost. His cheeks were flushed pink with windburn.
“Report,” I said.
“An emissary arrived from the north.”
“The north?” I echoed, frowning.
“The queen requests an audience.”
I looked up. “Heliconia?”
The man nodded once. “At the ridge. Alone.”
The word alone carried no comfort. Heliconia didn’t need an army to make a point.
I stood, brushing frost from my cloak. “Ready my horse.”
The soldier bowed low and hurried stiffly out.
The ridge overlooked what used to be farmland—now a wasteland of cracked ice and shattered fences. She was waiting there, as promised, at the center of it all.
I’d seen her once before. Years ago, when she’d come to my father’s court. To woo him to her side. His ego hadn’t allowed a true alliance. I’d glimpsed her then. Young, vibrant, eyes glinting with a hunger that might have been mistaken for passion or even kindness. But that version of her was gone.
Now, Heliconia stood in a furred cloak the color of a winter storm, her skin pale as carved marble.
Thick brown hair hung loose and wild where the wind caught it.
She was attractive, but not beautiful. Not with such a hard mouth and eyes that stayed half-narrowed, as if everything she saw disappointed her.
Too much cruelty had carved itself into her face, and the rest of her seemed to wear it like a crown.
Frost curled outward from her boots, spreading across the frozen ground in delicate veins. Something in me recoiled at the power that rolled off her.
Like one of the gods.
I batted the thought away.
She was mortal, same as all of us.
“Your Majesty,” she said as I approached. Her smile was thin, sweet, sharp. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“This was my land before your frost touched it,” I said, dismounting. “I’ll see what’s left with my own eyes.”
“The view is more than adequate.” Her hardened gaze drifted past me to the horizon, where smoke still rose from a ruined village. “Autumn is where it will remain. Frozen in its destruction.”
“You will go no farther,” I said.
“You intend to stop me.”
“My army will prove itself. We fight for the love of our land. Yours fights because you pull their hollow strings.”
Her lips twitched as if she found this all amusing. “You cannot hold it forever.”
I circled her slowly, the crunch of snow loud in the silence. “You asked for this meeting. Speak your purpose.”
“I offer peace,” she said simply, eyes glittering like diamonds. “And a future.”
“Peace. I’m not sure you and I define that word the same.”
“Then I’ll use a different word. Compromise, darling.” Her eyes caught the light—silver, endless. “Marry me.”
I frowned, unsurprised by the trap she’d laid.
She smiled wider at my silence. “You have a kingdom on its knees. I have the power to keep it from shattering. Together, we could rule both realms. I only want to share your seat—what do you call it? The Harvest Throne?”
My throat tightened. “You’d share it. Equally.”
“For now.”
Her honesty chilled me more than any lie would have.
“And if I refuse?”
Her expression softened, pitying. “Then I will take it anyway, Prince. Piece by piece. You’ve seen how easily Winter spreads.”
“I don’t bow to threats.”
“No,” she said, almost fond. “You bow to ghosts. To a father who left you nothing but a broken crown. To a woman who left you nothing but regret.”
I stiffened. “You presume much.”
“I know much.” She stepped closer, and the frost reached for my boots, curling around the leather. “You’re still trying to prove you’re more than a boy pretending to be king.”
“Careful,” I warned. “You stand on my soil.”
She smiled. “This will all be mine soon. And you will bow. One way or another.”
The wind shifted. The ice crackled beneath us like the earth itself was listening.
“I’ll give you time to think on it,” Heliconia murmured. “But not much. I have a war to win after all. A throne to claim.”
“I won’t say yes,” I said. “Not now. Not ever.”
“Then you’ll watch your realm die. Just as she did.”
“Her realm isn’t dead,” I said, knowing it was a useless barb. “They live.”
“They sleep,” she snapped, eyes narrowing. “And they remain lifeless and cursed. Dead in all the ways that matter.”
An easily struck nerve, then.
“And you?” I asked, cocking my head, seeing past all the cold cruelty.
“What did that curse cost you, I wonder? It’s been seven years, after all, since the realm has seen you march your abominations to another court’s doorstep to demand respect with violence.
Did it really take you so long to recover from your wasted efforts? ”
She laughed once—a sound like ice snapping.
“You mistake patience for price,” Heliconia purred. Her voice was a cool blade drawn across silk. “I did not lose years. I learned how to wait until others exhausted themselves. I let harvest rot, and I let men like your father thin their own ranks, thanks to their greed and cruelty.”
She stepped closer, a soft smile on her mouth. “These years have been much like your Autumn Court. I trimmed and pruned and stored. And now, we reap what we have sown.”
I swallowed. “And now you come offering a fool’s bargain. My crown for your hand. And you call it compromise.” The words tasted bitter.
She cocked her head, eyes narrowing. “I offer survival. You, of all people, should know the difference. You are your father’s son after all.”
“And what if I am my own sort of king?”
Her smile sharpened as if she’d seen straight through my words to the lie.
“Decide, Prince of Autumn. Marry and keep what remains, or refuse and watch what you would have ruled turn to a frozen memory. I do not threaten in anger, for you do not mean enough to me to stir it; I state what is inevitable. For you and all of Menryth.”
The frost at our boots creaked, the land listening.
“You will not set foot any farther into my kingdom,” I said with a snarl, more to keep my voice from breaking than from confidence.
She inclined her head as if obligingly amused. “Oh, I will set foot where it pleases me. But I will not dirty my soles where I can take the floor by breaking it beneath you. Think on that while your men shiver and starve, Callan. I will send for your answer soon enough.”
I watched her go until the ridge swallowed the last of her. The silence she left in her wake was a new kind of cold.
I stood there long after the snow coated her footprints, staring at the horizon. The fields were white for miles beneath the moon’s reflection, the sky dark and still.
Behind me, the campfires sputtered and died one by one.
When I turned for home, I could almost hear my father’s voice again: Rule, boy. Even if you have to lie to yourself to do it. But I was done lying. Maybe not to my enemies—survival was cutthroat and required cunning—but I wouldn’t lie ever again to myself.