Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Across the room, Alistair flinches at the mere sound of her voice.
It breaks my heart to see it. Since I was living with Draven in the Ice Palace, I don’t know the full extent of the physical and mental torture that the Icehearts put Alistair and Isera through.
But given the complete breakdown that I witnessed in the kennels last year, and his reaction just now, it must have been even worse than I could have imagined.
“Well done, Gremar,” Emperor Bane Iceheart says as he strides into the room next to Jessina.
His long black hair ripples down his back when he moves.
“I was doubting your intelligence when you sent word. But you were right.” Bane’s black eyes gleam in the torchlight as he sweeps his gaze over us. “We really do have rats in the castle.”
Isera’s expression darkens. Standing next to her, I can practically feel the murderous rage and hatred radiating from her entire body. Not only did Bane torture her, he also tortured and humiliated and drained the life out of her mother for a hundred and fifty years until she died from it.
Grabbing her wrist discreetly, I begin backing us away from the door and towards the side of the room where Draven and Gremar are standing. Across the shining floor, Orion and Alistair do the same.
The previous hesitation is completely gone from Gremar’s face as he inclines his head and says, “Thank you, sir.”
Draven lets out a mocking snort.
Anger flickers in Gremar’s eyes as he snaps his gaze back to Draven and gives him a taunting smile back. “Did you really think that Imar and I don’t have protocols in place? The moment he sent his message, I knew exactly what was going on.”
“Of course we did,” Draven replies, a smirk ghosting across his lips.
Gremar blinks in surprise, apparently not having expected that answer. But before he can say anything, Empress Jessina loses the final shreds of her already incredibly limited patience.
“Now, are you going to surrender quietly?” she asks, her pale gray eyes full of both haughty arrogance and vicious threats.
Sweeping her long white hair back over her shoulder, she arches a pale brow at Draven.
“Or are we going to have to kill all of your friends before we drag you back to make an example out of you?”
“I choose option four,” he replies.
My heart leaps. Four. We’re going with contingency plan number four. It’s the riskiest one. But also the plan that, if we succeed, will bring the most substantial reward.
“Four?” Jessina echoes, her delicate brows scrunching in confusion. “What do—”
Galen and Lyra, who are hiding in the other room just inside the open doorway behind us, flip their levers.
A white stone wall slams down from the ceiling, cutting the room in half and separating the Icehearts from the rest of us.
I smile. Since the levers were well hidden in the walls, and there was nothing visible in the ceiling either, none of us knew that this very convenient contraption existed.
No one except Orion, who apparently has a similar mechanism in his own castle.
It looks like the Seelie and Unseelie Courts used to share knowledge and ideas before we became rivals.
The moment that the wall hits the floor, Gremar whips around in shock.
But the rest of us have known what to do since the moment Draven said the word four, so we are already moving.
Next to me, Isera summons a mass of ice and slams it straight into Gremar, pinning him to the wall and trapping him there.
Orion yanks open a door behind him and darts into it while Draven runs into the room where Galen and Lyra are waiting.
Windows are slammed open inside that room.
Yanking out a piece of steel, I sprint towards where Isera is keeping Gremar trapped. Alistair runs towards me from the other side.
Deafening roars echo across the palace grounds outside as Draven, Lyra, and Galen jump out of the windows and shift into dragons. Massive black bodies are briefly visible on the grass outside before they lurch into the air.
“I will kill you for this, you filthy fae bitch,” Gremar snarls while he starts trying to melt Isera’s ice with his lava magic. “And then I’ll—”
She yanks the ice up over his mouth.
Dark red lava bubbles under the thick ice, and water runs down it as it starts to melt. Gritting her teeth, Isera keeps building the ice up over and over again.
Alistair and I skid to a halt in front of Gremar. While still pouring ice magic over his body, Isera suddenly removes the block of ice that was trapping his wrist.
I shove the piece of dragon steel against the naked skin of his wrist, right below the edge of his armor. Gremar’s eyes widen in shock, and his lava magic falters. Not hesitating a second, Alistair summons his fire magic and rapidly heats the metal.
A hiss rips from my lips, and I almost drop the piece of dragon steel.
“Shit, sorry,” Alistair blurts out, and grabs the metal from my fingers. “I forgot that you can feel the heat too.”
Since he is immune to the effects of his own fire magic, he doesn’t get burned when he holds the searing piece of dragon steel. Gremar thrashes against the ice bonds, and if Isera wasn’t silencing him with ice, I’m pretty sure that he would be screaming.
Alistair awkwardly bends the metal rod with only one hand while keeping a blue flame in his other and using it to heat up the material. At last, he manages to get the two ends together so that he can weld them together.
The moment it’s done, Isera yanks down the ice over Gremar’s wrist again to cool down the metal. A hissing sound fills the room as the cool ice meets the hot dragon steel.
Outside the walls, dragons roar as Bane and Jessina fight Draven and the others. The noise is so loud that the windows around us rattle in their frames.
“Go!” I tell Alistair. “Help them. We’ve got it from here.”
“See you on the other side,” he replies, and then whirls around and sprints into the other room.
A moment later, he leaps out the window and onto the grass outside.
Fire roars into the sky in a massive torrent.
I channel my magic and shove it straight into that piece of dragon steel. “Don’t fight back.”
Gremar immediately stops moving.
I suck in a sharp breath. This was the only part of the plan that we couldn’t really test beforehand, so I was worried that it wouldn’t work. That I would mess this up and ruin it for everyone. But it worked. Goddess above, it worked.
My heart beats hard in my chest as I stare at Gremar.
I’m bending him to my will with dragon steel.
The mere thought of it should horrify me.
But it doesn’t. This is the man who has tormented and punished us all my life.
The man who has killed and hurt and humiliated any fae who dared to step out of line.
And now, I hold his life in the palm of my hand.
Vicious revenge burns inside my soul, adding more fuel to the wildfire of rage and hatred that I let loose inside me when we left the Unseelie Court.
A few steps away, Isera lets her ice magic fade out and instead walks into the room with the levers.
Gremar only stands there, glaring at me with murderous eyes.
“You are not allowed to take off the dragon steel, and you are not allowed to tell or show anyone that you are wearing dragon steel,” I declare. “You are not allowed to tell anyone what we did to you in this room. And you are not allowed to hurt me, Isera, Alistair, Draven, Galen, Lyra, or Orion.”
Since I don’t know how specific I need to make my orders, I make them as detailed as possible to avoid loopholes.
“You will lead Emperor Bane Iceheart into that room,” I point to the room that Orion disappeared into earlier. “And you cannot let him, or anyone else, find out that it is a trap. Understood?”
He opens and closes his mouth for a few seconds, as if he wants to say something else, but in the end all he grinds out is, “Yes.”
“Good. Then go and find him now and start convincing him to come here.”
Hatred burns like black flames in Gremar’s eyes, but he jerks his chin down in a nod. Isera flips the levers, one at a time, which will make the wall retract into the ceiling again. Gremar turns towards it and waits.
All the orders that I have just given to Gremar are swirling around somewhere in the back of my mind. They don’t distract from my present thoughts, but they float there like glowing words.
Stone groans as the wall begins lifting. Slowly at first, but then it picks up. It disappears into the ceiling again with a bang.
And leaves us face to face with Lavendera.
I jerk back in surprise. But Gremar’s orders were to leave now, so he just strides past her and towards the main entrance.
For a few tense seconds, nothing happens.
Lavendera just stands there, staring unseeing at the wall above my shoulder.
As if her body is here but her mind isn’t.
She looks exactly like she did the last time I saw her.
Flowing brown hair rippling down her back, and the scar across her cheek and jaw that mars her otherwise extraordinarily beautiful face.
Her pink and purple eyes have that faraway look in them that she seems to get from time to time.
After we left the Ice Palace, I thought for a while that she might have been faking her weirdness so that we would be less likely to suspect that she was actually a traitor. But she actually is this strange.
“Selena,” Isera calls from the room behind me. “I’m going to…”
She trails off, and I think she might be glancing through the doorway and into this room, but I can’t tell for certain because I don’t dare take my eyes off Lavendera.
Ice shoots through the air.
It speeds through it so fast that I barely have time to flinch.
Lavendera, however, sees it coming.
A massive tree shoots up from the ground in front of her. The ice slams into it with such force that the wood cracks and the tree topples halfway forward. It suddenly sinks into the ground again.
Behind it, Lavendera blinks hard a few times, her eyes still unfocused.
Then her gaze at last seems to lock on me. It takes another moment for recognition to spark in her eyes. When it does, she heaves a deep sigh.
“I gave you a head start,” she says. “You should have used it.”
“I did.”
“Not well enough.”
“I thought you were my friend. I confided in you. I tried to help you. And you betrayed me.”
Her eyes show no emotion as she simply replies, “Yes, friends tend to do that.”
“No, they—”
Branches shoot towards me.
I suck in a sharp breath and throw myself to the side.
The branches slam into a block of ice while I roll across the floor and reach for my own magic.
Shoving it forward, I aim for the peach-colored spark of confusion in Lavendera’s chest. With her erratic way of behaving, she must be feeling constantly confused.
A hiss rips from my lungs, and I lose the grip on my magic the moment it connects.
Scrambling backwards, I leap out of reach of another branch while Isera shoves a second block of ice at her.
My head is ringing, and a flicker of fear blows through me as I stare at Lavendera.
When I tried to connect my magic to her emotions, something went wrong. No, something is wrong. With her. The moment my magic connected with her, it was like being hit by a wall of tens of thousands of screaming people. It was almost physically painful.
“They’re coming soon,” Isera hisses at me under her breath while she continues throwing sheets of ice at Lavendera. “If they come back and see this, our whole plan is ruined. We need to get her out of here.”
We need to get her on our side, my mind immediately insists instead.
“Why are you working for them?” I call to Lavendera while ice and wooden branches crash against each other. “You could help us. You’re one of us, so why are you helping them?”
Her gaze slides to me. “Because you can’t give me what I want.”
“And what is that?”
She doesn’t reply. Only doubles the number of branches that she shoots at us. But a terrible craving flared up in her eyes when I asked that question. Whatever it is that she wants, she wants it badly.
“Fuck this,” Isera growls under her breath. “We’re taking this outside.” She shoots a pointed look at me. “Make sure we get the bastard.”
Before I can so much as nod, she slams a sheet of ice towards Lavendera’s side.
She yanks up a tree to block it, but Isera has already thrown a second attack.
A massive ice wall crashes into Lavendera from the front, barely cushioned by a tangle of branches, and the force sends her flying backwards and out through the main entrance behind her.
Without a second look back, Isera sprints after her.
Outside, wings boom and dragons roar while fire lights up the night sky.
Giving my head a quick shake, I try to get my wits back as I spin around and run over to the room that Orion disappeared into earlier.
The Unseelie King jerks back, and his eyes abruptly stop glowing.
“Malachi’s balls, you couldn’t have announced yourself or something?” he huffs. “I was about to blast you with my full power.”
“Sorry,” I give him a smile full of sarcasm. “Next time, I’ll make sure to hire a master of ceremonies to announce me.”
He rolls his eyes in a very unkinglike way. “Everything is ready on my end, so we should—”
Cutting himself off midsentence, he suddenly yanks me the final half step out of the doorway and in behind the wall.
“They’re here?” I guess, keeping my voice soft.
He nods in confirmation.
My heart leaps and then starts pounding in my chest.
This is it. Our entire plan hinges on this moment. If we screw this up, we’re doomed.
Two pairs of feet thud against the floor in the entrance hall outside, getting louder with every step as they draw closer. But I can barely hear them over the pounding in my ears.
Please, Mabona. This has to work.
Summoning my magic, I get ready to shove it forward at a moment’s notice. Next to me, Orion’s eyes begin glowing as well. I resist the urge to fidget. Every nerve inside my body is strung so tightly that I can barely breathe.
The footsteps reach the doorway.
I hold my breath.
A silver pant leg appears across the threshold.
And then Emperor Bane Iceheart strides in through the door.