Chapter 17 Ban #2
Had she not been so new all those years ago, I never could have borrowed her magic in the dungeons. Now, she has rage to help force her strength through her motions.
When I throw us out of the shadows again, Neve’s still screaming. We’re farther from the palace, tumbling into the snow close to the mountains. She lands on top of me, and I force my hands into the sharp icicle tips before dissolving them.
I’m too focused on getting control of her ice that I never consider Neve might know how to fight. I grasp one of her wrists, intent on getting this damn girl to listen to me. She draws her arm back fast enough I don’t quite catch her before her knuckles strike across my face.
For just a moment, I’m too stunned to stop her. Neve fucking punched me.
And, fuck me, if it wasn’t goddamn beautiful.
“It had to be you!” she screams, throwing ice from her fingertips. I’m prepared for it to rain down on my face, but all the little shards seem to land around me instead of hurting me. “It has to! No one else could kill my father!”
She stops throwing ice at me, keeping me pinned beneath her straddled thighs, and when she starts pounding on my chest with closed fists I see the pain return. Her strikes are hard, but no harder than the burn she left on my cheek.
Her eyes gloss, and she looks more frustrated than ever. “Why? Why won’t you fight back?”
“I could, but it’s not going to give you any satisfaction. You want the King Killer, right? Even if you take my life for his, Neve, I didn’t kill your father. It’s not going to give you the vengeance you crave.”
She stops slamming her fists into my chest, her hands frozen against my dark coat. Pained eyes glare down at me, matching the broken crack in her voice. “Then who will?”
Holding up my hands again, I nod to one side. “Let me up, and I will show you.”
“Show me?” she hedges, unmoving. Her legs clench on either side of mine, sending my thoughts to unholy places. “You didn’t even know about the history of this land. How can you show me anything from the past when you don’t understand it?”
“Loaded question, Your Majesty,” I reply, and she grits her teeth at the jab. “Get up, and I can show you how. Maybe you can shed some light on Wonderland afterward.”
A flicker of uncertainty crosses her eyes, and for a moment, I wonder if she’ll simply try to kill me. It’s not going to work since I am now cursed, twice, with immortality, but she can try all the same.
If Dima’s ignorant attempts didn’t work weeks ago her strikes aren’t going to end me tonight either.
Neve all but throws herself off me, using the ice to push herself up. She’s wearing a cream-colored gown with embellishments and high slits on either side of the skirt. It draws way too much attention to her thighs, and I’m already struggling to stay focused after she pinned me.
I let the shadows give me a momentary reprieve before I stand, moving closer to the jagged rocks that follow the base of the mountains. Snow flurries around us, the storm growing closer.
She gestures to the space around us. Pain and distress burn her gaze, and I can’t quite get a lock on what she’s thinking. “I know you recognized Hartsell, but did you recognize the man at all?”
She hesitates, biting her lip. “Not the man. I’ve never met Lancelot.”
“Neither have I,” I reply carefully. “He’s from Camelot and I don’t know much about that kingdom. I heard him speaking to a few people recently, but I had nothing to put the face and name together until now.”
“How can you not know more?” she asks, scoffing. “What have you been doing for a century, ice mage? Staring at me while I slept?”
“I died again at one point,” I say casually, and her gaze flickers to the spot on my neck. “And I had to teach myself how to use my ice magic. I’ve had things to do, Neve. More important than watching someone I couldn’t wake.”
“And how did you wake me?” she presses. She gestures wildly behind us, and I’m surprised how attuned she is to where we are. It's like she senses where the palace and capital city are. “I sleep for a century, and then I just wake up, and no one knows why?”
“Because your mother was busy keeping you asleep.”
Neve bares her teeth, but there’s too much pain in her eyes for her to be vicious. “Tell me why, Ban.”
I wait until she’s taken a breath before I move. She’s still on edge, and if I set her off again, she might resort to throwing ice once more. Twisting my wrists, the shadows bend to my will, dragging out exactly what I need.
Her eyes narrow as she studies the items in my hands: a spinning needle and a book. “Is this a joke to you?”
Without a word, I toss the two items at her. She almost lets them hit the snow before her hand slashes horizontally, creating a shelf of ice that keeps them from touching the powder. Her eyes harden as she glares at me.
Flexing my fingers, I turn and force my shadows into the stone.
Neve gasps as an image takes form, and I wait until she can see the full picture before I say anything.
“I had a lot of time to teach myself tricks since I was cursed by the moon. I used to be able to make little puppets out of ice to play in the shadows. It’s the same principle, except I don’t have to use anything except my magic to make the shadows move now. ”
She is by my side in an instant, and I’m surprised by how quickly she moved. “It’s like a shadow puppet show, without the puppets.”
“Exactly.”
As I twist the shadows around until the image looks how I want, Neve’s breath hisses out beside me. She’s deathly silent when I speak. “A hundred years ago, the Ice Queen was struck down by a villager who wanted the kingdom to fall.”
Neve glares at me, but I ignore her, twisting the shadows.
The picture I create, first depicting a long mountain and a single girl, moves until it’s similar to the cabin I found her in.
The bed, the windows, the cliffside, it’s all there.
My magic helps me get the images to appear almost exactly as I see them, so there’s no guesswork on Neve’s end about what I’m showing her.
“I don’t remember a villager,” she hisses.
“Just watch,” I reply, nodding to the boulder. When she finally looks back, I pick up the tale. “A small cabin, lost in the mountains, hid a secret frozen in time. The Queen sleeps for years on end, waiting for someone to break her spell.”
“And what was the spell?” Neve breathes.
“To break the frozen sleep,” I tell her.
Changing the imagery again, I depict the palace dungeon.
It’s harder to show a white slate like that, but the chains and little room are distinguishable enough.
Crafting three figures, one bound in chains and two with crowns, I know this is where I’m probably going to lose her. “A spell not meant for her.”
Neve grabs my arm, digging her nails in. “Stop.”
If she really wanted me to stop, the ice would be back.
“I won’t show you the part you don’t wish to see,” I explain, and she must have picked up on what the image is.
The dungeon will always be a visceral memory in my mind.
I was barely coming into my ice and snow magic, and the King and Queen expected things from me that I couldn’t give.
“You see, the frozen sleep is a curse passed from the Snow Queen–”
“I know that part,” Neve interrupts, her voice tense.
“Shh,” I tell her, glancing her way. She’s so stiff, her grip on my arm like a vise; she might change her mind and strike out at me after all. “The curse could be stopped, if she had enough magic to counteract it.”
“Magic?” Neve grumbles, staring at the scene. I move the shadows, bringing in a fourth figure, and I can feel her gaze burning into me again. “That didn’t happen. They didn’t say anything about magic.”
“No,” I tell her tightly. “I put that together later.”
On the boulder, she watches as I move the four figures, until there are two on each side. Neve and me, and her parents, standing opposite.
“Ban–”
Instead of focusing on the moment I grabbed her hand, coupled her magic with mine, and threw it back at her parents, I direct my attention to the couple instead.
I don’t think Neve’s registered how her parents stood, or the moments leading up to her father’s death, when I wasn’t close enough to strike him.
She was always too focused on me at that moment.
“Before the Ice Queen went to sleep,” I explain, “the Snow Queen ensured her eternal rule.”
I move the figures like I remember, their magic shooting in streaks from shadowy fingertips. But where Andor’s magic sailed toward us to counteract mine, Ronnie’s magic sailed someplace else.
Neve hisses when I show her mother striking her father in the back, and the scene immediately shifts. I was never in the dungeon after that, so I don’t know exactly what happened next.
The Ice Queen destroys the shadows before I can continue, her ice crackling across the surface of the boulder as I let the darkness fall away. Turning, I’m prepared for her fury. It was always bound to happen. A large part of me still doubts she’s going to believe me.
The tears in her eyes are not unexpected.
“Why?” she hisses. “Why lie?”
I hold up my hands, and she steps away. “Do you really believe it’s a lie?”
“My mother wouldn’t strike down my father,” she whispers, her voice dropping. “It was you. You! You stole my magic, combined our powers to attack, took down my father–”
Her voice cuts off, and she presses a hand to her mouth.
I give her a moment to try and catch her breath, biting back the cries, before I continue, “I had no interest in killing the King. Or the Queen, for that matter. Before I died and the moon claimed me, I was a citizen here in the Frostlands. They were my rulers, too. I just wanted to escape. I borrowed your magic because I knew the Ice Queen had magic similar to mine. I figured it would be enough; I meant to put up a barrier to escape. You didn’t look especially interested in fighting, so I figured it would work. ”
“You lie,” she breathes, her voice almost too quiet to hear. “The shadows are yours. It’s your strange magic that created the story. You can twist it however you please.”
Crossing my arms, I level my gaze with hers. “Go back to the palace, then. Confront your mother. Ask her why the spinning wheel in your bedroom is gone, yet I found the needle. Ask her how she regained the ability to move like normal, yet since your return, she’s grown stiff again.”
Neve’s throat bobs, her eyes blazing as she tries to find a way to answer me. She’ll fight me on every point I make because she doesn’t want to believe it.
“I don’t know why your mother is cursed,” I explain, meeting her gaze. “I can’t tell you what happened in her homeland to give her the curse, but somewhere along the way, she learned how to bend it to work for herself. She couldn’t get what she wanted from me, so she sacrificed you.”
She steps back like I’ve struck her, her hands balling up at her sides. “My mother loves me. She did what she had to for me, for the kingdom, for all of us.”
I snort. “You don’t believe that. You returned home to demand answers, and amid the confusion, you accepted lies instead. Why do you think she’s still friends with the Mad Queen?”
Confusion flickers across her face. “You mean… Lady Hartsell?”
“Davina,” I reply dryly, the same thoughts as earlier echoing through my head. “She’s still alive and well, a century later. Just like your mother. Your mother, who used a curse to keep you asleep and her magic in check. Hell, she’s still alive. It seems to give her immortal youth, too.”
Neve shakes her head. “That doesn’t make sense. It isn’t right.”
“The Mad Queen retains her youth, too,” I continue, and it rubs me wrong that Neve is so in the dark about Hartsell.
If she ever decides to believe me, we’ll have to get to that.
“I wonder if she’s hiding someone someplace, too, keeping them a prisoner to maintain her youth.
Nowadays, Hartsell is known to kill purely for her own amusement and tortures people just because she’s bored.
I bet whoever she has locked away, they are in a great deal of pain. ”
Briefly, my thoughts fly to Anastasia and the story she shared with me. A frozen girl…
“Enough!” Neve’s voice is strong, but when she pushes me, the shove is weak. Her hands press to my arms, but there’s no effort behind the motion. I don’t know if she’s fighting herself or fighting me anymore. “I don’t trust you. I—I can’t trust you.”
“Then don’t,” I tell her. “Go back to the palace and ask your mother yourself. You can bring those things with you if you like. She can only deny so much when the evidence is clear. I would stay away from the Mad Queen, though, and Lancelot. I have no idea how he became her king.”
Neve bares her teeth, but swipes up the items from her icy shelf, anyway. “I will ask, ice mage. And I’ll prove you wrong. When we’re reunited once again, the only person left to answer questions will be you.”
I wish she were right, but I doubt she is.
I watch Neve take off through the snow, using her ice to glide quickly down the sloping hill.
I brought us out toward the mountain, not far enough that she’ll struggle to get home, but far enough that if we got into a fight it wouldn’t be quite so obvious for anyone back in the capital city.
Before I can step into the shadows, I notice light coming from my pocket. Sighing, I tug the seeing stone free. This is the worst possible time. “I’ll have to talk to you later.”
“Later doesn’t work,” Zarev snaps, and I’m unsurprised to see it’s him. There’s a woman in the background, and when she sits I’m stunned to see it’s Odette instead of Rapunzel. “We need to know about the Icebound. Now.”
“Well, it’ll have to wait,” I remind him, narrowing my eyes. “Right now, I’m about to have a very uncomfortable conversation with the Mad Queen.”