Chapter 3
Revna
In the dark of night, I paid my penance.
Sleep was hard-earned since the Trials. Most nights I lay awake, staring into the darkness and wishing the song would silence for long enough to allow me some rest. When I did succumb to unconsciousness, vivid dreams haunted me. Tonight was no different.
My feet were wrapped in layer upon layer of fabric, but it still wasn’t enough to keep out all the chill of the ice beneath my soles. A set of fishing poles rested on my shoulder and heavy mittens covered my hands. The sun was just beginning to peer over the mountains.
The body I occupied didn’t frown, but mentally I did. We were in the wastes, but that mountain range looked familiar. Where had I seen it before?
I tried to turn my head, but it didn’t move. Instead, I shifted the bag of supplies that rested on my other shoulder. “We should be out far enough now,” a voice said from next to me. “Let’s get set up.”
I turned to see a boy, probably sixteen, setting down his own handfuls of supplies atop the ice.
He was bundled as heavily as I was, covered from head to toe in furs wrapped with leather straps.
His blond hair fell over his face, strands whipping back and forth in the wind.
He scrunched his nose, pink from the cold.
I looked down at the ice. I knew I should be studying it, like the person I dreamt was.
But my attention caught on the fuzzy reflection there.
Long red hair tumbled down from the hood I wore, secured with strips of leather at the base of my skull and then at four-inch intervals all the way down.
My lips were thinner than usual, but the focused expression on my face was eerily similar to the one I saw in the mirror every day.
Who am I?
A loud crack sounded in the distance, and I gasped as I turned in that direction. “A crack in the ice? It’s the dead of winter. How is that possible?” My voice was high-pitched, and I wished again that I could frown.
The boy waved a gloved hand. “Not a crack. That’s normal. The ice shifts sometimes since there’s water beneath it. We’re fine.”
But I shot a nervous glance toward the shore.
It was indistinguishable from the lake, considering everything was covered in a thick layer of snow, but a figure sitting on the edge waved from afar.
In my dreaming state, I couldn’t navigate through my mind enough to put a name to the face of the girl watching us from a distance, but I knew her safety mattered more than anything.
I waved back, my breath steadying again. If the boy said we were fine, then we were fine. He came fishing out here every day in the winter. I’d trusted him with my life plenty of times before, and he’d always kept me safe.
Time passed in a blur as we set up two little stools and a few buckets, then baited our hooks. I watched as my friend grabbed a small chisel and a saw from the bags of supplies and started to chip away at the ice.
Another rumbling crack resounded in the distance. Louder than the last. My shoulders tensed. I could swim—my mother had insisted I learn from a young age, even taking my younger sister and me south during the summers to find bodies of water to practice in. But no one else in the village could.
Including the boy next to me.
He hadn’t even looked up. He continued chiseling away, then shoved the thin saw into the ice’s opening, putting his whole weight on the handle to force the blade beneath.
He didn’t see when the movement turned the ice to spiderwebs below him.
I gasped, the frigid air scraping my lungs.
In the space of a heartbeat, the rumbling returned, this time with a creaking groan so unearthly I wondered briefly whether a monster lived below the surface of the lake.
By the time I opened my mouth, the cracks had spread, their long fingers stretching around him.
Water shoved its way through the gaps, greedy in its arrival.
“Callum!” Instinctually, I scrambled backward. The boy’s wide eyes imprinted in my memory as I watched him push to his feet.
But the redistribution of his weight was too much for the steadily crumbling ice.
The water pulled him under in the blink of an eye. I screamed.
A gust of wind slammed the shutters over my window, startling me into consciousness like a cold bucket of water poured over my head. My heart thudded as if I’d been running. I sucked air into my lungs, rubbing my chest. A phantom ache from breathing the cold air of the wastes nested there.
Unnerved, I pulled my braid over my shoulder, examining it in the moonlight. Still dark as ever. I shook my head and sighed, collapsing back into bed.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had an unsettling dream, and I doubted it would be the last. Each one was the same: I left my body behind to become the red-haired girl I didn’t recognize. The dreams were vivid and memorable each time.
The one consistency between myself and the woman I transformed into in my dreams was the heavy weight of terror we both felt as we watched our lives crumble beneath our feet.
I’d recognized the true reason for the dreams easily enough.
My mind had turned to stories to cope with the endless loss I felt during my waking hours.
This time, though, the dream felt more ominous than before. The boy who fell beneath the ice…I’d called out for him. Callum. The same name my near-assassin had invoked when I caught him.
Coincidence, I told myself. I thought about it too much this morning, and it showed up in my subconsciousness. Nothing more.
Moonlight streamed through the window, the curtains left open out of a compulsion I couldn’t identify.
The first night after the Trials had been the one when I woke to find the Hellbringer sitting at my bedside, unapologetic in the face of his betrayal.
Perhaps I feared the same thing would greet me when I woke and knew the moonlight would allow me to see him.
Or perhaps I feared the other monsters that flourished in the darkness these days.
Lying in bed, wide awake, my thoughts descended like vultures to prey on my mind.
Volkan is angry with you, they whispered. He has shielded you at every turn, and in exchange, you allow your magic to run wild. To ruin everything he’s trying to help you build.
The lump in my throat was never far these days, and it rose again as I desperately tried to keep my breathing steady.
Panicking was the fastest way to bring my unruly magic to the surface—even now it hummed my mother’s lullaby in my ears, a song that no longer brought anything but anxiety.
Soul-crushing, bone-aching loneliness covered me like a shroud at all times.
My thoughts paid little heed to my desperate need for peace, though.
Tomorrow, the treaty will be signed. Freja will discover the truth. And then she will leave you—just like the Hellbringer, just like Frode, just like Volkan wishes he could. And it will be all your fault.
I pressed the heels of my palms into my closed eyes, colors blossoming in the dark.
The amorphous blobs whirled without a care, twisting until they shaped Bjorn’s face taut with pain and surprise as he realized my dagger was buried in his chest. Then they morphed into my father’s limp and broken body sprawled in the sand.
My mother’s still pulse. The assassin’s broken neck.
I sat up, my breathing heavy. There would be no more sleeping tonight. When my thoughts grew restless and insistent in this way, there was only one solution that could distract me.
My fighting clothes were draped across the chair in the corner.
I pulled them on, wondering when my mind would allow me peace again.
When everything was sorted, when the truth had been revealed to Freja, when Volkan had finally given up on me and returned to Faste, when the Lurae and Nilurae were no longer at each other’s throats?
Admit it, my mind taunted as I strapped on my belt and sheathed my sword at my hip. You have everything you dreamt of and it isn’t enough.
The worst part, I decided as my footsteps echoed in the empty halls, was that I knew exactly what would bring me peace again. Or rather, who.
S?ren’s face—no, the Hellbringer’s face, I chided myself—swam in my vision. Pushing open the castle doors and stepping into the freezing night did nothing to dim the heady mixture of longing and grief and fury that ripped through me at the thought of his dark hair, his gray eyes, his soft lips.
Despite the coming spring, frost covered the grass in the courtyard. It crunched beneath my boots, the faint sound grounding me.
No matter how I felt about him, I would see the Hellbringer tomorrow. I had no doubt.
When the Queen of Kryllian and I began correspondence after my coronation, she’d extended an invitation to host our party in her palace while we negotiated the terms of the treaty.
There was only so much that could be accomplished via letters, after all.
And it wasn’t like Bhorglid was in any fit shape to host a foreign delegation.
Knowing we were laying the terms of peace didn’t make me feel any better. This was nothing more than another power struggle, albeit one fought with words and subtle moves instead of blades. And who would show up to a battle without their most powerful general at their side?
The queen had seen to it that I was able to win the competition against my brothers for the throne.
She’d been the one who ordered the Hellbringer to train me in combat.
But even now, with the kingdom under my power, I still couldn’t figure out why.
How did it benefit her to see me on the throne? What was the purpose of it all?
And that question didn’t touch on the even more difficult one: How had the Queen of Kryllian known I had a Lurae, even when it hadn’t manifested yet?
The uncertainty of it all made my head throb.