Chapter 24
Lark
It starts as a simple question, barked by Helkki between bites of roasted turnip at dinner the next night.
“Why is the queen such a bitch?”
“Language, Hellion,” I snap. “We can’t say things like that.”
Val’s spoon freezes halfway to her mouth. Actually freezes. She has to shake off the frost and lower it to her lap. Luckily, no one else notices.
“I don’t get it.” Katja sighs. “She does nothing to help. Winter never ends. Food’s short. You’d think a queen would lift a finger to come to our aid, open trade routes, send supplies. Something.”
“She abandoned us.” Mika speaks so rarely that we all just stare.
The silence stretches into tension the same way my muscles do at what trouble these words of discord could land us in. But I should know better than to fear our princess’s reaction.
She breaks the stillness with a whisper. “She wasn’t always like that.”
Every head turns.
“I met her…before.” Val straightens her moonstone necklace with deliberate calm, masking the lies she needs to keep spinning.
When she gave me the safe version of her story the other night, there was so much left unsaid between her words. I can only imagine how hard this is for her. I wasn’t sure she would be comfortable enough to share with the rest of them, but I’m glad she is.
With a steadying breath, she begins. “When I was younger, my family visited the summer palace. We were part of a trade envoy; wealthy enough to get invited inside the gates back when they were more open.”
“You met the queen?” Aili breathes.
“Hush, Aili. Let her tell it,” I murmur, eager for any more kernels of truth I can glean from whatever she’s willing to share.
“She was radiant. The woman she was back then was no Ice Queen. Yes, she always had incredibly powerful ice magic, but she used it to make the most intricate ice sculptures I’ve ever seen.
Delicate birds that looked like they’d take flight, towers of lacework frost that caught every glint of sunlight, reindeer leaping over hedgerows.
They sparkled in the sun even as they melted away.
And her smile… I used to watch her turn that loving smile on her husband and stepdaughter and think how lucky they were. ”
How lucky she was…
I’m glimpsing a love for her family that I never imagined.
Why did I never picture a glowing young princess who loved her parents and admired ice sculptures?
I only ever imagined a spoiled Point Fae who never wanted for anything.
But it’s clear there was true love in her life, real joy.
And it’s clear in the ache under her voice now that she feels the loss of it keenly.
Not just her father’s death, but her stepmother’s love being taken away.
I want to claw back time and hold her through the pain.
“Are you sure we’re talking about the same queen?” Juani asks. “I’ve never seen her smile.”
Recent portraits and news flyers only ever show a severe face, the slash of her mouth a hard line against gaunt cheeks, that streak of white stark against her black hair.
“She used to. She used to read aloud to the court children, too,” Val says softly. “Really, she was reading for one little girl in particular. She always picked the little girl’s favorite books to read.”
Her expression is careful, but I hear the truth. One little princess. Her.
“Sounds like a better queen than the one we’ve got now,” Katja says.
“She was.” Val’s nod is sad.
Hugo crawls out of my pocket and onto the table with a soft grunt. Listening.
“What happened to her?” Johannes asks.
Val’s fingers tighten in her skirt. She doesn’t look up. “The king died.”
It’s a simple statement—the easiest answer—but I can hear the bottled-up pain pressed into those three words.
I remember the headlines. The mourning. The pictures of a princess shrouded in her veil.
“How did the king die?”
“Aili—” I cut off my rebuke of the blunt little grump when Val shakes her head.
“It’s fine.” She takes a breath, then offers the official story we all heard. “It was a kelpie hunt. He was wounded and didn’t survive the journey home.”
“A kelpie? Really?” Juani asks.
The king was a renowned hunter. It’s said there are trophies of every wild beast he killed mounted on the throne room walls.
Val glances at me, something unreadable in her eyes.
“That’s what everyone says. But…there were rumors.
Some said that a party of Night Guardians from Nattvarnheim had crossed the border into our lands.
That the spilled blood from the kelpie attack drew them, and they came to feast. The huntsmen and king fought them off, killing every last bloodsucker, but they lost three more men, including m—” She blinks and rubs at her throat. “Including our king.”
Most of us sit stunned. It’s unthinkable that Night Guardians would venture into the Hinterlands when they always stick to their shadowy territory. But she would know better than anyone.
Aili tilts her head. “And then the queen turned mean?”
Val wears a mask as icy as our queen’s. “I guess so. They say she sealed the border with a wall of ice that spread as far as the eye could see. It never melts. Some believe that’s when the seasons stopped turning and winter became endless. So the rumors say.”
Rumors? Or something she witnessed?
She clears her throat. “When my family returned to the capital for the funeral, the queen was ice cold. She didn’t acknowledge anyone. Not even the princess.”
“That must’ve been hard,” I say before I can think better of it.
“I’m sure it was…for the queen.”
“And for Princess Talvie,” I add quietly.
She shrugs tightly, trying for nonchalance, but her hands quake in her lap. “Clearly the queen never recovered, for her to keep being so selfish. Isolating us all.”
Bitterness bites through her words.
That was her life. Years spent in a lavish palace, but isolated and alone inside walls built to keep everyone out. My princess, my sweetheart with her sensitive soul, locked away with no one to love her. No one to hold her. The painful grip on my heart tightens.
“She made an entire wall of ice?” Johannes asks.
Hugo adds his voice to the question with a squeak.
“She’s powerful,” Val says. “Too powerful to fight against.”
“Maybe she just forgot how to love,” Aili says.
I give my head a shake. The words are too sweet to have come from my tough little grouch. Val’s head turns so fast, I expect her neck to crack. I can’t tell if it’s grief or wonder on her face, but she stares for too long.
Then she whispers, “Aili, you might be a genius.”
We wait.
Val blinks and looks around the room like she forgot we were here.
I hate seeing her look so lost. “You think the Ice Queen needs to be reminded of love?”
“I don’t know. I thought the ice wall was about keeping danger out, and the endless winter was an accidental side effect.
But what if it was the point? What if she locked her grief and loneliness in?
” Her sapphire eyes dance across our faces with shades of Princess Talvie’s aubergine glimmering through in my sight.
“If there was a way to get her to see what I—what the people out here go through…If she could just open her heart, even for a moment…”
Hugo gives a questioning chirrup, and I scoop him off the table to stroke his quills.
“She’s not grumpy, she’s just sad,” says Aili, making Katja loop a comforting arm around the girl’s shoulders.
Mikael’s voice is low in the quiet. “She froze her own heart.”
The princess leans back with a small gasp. After all the time I’ve been watching her, I can read the expressions her face rolls through. Wonder. Confusion. Revelation.
“She…can’t feel love. If she could feel love, she wouldn’t treat people this badly. We have to make her feel again!”
“We?” I ask.
Val’s brow furrows. “Is there any way to make someone feel love?”
“Love for others is hard to force on anyone,” I start, even as ideas flow, tangling into knots, dissolving into smoke.
There’s something there. A kernel at the center.
Hugo chirps in my hands. “Right. Especially when someone’s been closed off to feeling anything for so long.
It won’t be easy to break through. If we want to reach her, we have to start small. Something visceral.”
Everyone leans in.
“Romantic love,” I say. “It’s personal. Immediate. Easier to fake.”
Val flinches at my side.
Easier to fake. I curse silently.
It’s so easy to fake, I’ve even fooled myself.
No time for my own feelings now, I forge on.
“I have an idea. Instead of our usual plays, we can put on a special performance for the queen at the Trade Light festival that shows love in all its messy, hopeful, ridiculous glory. And we bring the entire audience into it. She needs to be part of the play for this to work. We have to remind her what love feels like.”
Val says nothing. But when I look her way, she’s sitting tall again, watching me. Not like I’m a fool, but like she sees something worth believing in.
In my head, the plans twist together.
Over the next two days, we finalize the script and begin rehearsing our roles for the most important performance of our lives. I gather plants and herbs, assembling all the ingredients we’ll need to make this play unforgettable.
Luck is on our side the day of the full moon when I find a patch of Valerian growing wild outside town, in the warm patch behind the smith’s forge.
The twins help me carry armloads of the flowering plant back to the cottage, enough for a whole vat of dreaming tea.
For this performance to work, the audience will have to join us in a dream-like state, with open minds and hearts.
In the middle of the cottage’s chaotic piles of costumes and props, I catch sight of Val kneeling beside Aili, carefully adjusting the little one’s sash.
Aili says something that makes Val smile, soft and genuine, before she leans in to brush a kiss over the girl’s hair. The sight twists something in my chest.
I linger in the doorway longer than I mean to. When Val moves away, I go kneel beside Aili.
“It’s okay to be sad.”
“I’m not sad.” She frowns as if I’ve said something strange.
“Okay. It was only…when we were talking about the queen the other day, you said she’s not grumpy, just sad. Is that how you feel sometimes?”
She shrugs.
“Because it’s okay if you do. We’re all sad sometimes. Even me.”
“Really?”
“Mhmm.” I tuck teal strands of hair behind her ear, smiling when her pout softens. “I know the orphanage wasn't much, but I feel sad about losing it. I'm still sad about losing Frederik. And growing up, I sometimes felt sad that I never had a mother in my life. Is that how you feel?”
She thinks, then, “Maybe.”
For once, she lets me hug her. Her little arms even loop around my neck, hugging me back.
“I’m not as sad anymore, though,” Aili whispers.
It breaks my heart all over again, because I know it’s because of Val.
Storms, I wish this wasn’t all an amazing dream I have to wake up from.
Selfishly, for me, but also for the kids, I wish this didn’t have an expiration date looming.
All our lives are better with Val in them.
I’m better with her around, even if I could never be worthy of keeping her.
I hate living on borrowed time and knowing how upset we’ll all be after this is over. No matter how the hearing goes, I’ll be losing someone important and dear to me, and my life after her will be worse for it.
I can’t bear to bring Aili down with me just yet, so I stay kneeling on the floor beside her until she decides she’s done with hugging and leaves me there to stew. Except there’s no time for stewing.
I have to pick myself up and keep going. Always moving forward.
Before we can worry about the hearing, there’s the festival and the play, and before that, I have to focus on the full moon tonight. I can’t have my attention split.
As evening approaches, the younger kids grow rowdy with anticipation for their first full moon revel.
Mika is quieter than usual, a reflection of my own darker mood, but he still smiles over the others from a corner.
When the sun dips low and the sky streaks with violet, it’s time to gather the silver shackles.