Chapter One
Silas
“You didn’t tell her.”
Silas watched the carriage roll away. He watched until his hands froze into claws where they rested in a white-knuckled grip over the bannister of the South gallery. Watched until there was nothing left to see but a dark speck, edging into the last shadows untouched by the dawn.
“You didn’t tell her what you told me.”
Lady Imogen spoke without looking at him and her flat, distant tone did not deliver the words as a question. So he did not answer.
He was so tired. Tired right down into the marrow of his bones. He thought he might collapse into snowdust, and let the Winds rise and scatter him where he stood. But there was still Edward.
Edward, who had been his friend.
Edward, who had planned to murder his daughter in her bed.
Edward, with the ancient wicked power he’d claimed and the crown hanging at his fingertips.
There could be no rest. Not yet.
Lady Imogen had turned at his silence, and now watched him intently.
“Surely she needs to know that she’s—”
“I didn’t tell her,” Silas said, without taking his eyes from the horizon, “because she is in enough danger as it is. She’s not a child any longer. If it’s still there, she’ll know. This time, she’ll know. And if it was a fluke, or it’s gone, I—”
His voice broke, and he was too tired, too far beyond masculine pride or courtly manners to clear his throat or even swallow down the fractured words.
“If it’s gone, she’ll be safe.”
He hoped it was gone.
That hope was one he’d clung to, the one reason he’d allowed his daughter to bear so many years of loneliness and hurt.
Why he’d never brought her home. To the family she deserved.
Selma may have had an entire country to protect, but Silas had only one daughter, and for her, he would have seen a thousand kingdoms withered by the Frost.
The dark speck disappeared beyond a snowy hill and was gone. His entire heart, gone. Rolling away into the grey horizon, soon to sail across the ocean. Was it his imagination, or had the very air changed? The sky grown dark and ominous, smothering the dawning light?
“The palace will wake soon. We should go inside, Your Grace.”
Still, he did not move. He hadn’t imagined it—it was as though the aching in his chest had unspooled where he stood and cast a wide net of despair over the kingdom. The cold air was heavy on his skin, the clouds full and black, and something was coming, something was—
“Your Grace?”
The skies burst.
Beside him, Imogen shrieked and stumbled back from the cascade of water that dropped like a thundering veil over the edge of the gallery.
Silas reeled only slightly, still holding tight to the railing.
Water pelted his knuckles, and he lifted one hand, reaching tentatively into the cold, open air until a shallow pool collected in his palm, rippling and splashing.
“Rain.”
He laughed, surprising himself with the sound. It rose from some place within him he’d already lost sight of.
“It’s raining.”
Silas glanced over his shoulder at Imogen, who was pressed to the wall like a furious cat on the edge of a bathtub. She took a cautious step, peering out into the watery blur of the courtyard below.
“It doesn’t rain in Eisalaan,” she said faintly.
But she reached into the downpour, and let rivulets of rain coat her slim brown hand like a glove.
She stood that way for a long moment, turning her fingers this way and that, mesmerised by the movement of the water on her skin.
It was the sudden fork of silver-white spearing the sky that set her skittering back again.
Her eyes were round enough that white ringed the dark brown — and though they were so different in so many ways, it was Adeline that Silas saw in that moment.
Young and frightened.
“Lightning,” Silas said gently. It was easy to forget, in the fog of his own pain and exhaustion.
For all her poise and presence, for all her extravagance and sharp wit, Lady Imogen was barely older than his own daughter.
Always a girl to him, really, and a child of Eisalaan.
It was entirely likely she had never seen lightning before in her life.
“It’s a storm,” he went on. “Next there’ll be—”
A growing rumble underlined his words, then drowned him out with an earth splitting crack that made the girl flinch.
“Thunder,” he finished. “It’s just a storm.”
She stared out at the flood, then back at him with those same wide eyes. But she nodded, and drew herself up, slipping easily into her usual grace.
“We need to turn inside, now, Your Grace. Before anyone sees you watching the gates and realises she’s gone.”
“Go then. If I’m found out, you can’t be seen to have helped.”
Imogen did not argue; she curtsied briefly, and was gone. Silas turned back to the downpour and stared through it as though he could will the curtain of rain to part, to show him one last glimpse of the empty white horizon. When it didn’t, he shook off his hand and stepped indoors.
He strode through the echoing marble halls with no particular destination in mind.
Just not here. Not anywhere Edward might come across him, with Adeline’s carriage still rolling through the streets of Eisalaan, hours away from the eastern port.
In this sudden downpour, Aera only knew how long it might take them to—
“Your Grace.”
Silas halted mid-step, catching himself against the corner wall he’d been rounding. The call of his formal title had not rung particularly loud in the hallway, but the cold rasp that delivered it was all too familiar.
Silas took a beat to compose himself.
Then turned on the spot.
“Captain Doran.”
The Captain gave a shallow bow. Then standing tall, he sneered and said, “It’s been a while.”
And at that grotesque twist of his thin lips, Silas could have lunged.
Could have wrapped both his hands around Doran’s tree trunk of a neck and squeezed, reminding him of the last time they’d seen each other.
It had taken three gards to wrestle him back that day at the Tourney; two to grab him round the ribs and another to pry his fingers from their Captain’s throat.
Had Selma not appeared behind him, he had no doubt Doran’s cronies would have retaliated in kind, and then some.
As it was, they’d only delivered the threat with their venomous stares.
Those same stares met his now; two gards appeared, flanking Doran on either side, hands resting casually on the hilts of their sheathed swords.
Silas made himself breathe through the urge.
“It has,” he said, the words scraping out through his teeth. “I wasn’t aware your suspension had been lifted.”
The Captain gave a bob of his head, a poor imitation of humbleness.
“The Commander has been most gracious.”
“And Edward makes the rules now, does he?”
Doran’s grin was sharp and edged with menace. “Well, he is the young Queen’s, ah—closest advisor, at present.”
Silas froze, and tried not to show it. Cold horror sank through him, frigid and brittle as the shattered ice that split the Laune.
The young Queen.
So that was it. Selma dead, Adeline gone, and Mareda on the throne.
It was all Edward could have hoped for.
The gards took another step forward, coming in line with their Captain at some unspoken signal.
Silas did not move, but found it in himself to raise a brow at the taller one, who leered at him.
The brute who’d fought Adeline in her first round of the Tourney, he realised.
Brenner, or Ben—no. Benan? Silas dragged his gaze away, back to Captain Doran.
“How gracious of them both, indeed.” He forced his tone steady, threading boredom and disdain through every word, even as his heart hammered against his ribs. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, it has been a long night. I ought to get to bed.”
“Oh, I think you’ll want to come with us, Your Grace.”
“Will I?” he said flatly.
“It would be best,” rasped Benan at Doran’s side. He couldn’t seem to help himself, rolling up on the balls of his feet like a giant, menacing child.
Doran flicked an irritated hand at him, though his eyes never left Silas’s. His grin spread, a white slash in the sickly grey of his skin.
“Her Majesty has requested an audience.”
???
His first impression, as he stepped through the door with a sword at his back, was the bite of cold air. A hushed skittering all around him; the sound of a dozen sets of teeth, all chattering in unison.
The throne room was strewn with courtiers, scattered at the edges of the farthest wall, shrinking away from the throne at the other end.
Some of them wore their bedrobes, many still in their dark blue mourning wear from Selma’s Parting Breath.
Most of them seemed bewildered and half asleep, and those that didn’t—
They were terrified.
For just one moment, Silas could not imagine what Edward might have done to inspire such fear. Then his eyes snagged on two figures kneeling at the fore of the sparse crowd, their heads bowed; one shaggy and streaked with grey, the other bright as spun gold.
Edward and—
“Mareda?”
The princess glanced up from beneath her long sheet of golden hair, tear-rimmed eyes flicking from his to the throne, and back to the cold, tile floor.
Her skirts pooled around her in a wide circle of overlapping silk, white as glittering snow.
One of her knees was bent beneath her, the other leg jutting out awkwardly, still healing from her ordeal at the Tourney.
Her crutch lay on the ground at her side.
“What—” Silas began, but he was cut off by a voice of sweetness and light.
“Your Grace.”
He whirled.