Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Avette stood at the foot of her own throne, soaking wet and utterly thunderous; only the whip of the winds around her gave away the rage behind her impassive mask.
That, and the slight heave to her slim shoulders, breath moving through her like the storm that encased her.
Her hand was thrown up before her, and from it spilt a long stream of solid ice that arched toward the daggered ceiling.
Ger’s eyes traced the shape of it, a gleaming woven surface like running water caught midstream, that ended in Kai’s cupped hands.
Or began there.
Unlike Avette, the king was far from calm.
He stood alone in a ferocious windstorm, hair blowing wildly around his snarling face, the collar of his shirt snapping in the breeze.
His hands were trapped in the arch of ice, no matter how hard he strained and yanked and thrashed, and a small green stone hung suspended in the air before his nose.
It took Ger several confused blinks to realise that it was a pendant, the chain dancing in the same breeze that blew like a small hurricane, confined to the spot where the Merrow King stood and struggled.
Not a word was spoken throughout the cold hall, barely a sound above a breath save for the distant grunts and curses that slipped from Kai’s hurricane prison.
Slowly, Avette lowered her hands; the arch and the windstorm remained.
Her pendant pulsed erratically, casting a menacing shine to her cold beauty as she took a step down the dais, wet skirts turned grey with the damp as she gathered them in her hands.
Her slippers left slushy footprints on the half-melted frost with every slow step she took toward the Merrow King.
Nobody dared breathe. Ger’s chest was moments from caving.
She stopped just short of Kai’s wild wind prison and blinked those long eyelashes at him.
“Out,” she said, her voice a gentle harmony to the hurricane’s roar.
There was a rustle of movement and loosed breath as the crowd of onlookers exchanged clumsy glances, dazed and uncertain. Out, she had said, but to whom?
With a noise like a whip, the hurricane burst and barrelled outward, the crowd bowing beneath it with a chorus of gasps and yells.
Avette whirled in a broad circle and screamed, curls whipping back in a storm of their own to reveal the blue of her pendant now beaming from her eyes and her open, shrieking mouth. Ger’s blood turned to ice.
“Out,” she howled. It was a primordial voice made of storm, layers of shrieks and roars and echoes. “All of you get out, get OUT! OUT! OUT!”
She was still screaming even as the thick of bodies scattered, debris to her winds.
The spiked ceiling lurched, ice fingers reaching like the claw of some ravenous beast. The queen’s cool mask had fallen, stripping with it all dignity and poise and order, and a steady string of cries hung in the air as the onlookers ran in chaotic terror, staff aiming for the side door and courtiers hurtling for the grand entryway.
Amid the chaos, Ger staggered to his feet.
His heart made every valiant attempt to overcome him, panic drumming in his ears like the frantic knocking of a fist as it begged to be let in.
He ignored it. Somehow, he ignored it. He braced his body against the tide of the crowd and wove through the turmoil, keeping wide of Avette’s back as he made his way to where the other Queen’s Gard stood, watching the crowd with their swords drawn and their eyes intermittently darting to the inching of the ice above their heads.
He was halfway there when a flurry of sparkling skirts caught his eye, and for just a moment, Ger’s panic wedged itself in the gap of his caught breath.
But it was Imogen, not Avette, who had passed him by, a sobbing Mareda in tow.
Imogen staggered mid-step as their eyes met, hers widening beneath arched brows.
She deliberated a moment, over what he could not say—then pursed her lips irritably and hurried off, dragging her hysterical princess after her.
Ger took her cue and kept moving, finally slipping behind the gards and standing to attention as though he’d been there the whole time.
The crowd was thinning, spilling out the side and main doors, and from his periphery, he could see Imogen shove a tuft of material that had to be Mareda through the door of the inner chamber—and then shut it, and turned decisively back to the howling hall.
The hurricane died to a gale, and then a breeze that stirred only around Kai and Avette.
The queen’s damp curls danced behind her, unseeing eyes staring dead ahead, her back to the king as though even now, even having shown her true self to half the occupants of the palace, she could not bear to let him perceive her.
It took a long moment for the visible hints of her rage to draw in, the light slowly ebbing from her eyes to be swallowed by her pendant once more.
Then Avette took a deep inhale that hollowed her fine collarbones, and revolved on the spot.
She considered the king for a moment, still trapped in the ice arch, still wrenching uselessly at his arms, feet skidding in the slush of Avette’s ice and his water.
His water, Ger realised with a jolt. He had Wielded it.
Magic had all but disappeared from the world so long ago it was confined to only the oldest fairytales, with only the barest ice magic still clinging to Eisalaan like frost to a windowpane, and yet somehow—
“Seize him,” Avette said mildly.
And with a flick of her fingers, the ice arch shattered in a thousand winking shards, each of them dissolving into snowdust that fell to the floor in a soft puff of white, little more than a frozen gasp of breath.
Benan was on the king the moment his hands were freed, this time knocking him to the ground with a kick to the back of his knees, arms yanked painfully behind him.
He collapsed in the slush with barely a grunt, but Ger’s lungs folded in on themselves in the same moment the King’s knees hit the ground.
Gone. Simply evaporated, only to be replaced by a swelling, thudding pressure, his insides becoming little more than one panicked pulse.
His mind guttered like a candle, and he reached, uselessly, for his missing scabbard—but found a warm hand instead.
A sharp shock rang keenly through him, and nearly sent him skidding to his arse on the slush, but the hand tightened around his own, and at his side, Imogen fixed him with a swift, assertive look.
“Breathe,” she murmured from the side of her lips, face forward and utterly blank. “Just hold my hand and breathe.”
He blinked back at her. But she just squeezed his hand again, then took a long, deep inhale.
So Ger mimicked her. And then, with his pulse slowing, and Imogen’s hand in his own, he turned and watched as Avette approached the Merrow King.
Around Kai’s neck, the strange pendant still hung eerily aloft, held by unseen hands as he stared defiantly up at the queen.
“Such an interesting little trinket,” said Avette, voice softening as she closed the short distance. “Familiar properties, if perhaps a little weak. Rudimentary, really. Is this seaglass? How primitive.”
She touched the pendant with one long, white nail, tapping out a dull chime that set the King’s jaw to grinding. The grind became audible when her slim hand suddenly closed around the rough glass, the chain pulling taut.
“The real question, of course, is where on all of Adhlas you found it.”
Even there on his knees, with his overgrown beard and too-small clothes, even caught in the grip of a brute and faced with a dead-eyed queen, the Merrow King managed to look tall.
His spine was straight, even if he was wedged between Benan’s push and Avette’s pull.
Poised, and bored, and regal, he blinked slowly up at the queen, and did not speak a single word.
“We both know you could not have made that journey twice,” Avette said, her voice so soft and intimate it made Ger want to glance away.
But Imogen squeezed his hand again, and he forced his gaze forward.
If he hadn’t, he would have missed the spasm of rage that passed over Kai’s face.
He didn’t know what journey she was talking about, but clearly it meant something truly awful to the Merrow King.
“And how would you know, Avette?” said Kai. His voice was low; hoarse with disuse and a contempt so thick Ger swore he could see the King’s gills flicker beneath the brush of his beard. “What do you know of my journey beyond how it benefitted you?”
“I know that you went nowhere else, my heart, for a very,” she paused, leaned in a touch and dropped her voice, “very long time. You stayed, waiting right where I left you.”
“I was not waiting for you,” he ground out.
Avette hummed, a cruel little laugh. “So I have heard.”
Fuck. Ger’s pulse jumped. Adeline. She had to mean Adeline. What had she said to Silas, all those months ago? Wherever I find Adeline, I find my betrothed. But she had him now. She had him—
“Breathe,” whispered Imogen.
“My sweet, devoted Merrow King,” Avette sang, the pretty trill of her voice slicing through Ger’s thoughts and Imogen’s quiet command. “So broken over my loss. So desperate for comfort, after all I sacrificed to save you and yours.”
For the first time, Kai strained against Benan’s hold, face twisting in a feral growl.
“Don’t,” he hissed, shoulders jerking as he struggled to free his hands. “Don’t for a moment pretend that you did any of this for anyone but yourself. You betrayed me, but worse, Avette, you betrayed the Mother herself—”
“The Mother,” Avette laughed, twisting Kai’s pendant idly in her hand. “Have they not yet sung my song in your little flower kingdom? Don’t you know? I am the Mother’s favoured daughter.”