Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jack
Panic seized my chest like a vise the moment the ice shattered beneath Sylvi, and she vanished.
There was no thought, no hesitation. Just instinct.
I’d flung myself into the water after her, the freezing shock slamming into me like a spear to the ribs.
It hadn’t been me I’d been worried about, though.
At that temperature, Sylvi wouldn’t have lasted long submerged in those waters.
The wraith had pulled her under so fast, it was as if a stone had been tied to her feet.
The lake swallowed her whole, a black, silent grave.
I’d blinked, trying to see through the dark, my magic flaring through the water, thin ribbons of blue-white light spiraling from my hands, but even that barely penetrated the depths.
White shadows had slithered through the lake like coils of smoke. The wraiths had recoiled at my presence, muffled shrieks exploding through the water as I blasted them with pulses of power. It hadn’t been enough to kill them, only scatter them. And even that took effort.
That’s when a silver glimmer shone among the dark, and hope returned to my lungs.
Moonshadow.
I’d kicked harder, vision tunneling, my lungs screaming for air, but I didn’t relent. My fingers found her, arms limp at her sides, her body death-still. I wrapped my arm around her waist, holding her tight.
The wraith lunged at me when it saw I was stealing its prey, and it clawed through the water.
I pried the seax from Sylvi’s frozen fingers and drove it straight into the creature’s face. It writhed and convulsed before slinking away, vanishing into the gloom, taking the blade with it.
By the time I broke the surface, Sylvi was still, lips blue, skin pale as snow. I’d hauled her onto the shore, collapsing to my knees. “Breathe,” I’d rasped, tilting her head and pressing my mouth to hers. I forced my breath into her lungs. Again. And again. “Breathe, dammit—come on!”
I’d never known such relief could hollow me out so completely than when she came to with a violent gasp, her chest convulsing with coughs.
After I rushed her to my pavilion, Sascha and Ingrid bid me to wait outside while they worked. I’d hated every second of it. But she was in capable hands, I knew that.
It had been for the best, anyway.
That had been ten minutes ago, but my veins still burned, rage festering beneath my skin with nowhere to go. I needed an outlet before I razed the whole gods-damned camp with frostfire.
I spotted Varik near the outer fire ring, his cloak torn, his jaw tight, recounting the events in the forest to those gathered.
Just the sight of him struck a flint in my chest. He’d run.
Left his soldiers behind. While Sylvi had put herself between us and a pack of cursed nightmares to buy us seconds, he hadn’t even looked back when Torin fell through the ice.
I crossed the camp in five strides, fists clenched, fury crackling at my heels. I stopped inches from Varik’s chest. “I told you to retreat to the lake, not to abandon your soldiers.”
Varik straightened, face flushed. “I did what I had to—”
I ripped the captain’s insignia from his cloak, the threads tearing with a satisfying snap. “You are hereby stripped of your command.”
“You don’t have that authority—”
Darkness surged in my blood, the unseelie beast in me coiling, rising. I didn’t need a mirror to know my irises had turned obsidian. “I’m your commanding officer.”
“The queen appointed me.”
“And I’m demoting you.”
Varik’s face twisted in anger, but I stepped closer. “That collar you secured around my neck… I let you and Kaelven shackle me. Not because I couldn’t fight back, but because I owed a blood debt. For that boy. Don’t mistake restraint for weakness.”
Silence.
Varik sneered. “The queen will hear of this.”
A slow smirk curled my lips, but it held no warmth. “You shamed your position the moment you ran. You didn’t just abandon Torin; you left Astrid, Ravin. You left your post. A captain never saves their own skin first. Your dishonor is your own.”
He readjusted his breastplate. “It’s her you plan to reinstate as captain, isn’t it? My soldiers will never follow her command.”
He looked to the others around the fire, trying to rally support. Twenty soldiers stared back. A few exchanged glances, uncertain. Three males stood beside him.
The rest dropped to a knee.
Varik spat in the snow and stormed off toward his tent, his loyal rats trailing behind him.
I turned to the kneeling soldiers. “Prepare the fallen. At first light, we honor them with a Skadgardian funeral pyre. Let Náldrún welcome their spirits with proper rites.”
Before I could speak again, a voice cried from the watchtower, “Riders approaching!”
I spun toward the gates. Astrid appeared from the crowd, my father’s sword in her hand. She flung it at me. “My Prince, figured you might need this.”
I caught it by the hilt, eyes widening. “I thought I’d lost it on the ice.”
“You did. I went back and got it for you.”
“It’s Draumskelmir, Your Highness,” the archer shouted. “And two other horses. And pack of…wolves giving chase.”
My stomach dropped. Those weren’t wolves.
“Let the horses through,” I barked as I sprinted toward the gates. “Everyone else, hold your positions on the wall. Do not, under any circumstances, let those beasts chasing them through.”
The moment the horses were inside the gates, I dropped to one knee and slammed a hand to the frozen ground.
The ice answered my call, spears of frost erupting in a wide arc, fencing the beasts two hundred yards out in a cage of jagged crystal.
The Nyrvendir howled, silver eyes glowing like molten moons. One hurled itself against the wall, snarling, but the cage held.
My gaze shot to the forest’s edge, a venomous hum rippling in the air.
The Helvaktír.
They hovered just beyond the trees, their cloaked shapes suspended mid-air. Watching. Waiting. Their fury crawled across my skin like biting wind. But they did not come closer.
“Son of Ice… You cannot escape your fate.”
Their whispers thumped in my head, pressing hard on my skull, but this time I pushed back against the pain, against their power.
I stood, raising my father’s sword. My magic rippled from my hands, coiling around the blade until it was completely consumed in frostfire.
“If you want me, come and get me, assholes.”
The wraiths didn’t approach. They continued to hover like shivering shapes of darkness cloaked in mist, as if an invisible threshold held them back. My pulse thudded, but something deeper stirred in my chest. A knowing. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt it down in my gut.
They feared me. Feared my magic.
One of the wraiths glided forward a fraction, robes undisturbed by wind, its face nothing but a black hole. Then came the whispers again, though this time, they didn’t make my skull ache.
“The blood of the old kings stirs in your veins, frostborne princeling… Bound in shadow, crowned in silence, you walk the edge of ruin and reign. Break the seals and shatter the chains. Take what was stolen. Ascend, O King of Frost and Shadow, and rise we shall, beside you.”
My grip tightened on the sword’s hilt. “I am not your king,” I growled.
But the Helvaktír only drifted back, their forms melting into the gloom as if they’d already said enough. As if they knew the seeds they’d planted would fester.
The Nyrvendir didn’t need a command. The cursed wolves halted their howling and slinked after their masters, tails low, like they hated leaving prey behind. But they obeyed.
Exhaustion crashed through me. After taking a few deep breaths, I returned to camp, but first, I needed to ensure those beasts would not be able to penetrate our defenses.
To invoke the favor of the gods, I touched the three sacred points with my the pad of my thumb…
Forehead for wisdom, heart for courage, and my mouth for truth and the binding power of my word.
Pressing a hand to the outer wall, I whispered a protective ward in the ancient words ingrained in me since childhood. “By sacred blood and silent vow, I bid our Skadgardian gods to guard us now. That this darkness crashes and breaks against my frost and searing flame.”
Frostfire flared from my hand, crawling up the gates and across the glistening surface of the entire wall encircling the camp, sealing the perimeter in light, magic, and ice.
Those beasts wouldn’t dare return. Not tonight.
Inside the wall, the camp stirred in uneasy silence. Astrid stood nearby, holding Draumskelmir’s reins. My horse nickered at me, hooves restless as I approached.
“He wouldn’t go with the other horses,” she said, “desperate to go after you.”
I sheathed my sword and brought my forehead to his, patting his flank. “It is good to see you, Tryggur.”
“He is unscathed, as are my mare and Ravin’s horse. The other three didn’t return.”
“Thank you,” I said to her. “For everything. You fought bravely. And you stayed with my friend.”
She dipped her head, her wind-tossed braid falling over her shoulder. “He wouldn’t traverse the lake without you.”
A corner of my mouth twitched. “How is he?”
“In the medic tent. Sascha’s stitching up that gash on his thigh. He’ll be fine.”
Relief swept through me in a wave. “That means Sylvi is okay?”
Astrid nodded. “Sascha said they gave her a sedative tea. She’s warm and sleeping.”
“Thank the goddess.”
“Go to her,” she said. “I’ll make sure Draumskelmir is looked after.”
I nodded my appreciation, then faced the center of camp to address the gathered guards before heading to see Sylvi. “Keep the watch doubled. But we should be safe until dawn. The walls are warded with frostfire; that should hold them back.”
A few nodded. One traced his fingers over the three sacred points. Another murmured a blessing to the gods.
“We rise at first light,” I added. “To burn the pyre and honor our dead. Then we make for Thrymgard. The king is expecting us. I don’t want to spend any more time in these lands than we have to. We’ll ride through the night if needed to reach their camp sooner.”
No one questioned me as I headed toward the pavilion.
The tent was quiet, dying candlelight flickering over the pelts and furs hanging on the canvas walls.
Warmth clung to the space, the brazier still glowing with ashy coals in the far corner.
The scent of clove tea wrapped around another undisputable scent…
hers. I inhaled it deep into my lungs, taking all the solace from it that I needed.
Gods. She was alive.
The ache in my chest unfurled into something unbearable. Not grief. Something worse. Love. And the terrible, paralyzing, bone-deep terror of losing her. She’d been close to death twice now in a matter of days.
I could barely distinguish what I felt anymore. Gratitude twisted with longing. Relief tangled with dread.
The primal side of me—the one buried in my male-fae blood—roared to cage her, to lock her away where no danger could ever touch her. I could trap her inside a ball made of crystal ice, then snuff out the sun and plunge the world into eternal frost and midnight to keep the ball from ever melting.
Gods, that sounded awful.
But also, that wasn’t who Sylvi was. No one could ever cage her, not even me. And Skadi help me, that was the irony. The wildness that made her reckless, the fire that made her defiant, the endless way she ran headfirst into chaos for the sake of others—that was the part of her I loved most.
She was fierce and brave, and I shook with the knowledge that it would be that part of her that would ruin me.
I waited a heartbeat longer at the threshold, breathing her in, branding this moment to memory.
Sylvi lay curled beneath the furs on my bed, her dark lashes framing her resting eyes, her breathing slow but even. Her unbound hair lay splayed around my pillow in waves, and her lips were slightly parted, pink again instead of that terrifying shade of blue.
I wanted to bottle this moment: Sylvi wrapped in my things, tangled in my scent, just the two of us secluded away from everyone, in our own little cocoon. Gods, if I could only tuck her in my chest and lock her there forever.
I shook the thoughts from my head.
That reality was mere fantasy. We weren’t in this tent to kindle the fire that had started to rage between us. We were here because we were on an envoy to meet the Unseelie King—and my future fucking wife.
To smile and lie and surrender my freedom for peace.
I crossed to the weapons rack on silent feet, fingers moving slowly as I unbuckled my belt and set my sword in place. But in this cramped space, even that soft creak of leather, the faint clink of steel, was enough to stir the dead.
“Jack?”
Her voice cracked against the silence, soft and weary, and I broke. That voice had unimaginable power over me. Enough to bend my will. Enough to make me kneel.
I turned, and gods help me… Her voice didn’t even compare to her eyes.
One glance, drowsy and dewy, full of starlight and pillow-touched promises…and I would’ve crawled across the breadth of Skadgard on bleeding hands just to have her look at me like that forever.