Chapter 4
Chapter four
Katria
When I woke, the world was white.
Not the soft white of morning snow over Hollowmere but a colorless gleam that seemed to swallow everything. Light pressed through the walls, too bright to look at directly, as if the room itself had been carved from frozen sky.
I sat up slowly, my breath clouding in the air. The bed beneath me was cold stone softened by a thin layer of fur. It should have been uncomfortable, yet the cold had its own stillness—too perfect to disturb.
My satchel lay near the foot of the bed. I reached for it, fingers stiff, and pulled out the bundle of herbs I’d hidden there. Dried mint, feverleaf, a little kingsroot from the hollow behind my cottage. The leaves had blackened overnight. Their smell—once sharp and alive—was gone.
“Too cold for anything living,” I whispered.
The walls seemed to hear me. A faint hum rippled through the frost, like the sound of a far-off chime. I pressed my palm to the nearest surface; it bit back, numbing my skin instantly. The palace of Winter was alive, and it didn’t like me.
A soft knock broke the silence—three quick taps that echoed too loudly. When I opened the door, a Frostguard stood there, pale-eyed and expressionless.
“Lady Katria,” he said, voice flat as polished stone. “His Highness requests your presence at midday. You will wear appropriate attire.”
He offered a folded garment: a cloak heavy enough to crush my shoulders, silver fur along the collar, runes stitched in shimmering thread.
I thanked him out of habit. He didn’t reply—only bowed his head and vanished back into the corridor, the door sealing itself behind him with a faint hiss of frost.
I unfolded the cloak. It glittered like a sheet of ice. The runes crawled faintly under my fingertips—alive or pretending to be. It was beautiful in the way knives are.
“No,” I murmured. “You’ll not make me one of them.”
I hung it over the chair and went to the window instead. The glass looked solid, yet I could see movement within it—light drifting like underwater currents. Beyond, the world stretched, endless and pale, mountains shining like fractured mirrors under a sky that never changed.
A sound somewhere below—boots striking ice, the faint rhythm of patrols—reminded me that this stillness was not peace. It was vigilance.
I straightened my shoulders, rubbed warmth back into my hands, and looked around the room for anything that still belonged to me. Only the satchel. The rest might as well have been grown from the same frost that built this palace.
“If they mean to keep me,” I told the empty air, “they’ll learn I don’t freeze easy.”
Frost along the window bloomed in delicate spirals, answering me like breath on glass.
The corridor beyond my door swallowed sound. My footsteps vanished almost before they began, leaving only the faint whisper of fur lining against stone. The air had a weight to it, as if the palace were listening.
Columns of ice rose like trees, their surfaces etched with thin silver veins that pulsed every few seconds—heartbeats, if Winter had one.
Between them, I caught glimpses of servants moving in silence, faces half-hidden by frost-woven veils.
None met my eyes. One bowed slightly, then crossed to the opposite side as if my shadow might burn.
The temperature shifted the farther I walked, the light thinning into a shade too blue to be real.
At each turn, the walls breathed faint mist, as though the entire palace exhaled around me.
Once, I thought I heard a whisper—my name, soft and uncertain—but when I turned, only frost drifted through the air like dust.
A guard waited where the corridor widened into a long bridge of glass. His armor glimmered faintly; even the metal looked frozen. “Lady Katria,” he said, inclining his head. “This way to the audience hall.”
He didn’t offer his arm. I wouldn’t have taken it.
As we walked, I tried to remember the stories told in Hollowmere—of fae who stole voices, of palaces where mortals turned to ice if they spoke too loudly. I almost laughed. The truth was quieter, colder. Not cruelty, not yet—only the indifference of a world that had forgotten warmth existed.
We crossed beneath an arch where runes burned dimly, and a gust of air lifted the hair at my temples. Beyond it, the palace opened into a great hall lined with frozen banners and mirrors that caught the aurora from outside. At the far end waited a dais and a single figure.
The Frostbound Heir.
Even from a distance I knew him—the same measured stillness, the same sharp lines that could have been carved rather than born. The crownless prince who had looked at me yesterday as if measuring what I was worth. Now he stood waiting, expression unreadable.
The guard stopped a few paces behind me. “His Highness, Prince Kaelith of Winter.”
Kaelith’s gaze lifted, pale and cutting. “The mortal,” he said, voice smooth and cold enough to mist in the air between us. “Punctual. That’s … unexpected.”
I bit back the first answer that came to mind. “Your message said noon. I thought it unwise to be late.”
A flicker passed through his eyes—amusement, maybe—but it was gone before I could be sure. He gestured toward the center of the hall. “Then stand where the light reaches you. We’ll see what you are.”
I did. The light from the mirrors slid over me like water, too bright, too cold, and the hush that followed felt like a held breath.
The mirrors threw back more light than the room could hold. Every surface gleamed, fractured into hundreds of reflections, so that for a moment I saw him everywhere—the Frostbound Heir multiplied into a thousand shards of ice.
He stood at the center of them, motionless, every line of him composed. His armor wasn’t silver as I expected, but a darker hue, almost blue-black, like the sky before snow. The runes etched along his gauntlets glowed faintly, the light crawling with each heartbeat.
“Lady Katria Vale,” he said at last, and the way my name left his mouth sounded like a test. “Daughter of no house. Apothecary. Mortal envoy of Hollowmere.”
Each title fell colder than the last.
I straightened my spine. “You forgot unwilling.”
A few of the courtiers lining the hall—thin, elegant shapes draped in pale silk—stirred at that. Their eyes glittered from behind translucent veils, curious but sharp, as if waiting for me to break and bleed curiosity for them to taste.
Kaelith’s mouth curved—not quite a smile. “Willingness wasn’t part of the bargain.”
“No,” I said quietly. “That much was clear.”
He descended two shallow steps, the movement so controlled it might have been choreographed. “Tell me, apothecary—do mortals still trade superstition for truth? I’ve heard they burn healers who cure too well.”
“I was offered,” I said. “Not burned.”
“An improvement.” His gaze swept over me once, assessing, not leering, but it still made my skin prickle. “You claim your work uses no magic.”
“I don’t claim. It doesn’t.”
“Then convince me.”
He said it without malice, yet the words pressed close, like a hand around my throat. I met his eyes anyway. “If you’re expecting me to conjure proof, I can’t. Healing isn’t spectacle. It’s knowledge.”
Something flickered there—an unreadable shift, gone too quickly to name. “Knowledge has a cost in this court.”
“I’ve paid mine already.”
He studied me longer than was polite. The court’s silence deepened until I could hear my own pulse echo off the glass.
At last, he spoke again, voice measured yet detached. “You’ll remain in the west wing. The guard will ensure you’re provided for. You’ll not stray from the boundaries assigned to you.”
“Because you’re afraid I’ll melt the walls?” I meant it as sarcasm, but the moment it left my mouth I regretted it.
The faintest tilt of his head. “Afraid? No. But curiosity can be a dangerous indulgence here, mortal. Try not to give the court a reason to indulge it.”
Then he turned, dismissing me as easily as closing a book. A gesture toward the guards sent them forward.
I should have left it there—bowed, curtsied, done whatever they expected of docile tributes—but something in his tone, that smooth authority without warmth, scraped at me.
“I’m not your enemy,” I said.
He stopped, looking over his shoulder. The light caught in his eyes and fractured it into pale fire.
“No,” he said, soft and distant. “You’re something else entirely.”
And then he walked away, leaving me in the silence that followed—a silence that seemed to stretch all the way to the heart of the palace.
They led me out through a hall of glass trees that chimed when the air moved. Each branch was so clear I could see my reflection bending across a thousand frozen angles. Somewhere above, light spilled through thin skylights, breaking into ribbons that shimmered over the floor.
“This is the west wing,” the guard said. “Your quarters are beyond the garden. Do not wander.”
I nodded, though my gaze kept catching on the strange beauty of it all—the way the ice seemed to breathe, the faint crackle like a sigh beneath every step. Nothing about this place stayed still. Even silence had movement.
A low sound stopped us—a deep, resonant rumble that vibrated through the floor. The guard stiffened, hand on his weapon. “Don’t move,” he whispered.
From between the crystal trunks, a shape emerged. White fur shimmered like spun glass; eyes, blue as glacial fire, fixed on me. The snowhound’s breath misted in steady clouds, each exhale freezing into small stars before falling to the ground.
“Fenrir,” the guard breathed, fear tightening his voice. “He only answers to the Frostbound Heir.”
The creature padded closer. Its paws left no sound, only faint prints that glowed before fading. I forced myself not to back away.
“You’re magnificent,” I said softly. My voice barely reached my own ears, yet the hound stopped, head tilting as if listening.
The guards didn’t dare move. Fenrir took one final step, lowering his head until I could see my reflection inside those pale eyes—small, trembling, determined. His breath touched my wrist, cold and clean as mountain air.
Then he turned, circled once, and sat at my side. The guards stared, wide-eyed, waiting for him to strike. Instead, the great beast leaned into me with the faintest brush of weight, as if testing my balance, before settling on his haunches.
“He’s … choosing her,” one guard whispered.
I didn’t look away from the hound. “Seems he has good sense.”
No one laughed. The air had gone thinner, sharper. When the guards finally found their voices, it was only to escort me on in silence with whispers too hushed for me to hear, Fenrir padding beside me like a shadow made of light.
As we walked, the mirrored walls shifted.
I caught flashes that weren’t ours—movements deeper in the ice, figures passing just out of sight.
At first I thought it was a trick of reflection, but once, briefly, I saw him: the Frostbound Heir, watching from another corridor.
The moment my gaze found him, the image fractured into frost.
When the guard opened the door to my quarters, Fenrir entered first. The hound circled the room once and lay down near the hearth’s unlit crystal. I followed, still trying to understand why I felt safer with a creature of legend than with the people who ruled here.
I crossed to the mirror opposite the window. Frost bloomed along its surface, delicate and bright. For a second, I saw more than my own reflection—a silhouette in armor, tall and still, fading into the shimmer of the glass.
“If the Winter Court meant to keep me prisoner,” I whispered, “it shouldn’t have left its mirrors open.”
The mirror stilled, the frost retreated, and behind me Fenrir gave a low, rumbling sigh—as if in agreement.