Authors: Amanda Hocking
Even in May, Lake Superior barely got above freezing. The Skojare kept the ice at bay through a combination of practical tools and magic, but that didn’t mean the water was warm by any means.
A human would succumb to hypothermia in as little as fifteen minutes, but I was no human. The Skojare thrived in the cold water. Spending their entire existence in Scandinavia, northern Europe, and Canada, they had adapted to handle the harsh temperatures of swimming in freezing lakes.
Even the Kanin had adjusted to the cold, but I doubted Kasper or Tilda would fare as well stepping into the icy lake as I would. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant feeling—like an electrical current running over my skin. But I couldn’t deny that there was something strangely enjoyable about it.
The chill took my breath away, and it felt as though it was waking up parts of my body I hadn’t even known were sleeping. I lay on my back, floating on the surface. The sun warmed me from above, while the cold water rocked me from below.
I just needed to be able to clear my head. The last twenty-four hours had been a blur of insanity, and I couldn’t seem to process any of it.
I knew that I’d killed Cyrano, and I knew that it had been the correct thing to do given my job and his actions. But I couldn’t make sense of how I felt about it. Numb perhaps, the numbness was mixed with sadness and regret and pride.
Sadness because a man had died, and regret because I was convinced I could’ve done something differently so he’d still be alive. And pride because I had done exactly what I had been trained to do. When it came down to it, I had acted and saved the King.
It seemed nearly impossible to reconcile those three emotions.
I tried to let the water wash over me, desperate for a reprieve from constant worries about work and Konstantin and Ridley. No matter how hard I tried, Ridley kept floating back into my thoughts, leaving an ache that ripped through me.
Thinking of him hurt too much, and I pushed away my memories of his eyes and the way his arms felt around me.
I closed my eyes, trying to clear my mind of everything, and I just focused on the sound of the lake lapping against the palace, the iciness of the water holding me up underneath the contrasting warmth of the sun.
That was all that mattered for the moment. Soon, I’d have to go back inside and try to untangle the mess of who was trying to kill whom and why here in Storvatten. But right now, I just needed
this
—to have a few minutes when nothing mattered and I didn’t need to think.
With my eyes closed, I could see the sun through my lids. Then the yellowish-red of my eyelids began to change, shifting into pure white bright light that filled my vision. It was disorienting and confusing, and when I tried to open my eyes, I realized they already were.
I was standing in the snow, but there was no horizon around me. Just whiteness, as if the world disappeared into nothing a few meters beyond where I stood. My heart began to race in a panic, and I turned in a circle, trying to understand where I was and what was happening.
Suddenly Konstantin Black was there, standing in front of me dressed all in black, smiling at me. “Don’t be scared, white rabbit.”
“What’s happening?” I asked.
This didn’t feel anything like a dream, but it had to be. There was no other explanation for how I could have been in the lake one second, and here in an impossible place with Konstantin the next. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but it was a possibility, given how exhausted I had been lately.
“I can’t stay long,” Konstantin said.
Already, his smile had fallen away. This was the first time I’d seen him without his hair pushed back, and his dark curls fell around his face. His eyes were the color of forged steel, the kind used to make our swords, and he stepped closer to me, looking at me intently.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“Here is nowhere.” He shook his head. “You are in Storvatten, and you must leave.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “How do you know where I am?”
“I know a great many things, and it doesn’t matter how I know. You are not safe in Storvatten, and you need to leave.”
“It seems safe to me, now that you and Viktor D
å
lig are gone,” I said.
Konstantin pursed his lips, and for a moment he looked pained. “I am glad to see you’re okay after what he did to you.”
“Why?” I shook my head. “Why do you even care?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted with a crooked smile. “I just don’t want to see any more innocent people hurt.”
“Then you need to stop working with Viktor D
å
lig.”
The sky—if you could call the whiteness that surrounded us the sky—began to darken, turning gray, and the snow underneath my feet started to tremble.
“This won’t hold for much longer,” Konstantin said. Thunder seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at all once, and he had to shout be heard over it. “You must leave Storvatten! They plan to kill you because you’re getting too close!”
“Too close to what?” I asked, and by now the sky was nearly black. “How do you know?”
“Viktor D
å
lig gave the order. He wants anyone in his way dead.”
Konstantin receded from me, but he didn’t step or move himself. It was as though he were slowly being pulled into the darkness around us.
“Run, white rabbit,” he said, his voice nearly lost in the rumbles, and then he was gone.
I opened my eyes to the bright sun shining above the Skojare palace, and even though I was still floating above the water, I was gasping for breath.
Everything seemed peaceful and still. There was no thunder, no darkness, no Konstantin Black. I tried to tell myself that it was just a strange dream brought on by stress and exhaustion, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had really been talking to Konstantin. That somehow he’d managed to visit me in a lysa to warn me that there was a bounty on my head.
It was in the fishbowl of the meeting room that everything went completely insane, and this was coming from someone who’d just been visited in a dream by Konstantin Black.
The meeting room stuck out from the rest of the palace in a bubble, with one interior wall and one exterior wall of glass domed out around us. It left me feeling as if the lake were engulfing us, as if it were a sea monster trying to swallow us all.
At the end of the long table in the center of the room sat King Mikko, with his Queen sitting to his right and his brother to his left. Lisbet sat next to her granddaughter. Other than Kasper and me, they were the only people in the room.
“This is Bayle’s meeting, isn’t it?” Kennet asked, looking over his shoulder at the large bronze clock hanging on the wall. “Doesn’t he know it’s rude to arrive late to your own party?”
“When you arrived late to your own birthday party, you told me that was arriving in style,” Linnea reminded him.
Kennet smirked. “That’s because everything I do, I do in style.”
Kennet might have joked, but nobody else here seemed to be in good spirits. Bayle’s making us wait—twenty minutes so far—wasn’t making things any better. Kasper and I were close to the end of the table, a polite distance away from the royalty, and Mikko kept shooting icy glares in our direction.
I had a feeling if we didn’t solve things quickly, we never would, because it seemed like we had begun to wear out our welcome.
“Oh for
Æ
gir’s sake.” Lisbet let out an exasperated sigh. “My King, perhaps you should send someone to fetch Bayle. This is getting tedious.”
“He will be here,” Mikko said, apparently immune to the same tension the rest of us were suffocating under.
Fortunately for the rest of us, Bayle finally arrived, with guards in tow. They were senior guards I’d met earlier in the week, decked out in their uniforms. Bayle had added a vest made of platinum, with carvings of fish scales. It was real metal that he wore over his jacket, armor to protect against attacks.
Looking back, that was the first sign that something was going on. Who wears armor to a meeting?
“I’m glad you could grace us with your presence,” Kennet said dryly.
“I am very sorry, my liege, but I had important business to attend to, which will become very clear to you all in a moment,” Bayle said. To his credit, he actually sounded winded, like he’d been hurrying.
He seemed nervous, though—staring about the room, swallowing and licking his lips a lot, and stammering a bit when he spoke. The guard behind him held a thick manila envelope, and he would only stare at the ground.
“That’s fine,” Mikko said. “Just get on with it.”
Bayle began to rehash what we all already knew—Cyrano’s attempt to kill Mikko, my thwarting of it, Cyrano’s wife and daughter running off, the sapphires, and the fact that the only people who had access to the vault were in this room.
“We spoke to all of you this morning, asking when and why you last accessed the vault,” Bayle said, and he put his hand on the bell of his sword. “Marksinna Lisbet had been there three months ago with the record keeper, for accounting purposes. Prince Kennet was there two days ago, showing Kasper and Bryn.”
Bayle cleared his throat. “Queen Linnea and King Mikko claimed it had been so long ago that they couldn’t recollect when they’d last opened it.”
“So?” Kennet arched an eyebrow. “That doesn’t really tell us anything does it?”
“No, not by itself.” Bayle turned to the guard behind him and took the envelope. “We checked the database to see if anybody else had gotten in the vault, and according to the, uh, the computer, the last person in the vault was, uh, King Mikko, two hours before the attack on his life.”
Mikko didn’t say anything immediately. He just shook his head. “That’s simply untrue. I wasn’t in there. I had no reason to go in.”
“Sire, the fingerprint scanning says you were,” Bayle said.
“The King is not a liar,” Linnea hissed.
Lisbet held up her hand to hush her granddaughter, her eyes fixed on the guards. “What does all this mean?”
“Well, it, uh…” Bayle cleared his throat again. “We believe that King Mikko paid Cyrano Moen to attack him, making it appear that Cyrano would kill him but knowing that a guard would intervene and protect him.”
“That’s preposterous!” Linnea shouted. “Why would Mikko fake an attempt on his life? That makes no sense.”
“We believe that King Mikko is the one behind your attempted kidnapping, and that to shift blame from himself, he planned the assassination attempt,” Bayle explained. “He wanted us to think someone else was behind everything going on here.”
Kennet sat back in his chair, almost slouching, and only glanced over at his brother once. Mikko, for his part, seemed unmoved by what Bayle was saying. He just kept shaking his head.
“Mikko would never hurt me,” Linnea insisted. She leaned forward on the table, as if that would make Bayle believe her.
“It’s with all that in mind that we have come here to arrest King Mikko Bi
â
else for the attempted kidnapping of the Queen, Linnea Bi
â
else, as well as hiring Cyrano Moen for a feigned assassination attempt,” Bayle said, and for the first time since he’d come in the room, his voice sounded strong.
“That’s treason!” Linnea was practically screaming now. “You cannot arrest the King!”
“Linnea, hush.” Lisbet put her hand on Linnea’s arm. “Let them sort this all out.”
Technically, a monarch could be arrested for breaking any of the laws of the kingdom. And while I wasn’t as familiar with Skojare history I was with Kanin, in the Kanin lore, I only knew of two monarchs ever being arrested—a Queen for poisoning her husband, and a King for stabbing the Chancellor in the middle of a party.
Kings had been overthrown. A few had been forced to step down, and a couple had even been executed. But they were almost never arrested. In theory, laws might apply to royalty, but in practice, they never really did.
“I haven’t done anything,” Mikko said, his voice a low rumble. “I’d never hurt my wife, and I never hired a guard to pretend to hurt me.”
But he didn’t threaten to have them banished or thrown in the dungeon. He simply denied the charges, and that emboldened the guards to come over and put Mikko in shackles.
Linnea began screaming at them, telling them that they couldn’t do this and that they had to let him go, and Lisbet had to physically hold her back. Throughout the whole display, Kennet never said a word.
As the guards escorted Mikko out of the room, he walked with his head bowed and his broad shoulders slumped. He seemed almost resigned to the position, and since he was a King with all the power in the kingdom to fight the charges, I didn’t understand why he was just taking it like this.
It did fit in line with what both Kennet and Linnea had said about him—that he would rather take what was given to him than fight back. But that made it feel all the more tragic to see the tall hulk of a man with his head hanging down as the guard he refused to depose escorted him out of the room.
Before Bayle left, I got up and ran after him, stopping him at the door. “We’d like to take a look at the records.”
“In due time.” Bayle was talking to me, but his eyes were directed out the door, following Mikko’s figure down the hall. “There’s a case we’re working on, and you’ll have your turn when we’re done.”
“No, we should be part of the case—” I tried to argue, but he cut me off.
“Excuse me,” Bayle said brusquely. “I’ve just arrested the ruler of our kingdom. I have more pressing matters to deal with.”
While Lisbet struggled to get Linnea to calm down, I walked back over and collapsed in the chair next to Kasper. He looked just as shocked as I felt, and considering Kasper prided himself on keeping his emotions hidden, that was really saying something.
“What the fuck just happened?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
“
Miss!
You can’t go in there!” the footman called after me, but if I wasn’t going to heed Konstantin’s warning of imminent death, I wasn’t about to listen to a servant worrying about propriety.