Ice Like Fire (5 page)

No,
I will it, screaming in my head.
STOP!

It doesn’t listen. Not in time anyway—it leaves my body a beat before I fling my will out to it, spiraling out of me and into—who? Where?

Sir.

He flies to his feet, mouth popping open in a choking huff like someone slammed a sword hilt into his lungs. “What—” He gags. “What did you—”

He stumbles back, boots slipping on the wooden floor, and bumps into the closed door to the rest of the cottage. His hand drops to the knob and he shoves, but instead of twisting under his fingers, the entire thing breaks apart and clatters to the ground.

I leap off the cot, hands out.

Sir ripped the door clean off its hinges.

No—
I
did it to him.

I drop back onto the bed. I’ve seen the magic give people strength before—but enough to endure a day of labor, not rip apart planks of wood. And it always reacted how it should—uncontrollable, but it did what my people needed it to do.

What
happened
?

Sir flexes his hand and shoots a questioning gaze at me. “My queen. Why did you do that?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t mean to. The magic down
there—that barrier—it did something. I don’t feel . . . right.”

My chest is so cold. My heart is ice, my limbs snow, my every breath should be a cloud of condensation. The magic felt awakened before, but now it feels—unleashed.

Sir eases forward. “We’ll figure it out, my queen. We’ll send someone else down there, someone who isn’t connected to a Royal Conduit.”

I launch to my feet again. “No, it’s too dangerous.
No one
can go down there.”

“We found it, Meira,” Theron intercedes, his voice hoarse. “The magic chasm, after all this time, and you don’t want to at least investigate it? The world hasn’t seen such power in centuries. Imagine the good we could do with this!”

“And imagine the evil!” I shout, unable to keep my worry at bay. “Did you see what I just did? My magic could’ve hurt Sir! And you want
more
? Even if we could get to it, the world won’t receive magic the way you want it to. You believe your father would use more magic for good? Maybe in Cordell’s eyes, but how will it affect my kingdom?”

Theron drops the unlit candle and match he had still been holding and steps closer to me. “The world needs this,” he states. “My father isn’t the only one with plans—we could see to it that the magic would benefit everyone. Your people would all have their own magic. They’d have
the strength needed to keep anything like Angra’s takeover from happening again.”

“You can’t tell your father we found it,” I beg. “I know why you fear Angra, but we are stronger than him.
You are nothing like him
.”

Theron’s eyes narrow in confusion, darting over my face. I pause, waiting for understanding to pull forward his memories, but he only cocks his head, perplexed.

Doesn’t he remember what Angra did to him? Wasn’t that real?

A door opens deeper in the cottage and voices slam into us.

“Is she awake?” Nessa asks.

Dendera chirps when they stumble into the room. “What happened to the door?”

While Sir, Nessa, and Dendera drop into quiet discussion, I draw closer to Theron, lowering my voice. “Please don’t tell Noam.”

“My men saw it too. Your people know we found it. He’ll find out eventually.”

“Only a few of your men were down there, and my people will keep it quiet. Please, Theron. Just give me time to figure out what to do.”

My heart knots up in the pause that follows.

“When you were asleep—” Theron finally says. “You sounded like you were scared.”

He didn’t agree to anything. He changed the subject.

“I dreamed of Angra. And you.” I hesitate, not wanting to hurt him, my words hammers and him a porcelain vase. “In Abril.”

Theron jolts back from me.

I try to wave it away. “It was just a dream—”

He snatches my hand midwave and holds it, every muscle in his body stiff.

“I don’t remember much about it,” he whispers, each word weighted by three months of keeping it inside. “Whole days just . . . gone. But I do remember Angra telling me what he planned to do with you. What he planned to let Herod—” Theron’s voice cracks. “Angra used magic on me in Abril, that much I do know. He shouldn’t have been able to—Royal Conduits can’t affect people not of their kingdom. And if magic like that exists, we need protection.”

My arms twitch to lean forward and wrap around him. But despite his pain, despite the memories throbbing in my mind of Angra’s torture, I can’t agree to what Theron wants.

“Then it’s even more important that the door stays closed. If it’s used wrong, it could aid the very magic you fear.”

Theron grimaces. He’s unconvinced, but Nessa rushes over to me.

“My queen, how are you feeling?”

She doesn’t ask what happened, or anything about the
mine shaft, and I assume Sir filled her in enough. Conall and Garrigan take up their places guarding my room when Sir says something about going to check on Finn and Greer. He doesn’t stay to make sure I’m okay; he simply tells Dendera to “ensure that the queen rests.”

No help from him—and no help from Theron either, who also leaves. I try to go after him, but Dendera shoves me onto the cot, scolding me to lie down. Theron doesn’t notice, vanishing without another word. What did I expect him to say, though? What could he do?

He could help me in this. He could stay, help me deal with . . . everything.

No—Theron is broken because of me. Because he came to save
me
. I saw what he went through—or at least, what he might have gone through. Even if he doesn’t remember what happened, there’s no way to know whether or not what I saw
didn’t
happen. He doesn’t need to help me; I need to help
him
. I have other people who can—

Sudden awareness drowns every other thought.

Hannah never responded. The moment I reached out to her, my magic erupted.

I almost call out to her again, but my chest seizes, and I can’t tear my eyes away from the splinters of the door that Nessa brushes into the corner. Our connection was always mysterious—maybe the barrier severed it. The coldness inside of me throbs as if sensing my dilemma, knowing I’m
moments away from trying to rekindle my magic.

I’m afraid of it. But I can’t be afraid of my magic. Now that the chasm has been found . . .

I can’t be afraid of anything.

Mather

“BLOCK!”

Mather’s sword cut through the air a beat behind his command, but even as the word left his lips, he knew how this fight would end. His opponent would stumble on the barn’s uneven floor as uncertainty flashed through his eyes; then he would realize his mistake, overcorrect, and end up on his back with Mather’s wooden blade pressing into his collarbone.

Seconds later, the man blinked up at Mather from the floor. “I’m sorry, my lord,” he mumbled, and rolled to his feet, passing his practice sword to the next in line.

Mather exhaled, watching his breath collect in puffs of white in the afternoon air. At least his next opponent, a boy named Philip, was his age. A nice change from the older men, who stared at him with a mix of fear and desperate eagerness.

Of all the Winterians rescued from the Spring work camps, only six hundred had lived in Jannuari. Two hundred had come from western Winter, seven hundred from the center forests, and a mere one hundred and fifty from the southern Klaryn foothills. Of those who had formerly lived in Winter’s capital, little more than three-fourths of them had chosen to repopulate Jannuari. The rest couldn’t bear the sight of their war-shattered homes and had dispersed three months ago into the now-untamed wilds of a new and unknown Winter.

Sweet ice above, Mather couldn’t believe so much time had passed. How had it been three months since they’d returned to Jannuari? Three months since the battle in Abril where he had broken Angra’s conduit and the Spring king had died. Three months of freedom.

And less than a month since William and Meira and a contingent of others had departed for the southern mines. In hours—moments, heartbeats—they would return, along with Noam coming back from one of his too-short breaks to Bithai. The Cordellan king would amble back into Winter’s capital like the stuffed-up, overconfident ass he was, and swipe what riches the Winterians had been able to extract.

The rattle of armor jerked Mather’s attention to the door of the barn. A pair of Cordellan soldiers sauntered past on their patrol through Jannuari’s inhabited quarter,
mocking grins spreading over their faces as they eyed the scene within.

Mather’s grip on his practice sword tightened. But he found he couldn’t hate the borrowed soldiers for laughing—what the Winterians were doing
was
laughable, training people so soon after years of imprisonment, expecting everything to instantly heal and fall into place. Most Winterians had only recently begun looking like people again instead of starved slaves. Making them fight when their eyes spoke of terror and memories still raw . . .

Mather turned to Henn. “This is too soon.”

Henn leaned forward from where he propped against the wall, observing the training in William’s stead. “We’ve only been at it for a few weeks.” He nodded Mather along. “Spar.”

An order. Mather growled, the sound bubbling in his throat. Orders were all he had now. Orders from William, orders from Henn. Orders from his queen.

A jostling near the door tugged at Mather’s awareness again, but it wasn’t Cordellan armor. Boots, the rustle of fabric, and a voice Mather knew by heart.

“We’ve returned.”

William.

No one seemed to notice the way Mather darkened at William’s arrival, an event that should have made him fake a smile, at the very least.

Henn launched away from the wall, closing the space between him and William like a man intoxicated. “You’re all back?”

Mather saw the unspoken questions ripple across Henn’s face—
Is Dendera safe? Is she well?—
because similar questions filled him.

If you’ve returned, William, it means Meira is back too—is she safe? Is she well?

Does she miss me at all?

Blotches of red covered William’s cheeks, telling of the cold winds that had chased their party all the way from the mines. He smiled at Henn, dusting snow from his sleeves. It scratched at Mather wrong whenever William looked like that. After sixteen years of William being stoic and hard and unrelenting, happiness looked awkward on him.

“Yes,” William started, one eyebrow rising. After a pause, he waved at the door behind him. “Dismissed. Go to Dendera. She’s just as eager to see you.”

Henn slapped William on the shoulder and darted outside. Which left Mather as the sole person to report on the trainees’ progress, and when William turned to him, Mather found his mouth had dried more violently than the Rania Plains at noon.

“Report,” William coaxed, taking in the Winterians standing behind them.

What did he have to report? The most notable thing the Winterian trainees had done since they had begun was to
eat a full breakfast and keep it all down.

“They’re not physically ready for this,” Mather stated, his voice level.

William’s smile didn’t flutter. “They will be. Training will help.”

“They need to heal first.” Mather angled his shoulders forward, all-too aware of how the subjects of their argument stood behind them, watching, listening. “They need to work through what happened. They need to
understand
what happened—”

Mather cut his words short. William’s veil fluttered, a crack that showed whenever Mather pushed too far. Like when William had tried to explain his reasoning for keeping Mather’s parentage a secret as a “necessary sacrifice for Winter,” and instead of accepting that explanation, Mather had demanded why. Because it made sense, yet it didn’t make sense, and while Mather had wept on the floor of the ruined cottage the Loren family had claimed, William had simply stood, told him it was in the past, and left.

But all William said now was, “No, they need this. They need to get into a routine.”

Which felt exactly like:
It’s in the past, Mather. Look only to the future.

Mather panted. He couldn’t breathe, damn it . . .

He shouted a warning cry and dove at Philip. The boy launched backward with a shocked yelp and caught a few of Mather’s rapid blows before he tripped on a lump of straw
and smacked onto the floor in an explosion of dust.

Mather wrapped both hands around the hilt of his sword. In one solid push of movement he leapt into the air, dropped down, straddled the boy, and slammed the wooden sword into a crack in the floorboard a finger’s width from Philip’s head.

Everyone in the barn held silent. Not a gasp, not a cry of concern. Just dozens of eyes watching Mather and Philip and the wooden sword wobbling vertically in the barn’s floor.

Philip’s eyes wandered down Mather’s sword, to the crack in the floor, and back.

“So.” His lips relaxed in a smile. “This means I lost, right?”

Mather spit out a laugh. The sound released the tension, and a few of the men waiting in line chuckled as Mather helped Philip to his feet.

But Philip’s eyes flicked over Mather’s shoulder and the laughter died, an absence of sound that ignited all of Mather’s senses.

He only had time to grab his sword out of the floor before William swung down on him. Mather slid to his knees, caught the blow, and danced around until he righted himself. William spun his blade and dove again.

Around them, Winterian voices rose in encouragement, Winterian cheers filled the air, so wondrously different from the life Mather had been living months ago that it
saturated his every muscle, easing realizations into his mind.

If they’re all happy, maybe ignoring the past is worth it.

Mather threw every bit of his frustration into the fight, letting the cheers dissolve beneath his sudden need to beat William. He sucked the cold air into his lungs. Winter’s air. The kingdom he had been supposed to lead, protect, defend.

And it was all on Meira’s shoulders now.

He didn’t want to need her. But loving her was easy, something that had developed over time, like sword fighting or archery—a skill he had picked up methodically until one day he did it without thought. Needing a family, though? He would never in a thousand winters need it.

He would never be able to forgive William for letting him think he was an orphan.

Mather jerked to a halt. William’s blade continued through the air and slammed into his shoulder, knocking him flat on his stomach. Mather glowered and sprang up, sword thudding somewhere behind him as he propelled himself at William. His shoulder connected with William’s stomach, sending both of them down in a tangled pile of grunts and limbs and punches. It didn’t last long—in a few firm twists, William had Mather’s arms knotted behind his back, Mather’s cheek memorizing the feel of the rough wooden floor.

William bent down, his mouth to Mather’s ear. “It
doesn’t matter if they fail a hundred times,” he said, barely panting. “All that matters is that we’re here. This is our future.”

Mather grunted, sucking down dusty air. “Yes,
Sir
.”

He knew William hated when Meira called him that, not that William would ever tell her to stop. Mather just wanted to see unease in him, so he knew that he wasn’t the only one feeling it.

William’s grip on him tensed, a reflex that said he had heard Mather. He held him on the ground for a beat before stepping back, and when Mather burst to his feet, hands clenched, he couldn’t bring himself to face the group of now-speechless Winterians.

“That’s enough for today,” William told everyone as though nothing had happened.

Mather whirled for the door first. William caught his arm in a tight grip, yanking him to a halt as everyone behind them moved to put away the practice swords. “We brought a new shipment of goods. Sort them, and be at the ceremony tonight.”

Orders. More jewels for him to sort through, counting out piles of payment to a kingdom that would demand even more. He didn’t know why Noam insisted on storing the goods here and playing through a ceremony instead of shipping everything to Bithai. Maybe he wanted to taunt the Winterians even more, force Meira to hand each jewel to him, one by one.

Mather shot William a curt nod and hung back once he realized William too, intended to head out. Returning to Meira and Noam, no doubt.

Mather lingered until the barn emptied, and only then did he let himself fly out the door. So distracted was he that he didn’t notice the figure standing just outside until he slammed into it, shoulder stinging from where it connected with armor.

“Watch your—” he started, a mouthful of curses ready. Careless Cordellan scum—

But it wasn’t just any Cordellan. It was Captain Brennan Crewe, the man Noam had put in charge of the soldiers stationed in Jannuari. Number two on the list of Cordellans Mather hated, behind both Theron and Noam, who tied for first.

Mather spun away, stomping off before he could register any reaction on Brennan’s face. He’d only gotten a few paces when he heard snow crunch, footsteps that trotted after him.

“Hold a moment!” Brennan called. “How goes the training? By your scowl, I can tell it’s going as well as I’d expected. My king still wonders why you bother training an army, when you have all the protection you would ever need from Cordell.”

Mather stopped, boots shredding holes in the snow. The training barn stood to the east of the palace, connected by an expanse of snow and a disheveled path that covered
with flakes faster than anyone could clean it. But they were alone, no soldiers pacing by in their patrol. And after his interaction with William, Mather didn’t have the strength to keep his mouth shut.

“It’s going well enough that you should tell your king not to get too comfortable here,” he spit as he pivoted around.

Brennan’s eyebrows rose. “You forget your place,
Lord
Mather.”

Mather bristled but ground his jaw to steady himself. Being dropped from king to lord didn’t bother him, not really—what bothered him was who had all his responsibilities on her shoulders now.

“My apologies, Captain. I did forget my place in relation to your own. I have such a hard time remembering that you aren’t an actual soldier—you’re a gift meant to protect an investment. It would make things so much easier if every Cordellan soldier walked around wearing bows on their helmets.”

Brennan lurched closer. Mather rose up as he neared, but before he felt the sweet vacancy of instinct take over his movements, Brennan smiled.

“Gifts we may be,” he said, “but at least we are wanted. Your queen is back, didn’t you hear? But has she summoned you? No, I’d take it. You’re probably on your way to continue the task of counting out
Cordell’s
wealth. You act so sure of your importance to Winter, though we both
know your role in this kingdom is little more than that of a peasant.”

By the time Brennan finished talking, Mather couldn’t see anything but the stars swimming across his vision, his body so hot with rage that he expected the falling snowflakes to sizzle on his skin. He moved, but he didn’t remember doing so—all he knew was a sudden fistful of Brennan’s collar, the fabric pulling taut out of his breastplate as he yanked the man forward.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mather growled.

Brennan’s attention flicked over Mather’s shoulder. His eyes enlarged. “Queen Meira.”

Mather swelled with panic. She was here, now?