Gold, page 40
She stops and turns with a frown. “Hmm. Apologies, Captain Osrik, but I don’t have any of those.”
My shoulders go stiff, and my gaze shoots around the outdoor space. “You got plenty of yellow flowers; I’m sure you have them.”
“I know every plant I’m growing,” she replies, tapping her temple. “I don’t carry yellow bells. No one tends to buy those. They’re also quite poisonous.”
Frustration cricks in my neck. “You’re a damn flower shop. I need a flower.”
Why is this so fucking hard?
She hesitates. “That particular flower just isn’t very popular here. Not many like them, I suppose.”
“I fucking like them,” I snap.
The woman rears back in surprise at my sharp tone, and I grind my teeth in irritation, trying to tamp down my anger. It’s not her fault.
“Just check. Please.”
With a wary nod, she turns and heads down the path to the various yellow flowers and walks through them, checking the blooms.
I just wanted some fucking yellow bells to put on Rissa’s bedside. Not that I’ve ever gotten flowers for a woman before, but it seemed like something she might like. Now, I’m twitchy and frustrated and remembering how bad she looked this morning. Sallow. Worn out.
I hate it.
When the woman comes back empty-handed, she shakes her head with a regretful look on her face. “Apologies. As I said, I don’t have them. But I do have some other quite beautiful blooms that are yellow. There’s—”
“Forget it,” I mumble before whipping around.
I march back through the shop, my booted steps sounding way too loud, the browsing women eyeing me and whispering as I pass by. I wrench open the door so hard that the bell above rips off, knocks into my head, and then clatters to the ground.
I stare down at it and try real fucking hard not to see it as a bad omen.
When I get back, I nearly run into Polly just as she comes out of Rissa’s room. Her face is all blotchy red, eyes swollen with a handkerchief stuffed against them like it’ll help stop the leak spewing out of her eyes.
“I can’t keep seeing her like this. I can’t keep coming here to watch.” She shakes her head and looks up at me all glassy-eyed. “Thank you. For letting me visit her, but I can’t anymore.” Before I can say anything, she turns and rushes away down the corridor, leaving me to scowl after her.
I have half a mind to drag her back into Rissa’s room and make her sit at the bedside and help care for her. Just like Rissa fucking did for her day after day.
But I don’t. Rissa doesn’t need her. She has me. And unlike Polly, I won’t abandon her.
When I enter, I find Hojat in the room. He gets up from his chair beside her bed, and his grim face makes my muscles bunch. My bones lock up.
“It’s soon, Captain,” he says quietly.
A cold, sickly dread gushes into my gut.
I give a sharp shake of my head. “No.”
He stops me before I can storm past him with a gentle hold on my arm. I don’t like the look in his fucking eyes. “Yes,” he says, like he’s trying to let me down easy. “I’m sorry.”
My gaze shoots past him to Rissa’s sleeping form. One of the novices steps away from her, her hands clasped, head bowed. She’s brushed out Rissa’s hair. It looks pretty. Soft and light. She’s been changed into a clean nightdress too. Pink, like the color her cheeks used to get every time she blushed at something crass I said. But there’s no embarrassed flush now, no gaze sparkling with fire.
She’s sleeping. Not thrashing or crying out with delirious fits. Just lying there.
Wheezing.
Wheezing so slowly it makes me grimace.
“I’ll leave you alone with her to say your goodbyes,” Hojat says softly, while I swallow hard.
Denial wants to rush up, but it just…drains out of me instead. I don’t take my eyes away from her as he and the novice leave the room, shutting the door behind them.
When it’s just us, I step forward, almost tiptoeing, like I shouldn’t disturb the quiet. I don’t want to break it, don’t want to startle her. I slump into the chair next to her and place the little brass bell from the plant shop on her bedside table. Probably shouldn’t have taken it, but I didn’t want to return empty-handed.
Reaching forward, I grab hold of her hand. It’s hot with her fever, but the worst part is how limp it is. How fucking lifeless.
“Brought you this, Yellow Bell,” I tell her, but my voice sounds too rough. My hand looks huge compared to hers. She feels delicate. Fragile. I’m afraid to squeeze too hard in case I break her fingers. “They didn’t have your flowers. At a flower shop. Can you believe that shit?”
She doesn’t reply. Her eyelids don’t even twitch.
The pauses between her labored breaths are fucking terrifying.
“Brought you a bell instead. It sounds kind of annoying to be honest. Not like your voice. Your voice is…nice.”
I cringe. I suck at this shit. I’m almost glad she can’t hear me. I’ve never been good at words. Not good at giving compliments. But right now, I wish I was. Because if I were, I’d give them to her.
I’d give her whatever fucking words she wants.
“Wish you’d wake up and mouth off to me, Yellow Bell,” I murmur as I scrape my callused thumb over the back of her soft hand. It’s softer than feathers. Like silk or something. Too soft for the likes of me. My hands are scarred and rough, with ripped cuticles and thick skin from all the years I’ve gripped a sword.
She takes another slow, wheezing breath before silence draws out between us.
What happens when she just…stops? When that drawn-out silence turns into just silence?
Emotion quick and hot rushes up my throat and stuffs inside my head. I’ve tried raging. Tried torturing. Tried arguing. Tried denying. But now, in this wheezing silence, the truth glares at me like a judgmental bastard.
She’s dying.
She has been. Since that dagger went into her chest. Since I carried her into this mender room. She wasn’t ever going to come back out. I wasn’t ever going to hold her again.
Every time I’ve sat here at her bedside, death has been spreading over more of her, like a sheet coming to cover her up, going higher and higher.
I didn’t want to see it, but there’s no denying the infection spreading from that wound. If she were one of my soldiers, I would have broken the news to her family already, sent a message to prepare them for the worst.
But she’s not a soldier. She didn’t enlist for violence or sign her name accepting the threat of dying on a blade. She should die of old age a long time from now, after she got what she wanted. The thing she wished for most.
Her independence.
She wanted to go away. To go far enough to escape her past and live without being beholden to anyone. Without having to cater or coddle or please any fuckheads to earn a coin like she had to do for years. I was the selfish bastard that asked her to stay. Look where that got her.
With a blade nearly stabbed through her heart and an infection burning her alive.
“Can’t even get you fucking yellow bells…”
She called me her mistake. Said we were wrong. Maybe that’s true, because I can’t seem to get anything right. But when she kissed me, that did feel fucking right.
In a world full of wrong, I wanted one right thing.
I press my finger against the pulse on her wrist, feel the weak flutter, and it makes me so fucking angry. I shove my gaze at the clear window, like I can glare at the gods.
“Not her,” I snarl at them. “Not yet.”
It’s a pissed-off prayer, and I don’t even fucking pray. Don’t even know if I believe in the gods. But if they’re up there smug as shit in their simple sky, then the least they can do is come down here and help this complicated woman who doesn’t deserve this.
“She needs more time,” I tell them. “We need more fucking time.”
I thought we had all the time in the world.
“Just give us that,” I snap. “Never asked you for shit all my life. Just give us this.”
I wait, listening. Glaring out the window. But nothing happens. Not a strike of lightning or a growl of thunder. She doesn’t suddenly open her eyes.
Hojat wants me to prepare myself. To say my goodbyes.
But how am I supposed to see her through to her end when we barely got to start?
My gaze trails up to her lips, now chapped and pale, a frown dug deep between her blonde eyebrows like every breath hurts.
I feel that hurt right in my chest.
It burrows deep. Jabbing in with her next labored wheeze. Hearing the way her inhale scrapes and whines as if it’s ready to give up makes that cottony emotion in my head rupture, like stuffing that bursts out of a seam.
I never get teary-eyed. Never let emotion seep out. Not even on the battlefield when my own soldiers died at my side. But right now, right here, I find a furious, grief-ridden sob rasping from my throat and tears searing my eyes.
I lean in and place a kiss on her burning brow, and then I tip my head against hers, eyes shut with anguish. “You were supposed to wake up,” I tell her as torment slides down my tongue. As the evidence of my misery lands in dots against her pink nightgown. “We were supposed to have time to make this mistake over and over again, until you finally realized how right it really is.”
But time doesn’t fucking listen to me any more than the gods do.
So I listen instead, because that’s all I can do. I listen to her every breath that gets harder and harder for her to take. I listen to all the things I never got to say.
And I listen to my own goodbye that she’ll never get to fucking hear.
“Sit up straight, Malina. Honestly, is it so hard?”
My father hisses this at me from the corner of his mouth. It’s impressive how he can speak like this, barely moving his lips.
Impressive how he can convey such anger in his tone while keeping his expression completely flat.
I lengthen my spine and slam my shoulders back. I’ve been sitting here for hours, holding court, listening to the people as they come forward and give us their condolences.
Because my mother is dead.
It still sounds strange, like it isn’t real. Except it is.
My mother is dead, and her corpse is in the atrium right now, where her death rites are being carried out. That’s where I should be. Up there with her, where the gods can look through the atrium windows and accept her soul’s ascent. I want to be with her when her soul slips away. Maybe her incorporeal spirit will remember me as she passes into the heavens.
Yet father won’t let me, so here I sit in the throne room. Normally, the white walls and blue carpet that runs up the stairs to the dais make it feel icy and open, but with the black drapes of mourning and the packed crowd, it feels claustrophobic.
More and more people come forward, leaving boughs from the Pitching Pines at the bottom step of our platform, while we sit at the trio of thrones, my mother’s seat startlingly empty.
I’m dressed all in black with the mourning veil hanging from the tiara on my head and draping down my face. At least the sheer fabric is dark enough that no one can see the silent tears that drip down my cheeks.
It’s not until hours later, when the people have finally gone, that my father allows me to peel myself up from my throne. His advisor informs us that mother’s body is wrapped up and moved away already. I can’t help the sob that escapes me, my grief echoing through the empty room. When the advisor bows and leaves, my father’s eyes skate over my veiled face.
I so desperately want to ask him if he misses her as much as I do. If it doesn’t quite feel real. But he wouldn’t appreciate questions like that.
So I say nothing.
Yet as he looks down at me, I see something in his eyes soften—just for a moment. His hands come up and grip my shoulders, and I almost flinch. Father doesn’t give loving pats or hugs, or anything like that, so his touch is foreign, making me go stiff.
“Why are you crying?” he asks.
I blink at him, wondering if I misheard. “Because…Mother.”
Why wouldn’t I be crying? She’s dead! I want to scream at him.
Of course, I stay silent.
“It is important that you do not show weakness in front of our people, Malina.”
My head bows under the condemnation of his words. “Yes, Father, but I—” I catch myself, horrified by the argument I almost let slip.
“But what?” he demands.
I hesitate, but I know it’s no use. I have to answer him. “I wanted to be with her during her rites,” I say in a small voice. A despairing one.
Her body is already wrapped up. Already moved away.
I’ll never see her again.
That thought hits me in the chest and steals the breath right out of my ribs and makes me want to fall to my knees and sob. But I can’t.
My father squeezes my shoulder in what I think might be a rare show of affection, and my eyes snap up to his face. “This is what it means to be royal, Malina,” he says. “Yes, your mother, my wife, died. But their queen died too, and it was our responsibility to sit here and allow them to pay their respects. To grieve.”
But what about my respects? What about my grief?
“When you’re a ruler, you make sacrifices for your kingdom,” he says as he shakes me, as if he wants to rattle the sadness right out of me, like knocking pebbles from a jar. “Your feelings come second. You listen to them, you act for them, even to your own detriment. Kingdom comes first.”
He drops his hands and gives me one last look. “Wipe your face and go up to bed now. We have her funeral in the morning, and the bell will start tolling at dawn.”
I dip my head and walk away, reeling with sadness. Reeling with his words too.
But I don’t cry again.
In Highbell, the sky is constantly cluttered with clouds, making the sun limp and futile. If it gives off warmth, it can’t be felt, nor can it be used in marking the hour since it’s always covered. Instead, snow is how I tell the passing of time.
The storm that falls around me has been steady and unyielding, sloughing off the crust of the icy clouds as wind whips around me. Already, there are thick heaps of snow caught alongside the short wall that braces against the chasm, more of it drifting toward the mouth of the bridge and trying to pile up around me.
This mouth is where I still sit, stone cutting into my bent knees. I’m long past the point of feeling the bite. I’m not sure where our horse trotted off to, and there’s no one to watch, since it seems all of Highbell retreated inside their homes to escape the storm. Dommik and I are the only ones out here.
It feels eerie.
With gritted teeth, I smooth my palms over the ice brick I’m making, arms burning as I hold its weight. Dommik plucks it up from me as soon as I’ve finished forming it, and then whooshes away in shadows, appearing several feet up. I squint up past the snow and wind, watching him place the heavy brick on the top of the wall we’ve built. The bricks are stacked along the entire entrance of the bridge, and since each slab is about a foot thick, it’s already quite high.
Dommik stacks them diligently, one after the other, all across the row. Then, once we get a good ten feet high, we start doubling up the wall. Then tripling. Making it as thick as we can.
We work all through the night.
Past the pealing of the midnight bells. Past the worst of the storm, where the clouds dump mounds of snowfall onto the ground. It doesn’t deter me in the slightest. Instead, it’s as if the storm is helping—pillowing where I kneel on the ground and slipping onto my lips to moisten my parched mouth.
I work almost in a trance, focusing only on the cold power that slushes through my veins. Ice pours from the gashes in my hands and continues to bleed out frozen magic—magic that allows me to make brick after brick.
My people might hate me, someone else might sit on my throne, the fae might be marching on us, and I might not know what else I can do with this new magic…but I can do this.
I can do this.
Dommik doesn’t try to talk to me, he simply works alongside me in silent support. Somehow, we don’t need words. He knows exactly how to help, and does so without complaint. Even as the wind whips at his hood and his bare hands go chapped. Even as snow gathers on his shoulders and leeches the warmth from his heated body. I make them, he stacks them, and he doesn’t try to direct me or argue with me or say he knows better.
When morning crests, the storm finally abates, letting out a few last sprinkles of snow shavings. Yet as the pale gray light of morning arrives, so do the people.
The first of them mutter and keep walking, but soon, they begin to gather. Just a few at the beginning, but then the gathering steadily grows, and with more numbers, the bolder they become.
The realization that I’m using magic ripples through them, surging along the steps of disbelief, surprise, confusion, and anger, each emotion rising with fervor. They begin to voice their complaints about the bridge being blocked, the way to the castle cut off.
“What are you doing?”
“She’s trapping us in!”
“Cold crone bitch! You’re no queen of ours!”
“She’s using magic against us!”
“Take this down!”
“Queen Kaila won’t stand for this!”
They ridicule me. Curse me. Hate me. But I keep going.
Dommik appears at my back, growling fiercely when a group of them gets too close. He grips a dagger in each hand with a threatening warning, a sneer on his lips as light bends around him.
It’s enough to keep everyone from growing too aggressive in their hatred and trying to harm me or drag me away. Their verbal lashes don’t stop, though, and I hear it all. My body may be numb to the cold, but my mind is open to the onslaught of their heated words that continue to pour, gushing out like steam, making me flinch one after another as they scald me.
—the cold queen lied about having magic—the frigid bitch—get out of the fucking road—she blocked the bridge—she’s gone mad—go back to the grave—you should’ve stayed dead—
My shoulders go stiff, and my gaze shoots around the outdoor space. “You got plenty of yellow flowers; I’m sure you have them.”
“I know every plant I’m growing,” she replies, tapping her temple. “I don’t carry yellow bells. No one tends to buy those. They’re also quite poisonous.”
Frustration cricks in my neck. “You’re a damn flower shop. I need a flower.”
Why is this so fucking hard?
She hesitates. “That particular flower just isn’t very popular here. Not many like them, I suppose.”
“I fucking like them,” I snap.
The woman rears back in surprise at my sharp tone, and I grind my teeth in irritation, trying to tamp down my anger. It’s not her fault.
“Just check. Please.”
With a wary nod, she turns and heads down the path to the various yellow flowers and walks through them, checking the blooms.
I just wanted some fucking yellow bells to put on Rissa’s bedside. Not that I’ve ever gotten flowers for a woman before, but it seemed like something she might like. Now, I’m twitchy and frustrated and remembering how bad she looked this morning. Sallow. Worn out.
I hate it.
When the woman comes back empty-handed, she shakes her head with a regretful look on her face. “Apologies. As I said, I don’t have them. But I do have some other quite beautiful blooms that are yellow. There’s—”
“Forget it,” I mumble before whipping around.
I march back through the shop, my booted steps sounding way too loud, the browsing women eyeing me and whispering as I pass by. I wrench open the door so hard that the bell above rips off, knocks into my head, and then clatters to the ground.
I stare down at it and try real fucking hard not to see it as a bad omen.
When I get back, I nearly run into Polly just as she comes out of Rissa’s room. Her face is all blotchy red, eyes swollen with a handkerchief stuffed against them like it’ll help stop the leak spewing out of her eyes.
“I can’t keep seeing her like this. I can’t keep coming here to watch.” She shakes her head and looks up at me all glassy-eyed. “Thank you. For letting me visit her, but I can’t anymore.” Before I can say anything, she turns and rushes away down the corridor, leaving me to scowl after her.
I have half a mind to drag her back into Rissa’s room and make her sit at the bedside and help care for her. Just like Rissa fucking did for her day after day.
But I don’t. Rissa doesn’t need her. She has me. And unlike Polly, I won’t abandon her.
When I enter, I find Hojat in the room. He gets up from his chair beside her bed, and his grim face makes my muscles bunch. My bones lock up.
“It’s soon, Captain,” he says quietly.
A cold, sickly dread gushes into my gut.
I give a sharp shake of my head. “No.”
He stops me before I can storm past him with a gentle hold on my arm. I don’t like the look in his fucking eyes. “Yes,” he says, like he’s trying to let me down easy. “I’m sorry.”
My gaze shoots past him to Rissa’s sleeping form. One of the novices steps away from her, her hands clasped, head bowed. She’s brushed out Rissa’s hair. It looks pretty. Soft and light. She’s been changed into a clean nightdress too. Pink, like the color her cheeks used to get every time she blushed at something crass I said. But there’s no embarrassed flush now, no gaze sparkling with fire.
She’s sleeping. Not thrashing or crying out with delirious fits. Just lying there.
Wheezing.
Wheezing so slowly it makes me grimace.
“I’ll leave you alone with her to say your goodbyes,” Hojat says softly, while I swallow hard.
Denial wants to rush up, but it just…drains out of me instead. I don’t take my eyes away from her as he and the novice leave the room, shutting the door behind them.
When it’s just us, I step forward, almost tiptoeing, like I shouldn’t disturb the quiet. I don’t want to break it, don’t want to startle her. I slump into the chair next to her and place the little brass bell from the plant shop on her bedside table. Probably shouldn’t have taken it, but I didn’t want to return empty-handed.
Reaching forward, I grab hold of her hand. It’s hot with her fever, but the worst part is how limp it is. How fucking lifeless.
“Brought you this, Yellow Bell,” I tell her, but my voice sounds too rough. My hand looks huge compared to hers. She feels delicate. Fragile. I’m afraid to squeeze too hard in case I break her fingers. “They didn’t have your flowers. At a flower shop. Can you believe that shit?”
She doesn’t reply. Her eyelids don’t even twitch.
The pauses between her labored breaths are fucking terrifying.
“Brought you a bell instead. It sounds kind of annoying to be honest. Not like your voice. Your voice is…nice.”
I cringe. I suck at this shit. I’m almost glad she can’t hear me. I’ve never been good at words. Not good at giving compliments. But right now, I wish I was. Because if I were, I’d give them to her.
I’d give her whatever fucking words she wants.
“Wish you’d wake up and mouth off to me, Yellow Bell,” I murmur as I scrape my callused thumb over the back of her soft hand. It’s softer than feathers. Like silk or something. Too soft for the likes of me. My hands are scarred and rough, with ripped cuticles and thick skin from all the years I’ve gripped a sword.
She takes another slow, wheezing breath before silence draws out between us.
What happens when she just…stops? When that drawn-out silence turns into just silence?
Emotion quick and hot rushes up my throat and stuffs inside my head. I’ve tried raging. Tried torturing. Tried arguing. Tried denying. But now, in this wheezing silence, the truth glares at me like a judgmental bastard.
She’s dying.
She has been. Since that dagger went into her chest. Since I carried her into this mender room. She wasn’t ever going to come back out. I wasn’t ever going to hold her again.
Every time I’ve sat here at her bedside, death has been spreading over more of her, like a sheet coming to cover her up, going higher and higher.
I didn’t want to see it, but there’s no denying the infection spreading from that wound. If she were one of my soldiers, I would have broken the news to her family already, sent a message to prepare them for the worst.
But she’s not a soldier. She didn’t enlist for violence or sign her name accepting the threat of dying on a blade. She should die of old age a long time from now, after she got what she wanted. The thing she wished for most.
Her independence.
She wanted to go away. To go far enough to escape her past and live without being beholden to anyone. Without having to cater or coddle or please any fuckheads to earn a coin like she had to do for years. I was the selfish bastard that asked her to stay. Look where that got her.
With a blade nearly stabbed through her heart and an infection burning her alive.
“Can’t even get you fucking yellow bells…”
She called me her mistake. Said we were wrong. Maybe that’s true, because I can’t seem to get anything right. But when she kissed me, that did feel fucking right.
In a world full of wrong, I wanted one right thing.
I press my finger against the pulse on her wrist, feel the weak flutter, and it makes me so fucking angry. I shove my gaze at the clear window, like I can glare at the gods.
“Not her,” I snarl at them. “Not yet.”
It’s a pissed-off prayer, and I don’t even fucking pray. Don’t even know if I believe in the gods. But if they’re up there smug as shit in their simple sky, then the least they can do is come down here and help this complicated woman who doesn’t deserve this.
“She needs more time,” I tell them. “We need more fucking time.”
I thought we had all the time in the world.
“Just give us that,” I snap. “Never asked you for shit all my life. Just give us this.”
I wait, listening. Glaring out the window. But nothing happens. Not a strike of lightning or a growl of thunder. She doesn’t suddenly open her eyes.
Hojat wants me to prepare myself. To say my goodbyes.
But how am I supposed to see her through to her end when we barely got to start?
My gaze trails up to her lips, now chapped and pale, a frown dug deep between her blonde eyebrows like every breath hurts.
I feel that hurt right in my chest.
It burrows deep. Jabbing in with her next labored wheeze. Hearing the way her inhale scrapes and whines as if it’s ready to give up makes that cottony emotion in my head rupture, like stuffing that bursts out of a seam.
I never get teary-eyed. Never let emotion seep out. Not even on the battlefield when my own soldiers died at my side. But right now, right here, I find a furious, grief-ridden sob rasping from my throat and tears searing my eyes.
I lean in and place a kiss on her burning brow, and then I tip my head against hers, eyes shut with anguish. “You were supposed to wake up,” I tell her as torment slides down my tongue. As the evidence of my misery lands in dots against her pink nightgown. “We were supposed to have time to make this mistake over and over again, until you finally realized how right it really is.”
But time doesn’t fucking listen to me any more than the gods do.
So I listen instead, because that’s all I can do. I listen to her every breath that gets harder and harder for her to take. I listen to all the things I never got to say.
And I listen to my own goodbye that she’ll never get to fucking hear.
“Sit up straight, Malina. Honestly, is it so hard?”
My father hisses this at me from the corner of his mouth. It’s impressive how he can speak like this, barely moving his lips.
Impressive how he can convey such anger in his tone while keeping his expression completely flat.
I lengthen my spine and slam my shoulders back. I’ve been sitting here for hours, holding court, listening to the people as they come forward and give us their condolences.
Because my mother is dead.
It still sounds strange, like it isn’t real. Except it is.
My mother is dead, and her corpse is in the atrium right now, where her death rites are being carried out. That’s where I should be. Up there with her, where the gods can look through the atrium windows and accept her soul’s ascent. I want to be with her when her soul slips away. Maybe her incorporeal spirit will remember me as she passes into the heavens.
Yet father won’t let me, so here I sit in the throne room. Normally, the white walls and blue carpet that runs up the stairs to the dais make it feel icy and open, but with the black drapes of mourning and the packed crowd, it feels claustrophobic.
More and more people come forward, leaving boughs from the Pitching Pines at the bottom step of our platform, while we sit at the trio of thrones, my mother’s seat startlingly empty.
I’m dressed all in black with the mourning veil hanging from the tiara on my head and draping down my face. At least the sheer fabric is dark enough that no one can see the silent tears that drip down my cheeks.
It’s not until hours later, when the people have finally gone, that my father allows me to peel myself up from my throne. His advisor informs us that mother’s body is wrapped up and moved away already. I can’t help the sob that escapes me, my grief echoing through the empty room. When the advisor bows and leaves, my father’s eyes skate over my veiled face.
I so desperately want to ask him if he misses her as much as I do. If it doesn’t quite feel real. But he wouldn’t appreciate questions like that.
So I say nothing.
Yet as he looks down at me, I see something in his eyes soften—just for a moment. His hands come up and grip my shoulders, and I almost flinch. Father doesn’t give loving pats or hugs, or anything like that, so his touch is foreign, making me go stiff.
“Why are you crying?” he asks.
I blink at him, wondering if I misheard. “Because…Mother.”
Why wouldn’t I be crying? She’s dead! I want to scream at him.
Of course, I stay silent.
“It is important that you do not show weakness in front of our people, Malina.”
My head bows under the condemnation of his words. “Yes, Father, but I—” I catch myself, horrified by the argument I almost let slip.
“But what?” he demands.
I hesitate, but I know it’s no use. I have to answer him. “I wanted to be with her during her rites,” I say in a small voice. A despairing one.
Her body is already wrapped up. Already moved away.
I’ll never see her again.
That thought hits me in the chest and steals the breath right out of my ribs and makes me want to fall to my knees and sob. But I can’t.
My father squeezes my shoulder in what I think might be a rare show of affection, and my eyes snap up to his face. “This is what it means to be royal, Malina,” he says. “Yes, your mother, my wife, died. But their queen died too, and it was our responsibility to sit here and allow them to pay their respects. To grieve.”
But what about my respects? What about my grief?
“When you’re a ruler, you make sacrifices for your kingdom,” he says as he shakes me, as if he wants to rattle the sadness right out of me, like knocking pebbles from a jar. “Your feelings come second. You listen to them, you act for them, even to your own detriment. Kingdom comes first.”
He drops his hands and gives me one last look. “Wipe your face and go up to bed now. We have her funeral in the morning, and the bell will start tolling at dawn.”
I dip my head and walk away, reeling with sadness. Reeling with his words too.
But I don’t cry again.
In Highbell, the sky is constantly cluttered with clouds, making the sun limp and futile. If it gives off warmth, it can’t be felt, nor can it be used in marking the hour since it’s always covered. Instead, snow is how I tell the passing of time.
The storm that falls around me has been steady and unyielding, sloughing off the crust of the icy clouds as wind whips around me. Already, there are thick heaps of snow caught alongside the short wall that braces against the chasm, more of it drifting toward the mouth of the bridge and trying to pile up around me.
This mouth is where I still sit, stone cutting into my bent knees. I’m long past the point of feeling the bite. I’m not sure where our horse trotted off to, and there’s no one to watch, since it seems all of Highbell retreated inside their homes to escape the storm. Dommik and I are the only ones out here.
It feels eerie.
With gritted teeth, I smooth my palms over the ice brick I’m making, arms burning as I hold its weight. Dommik plucks it up from me as soon as I’ve finished forming it, and then whooshes away in shadows, appearing several feet up. I squint up past the snow and wind, watching him place the heavy brick on the top of the wall we’ve built. The bricks are stacked along the entire entrance of the bridge, and since each slab is about a foot thick, it’s already quite high.
Dommik stacks them diligently, one after the other, all across the row. Then, once we get a good ten feet high, we start doubling up the wall. Then tripling. Making it as thick as we can.
We work all through the night.
Past the pealing of the midnight bells. Past the worst of the storm, where the clouds dump mounds of snowfall onto the ground. It doesn’t deter me in the slightest. Instead, it’s as if the storm is helping—pillowing where I kneel on the ground and slipping onto my lips to moisten my parched mouth.
I work almost in a trance, focusing only on the cold power that slushes through my veins. Ice pours from the gashes in my hands and continues to bleed out frozen magic—magic that allows me to make brick after brick.
My people might hate me, someone else might sit on my throne, the fae might be marching on us, and I might not know what else I can do with this new magic…but I can do this.
I can do this.
Dommik doesn’t try to talk to me, he simply works alongside me in silent support. Somehow, we don’t need words. He knows exactly how to help, and does so without complaint. Even as the wind whips at his hood and his bare hands go chapped. Even as snow gathers on his shoulders and leeches the warmth from his heated body. I make them, he stacks them, and he doesn’t try to direct me or argue with me or say he knows better.
When morning crests, the storm finally abates, letting out a few last sprinkles of snow shavings. Yet as the pale gray light of morning arrives, so do the people.
The first of them mutter and keep walking, but soon, they begin to gather. Just a few at the beginning, but then the gathering steadily grows, and with more numbers, the bolder they become.
The realization that I’m using magic ripples through them, surging along the steps of disbelief, surprise, confusion, and anger, each emotion rising with fervor. They begin to voice their complaints about the bridge being blocked, the way to the castle cut off.
“What are you doing?”
“She’s trapping us in!”
“Cold crone bitch! You’re no queen of ours!”
“She’s using magic against us!”
“Take this down!”
“Queen Kaila won’t stand for this!”
They ridicule me. Curse me. Hate me. But I keep going.
Dommik appears at my back, growling fiercely when a group of them gets too close. He grips a dagger in each hand with a threatening warning, a sneer on his lips as light bends around him.
It’s enough to keep everyone from growing too aggressive in their hatred and trying to harm me or drag me away. Their verbal lashes don’t stop, though, and I hear it all. My body may be numb to the cold, but my mind is open to the onslaught of their heated words that continue to pour, gushing out like steam, making me flinch one after another as they scald me.
—the cold queen lied about having magic—the frigid bitch—get out of the fucking road—she blocked the bridge—she’s gone mad—go back to the grave—you should’ve stayed dead—
