“Ahh...gghl...” The words I was trying to form turned into a tangle of discomfort in my mouth.
Both my brother and sister-in-law turned toward me with expressions of bright interest.
“All right there, old girl?” Jonathan inquired, raising his eyebrows. “Need a sip of something to clear your throat?”
Amy said, “What are you crumpling in your hands, Cassandra? If you were meaning to post those letters, you might want to flatten them out a bit.”
I loosened my fingers with a jerk, smoothing down the wrinkled pages. “These...are for you, actually.” I thrust them forward, bracing myself.
“For us?” Amy’s eyebrows drew into a frown. She didn’t move. “Why would you write letters to us?”
“Not only to us,” Jonathan told her, as he scooped them out of my hand. He held up the letter addressed to my young niece, his voice hardening. “Apparently, she’s planning to be gone for a while.”
“What on earth—?” Amy began.
“Just read them!” I snapped, and strode past them both to the window, sucking in a deep, panicked breath.
This was exactly the kind of conversation I hated most.
The snow swirled outside as discontentedly as my own frantic, whirling thoughts. My fingers tapped impatiently against the iron-bound windowsill.
It would have been so much easier to stride directly out into that terrible storm and face whatever was coming to me on my own, rather than having to endure this agonizing truth-telling session first...followed by the certain wrath of the Boudiccate afterward.
When they all realized exactly how I’d let myself be tricked through my own pride and arrogance into accepting that impossible, poisoned bargain from Lord Ihlmere...
Wait.
My mouth dropped open.
My fingers stilled.
Inside my head, the frantic storm whirled to a sudden, frozen halt.
“Cassandra,” Amy said behind me in a strangled voice. “You—”
“No!” A wide, disbelieving smile bloomed on my face as I spun around to face my family. It stretched and stretched until I was beaming like the sun at their horrified faces.
“Forget everything I said in those letters,” I told them. “I can solve this puzzle after all. But first: I’ll need as many people there to witness it as possible.”
14
It had been over a decade since the last time I’d attended an official Boudiccate ceremony. That last time, I’d stood prickling with resistance behind my mother with every inch of my body braced against the path she’d laid out for me.
That moment seemed a very long time ago, although I could see its memory reflected all around me in the faces of the older women who surrounded me now. They’d always commented on my resemblance to my mother.
She should have been here today leading all the rest, but that was an old—albeit aching—grief. My stomach might be roiling with sick tension now, but Amy and Wrexham walked on either side of me in the center of the crowd, while Jonathan walked so close behind that I could feel his steady warmth against my back. My easy-going older brother had bellowed at the top of his lungs this morning and nearly torn his hair out with his agitation—and Amy had made it very clear, in her softest and most ominous tones, that if I did somehow manage to survive this ceremony, she would have a very great deal indeed to say to me afterwards about keeping vital secrets from my own family members, who deserved far more respect and consideration and could perhaps have even helped me beforehand if I had only bothered to include them...
But she had cut herself off there with a visible effort in order to preserve all the rest of the time we had left for strategizing with the full force of her wily political brain. So it was because of my sister-in-law’s machinations that now, as we stepped en masse out of Cosgrave Manor, nearly the entire house party trailed after us through the knee-high snow, rather than the paltry nine-person committee that had originally been planned.
They would either be the audience that confirmed my victory to the world...or the witnesses as I was dragged away forever.
Lady Cosgrave looked physically pained as she shepherded our unwieldy group into place on a wide patch of nearly-cleared ground just past the knot garden. A bubble of magic protected all of us from the elements, but her voice grew more and more strained with every moment. “If everyone could please ensure that we stay in two clear semi-circles, with every guest who isn’t an official member of today’s ritual remaining safely in the outer ring...no, not there, Mr. Sansom,” she added sharply as the scarlet-coated weather wizard tried to bluster his way into the center of the smaller, inner semicircle. “If you please...!”
Even through my own churning nerves, I felt a moment of pure sympathy break through. This couldn’t have been how she had ever imagined her exquisitely-planned ceremony proceeding.
Standing just in front of me and leaning on her walking stick, which she’d planted firmly in the snowy ground, Mrs. Seabury let out a sharp crack of laughter. “Be grateful for small mercies, girl,” she called over to Lady Cosgrave. “At least Sansom’s kept his clothes on for this one!”
“I beg your pardon, Madam.” Sansom glowered at her as he allowed himself to be shuffled back into the outer semicircle with the rest of us. “If you had any conception of the infinite mysteries of weather, which occasionally require—”
“Will everyone please be quiet!” Lady Cosgrave’s voice rose to a shriek. A stunned silence fell across the entire house party as our hostess, bereft of her customary poise, cast a desperate glare across our imperfect semicircles, her face pinched white with tension beneath her luxurious satin hood.
“Do you have any idea how much rides upon this ceremony?” she demanded of the company at large. “If they can seize upon a single excuse to claim insult—if a single person here coughs or speaks at the wrong moment—if Miss Harwood’s rash bargain hasn’t doomed all of us already—!”
I winced, but for once, I didn’t argue. Every muscle in my body was braced for the oncoming battle. From the moment that I had stepped outside into the cold, snow-swept air, all the intellectual excitement of my earlier breakthrough had been replaced by an overwhelming awareness of everything that could go wrong. That list mounted higher with every moment, clenching the muscles in my back tight with dread and sending nausea rocketing through my stomach.
It didn’t matter that I was certain I was right. I’d been certain I was right four months ago, too. And what had happened then, after all of my great plans...
A deafening roar of sound crashed through the air, and a towering tidal wave of snow erupted in the landscape before us.
“RAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGHHHH!”
I clapped my hands to my ears, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing could be enough to protect me from this. The roar echoed agonizingly on and on, growing impossibly louder and louder, pounding at my head and battering all my senses until I had to fight the urge to drop to my knees in pure submission and terror. A wall of unbroken white billowed before my eyes, piling higher and higher beyond our fragile bubble of spelled protection, while the roar...
No, wait.
It wasn’t a roar, after all. It was roars: a multitude of them, all sounding together and coming from all around us...
...From the massive, rocky hills that dotted the rugged northern landscape, all bursting upward from the ground at once.
How many ancient trolls had been sleeping there for centuries?
They were all wide awake now and advancing on us through the snow with massive, stone-strong legs. As the cloud of snow they’d flung off from their grassy sides finally collapsed to the ground beyond our bubble, I could see exactly who had woken them.
Apparently, we weren’t the only ones to have desired extra witnesses to this meeting.
The elf-lords rose from the center of the white landscape, tall and beautiful and shining like icicles encased in flesh. Their long, pale hair glittered with razor-sharp shards of transparent glass. Their floor-lengt
h white coats shimmered with iridescent silver embroidery. The crown of the elf in the center looked as if it had been fashioned from pure diamond, and an audible gasp ran through the inner semicircle of human watchers as the snow cleared to reveal him.
The elven king, according to Amy, had never attended this ceremony. That was the duty of his representatives, hardly suited to the eminence of his role in the elven court...
But the eyes of the elf-lord on the king’s left side gleamed with unmistakable satisfaction as his cat-like gaze turned directly to me.
Lord Ihlmere was ready to claim his prey.
“Your Majesty. We are honored indeed by your presence here today.” Lady Cosgrave stepped forward and bowed her head to the elven king with perfect grace, ignoring the gigantic trolls who continued to close steadily around our tiny semicircles. Even as their massive strides shook the earth beneath her feet, she kept her steely social smile fixed to her face.
“...And my lords.” She looked deliberately around the assembled elves. “How delightful to see so many of you gathered in friendship for this year’s solstice ceremony...especially after such a disappointing absence from this year’s Samhain celebrations. If only we’d known how many of you would be arriving today, we would have set out even more places at our feast to welcome you as kin.”
A ripple of expressions ran across the faces of the elven courtiers, ranging from skepticism to outright sneers. The elven king himself, standing still and poised in the very center, appeared to be perfectly unmoved by any such trivial emotion, except...
Had that been a warning twitch of his eyebrow as he nodded gravely back to Lady Cosgrave? I frowned, peering at them both from my position at the back of the second semicircle. I was too far away and too untutored to read the intricacies of the code, if there was one, that had passed between them in that moment.
But I remembered what Amy had told me: “It was either a deliberate snub, in which case our treaty is in grave danger—or else a sign that their own court is in such disarray that he didn’t trust any one of his courtiers to meet with us in public this year...”
The elven king might be here to defend the treaty. But in this particular meeting, he could well be overwhelmed by his own attendant numbers...and I wouldn’t be surprised if Lord Ihlmere had more than one upset in mind for today.
“Our noble king,” he’d murmured in a tone of pure venom all those days ago, as his sole reason for leaving the lost travelers unharmed.
Ihlmere stepped forward now, taking control as easily as if he’d already slipped the crown from his ruler’s head.
“Alas,” he said in a tone that reeked of satisfaction, “not every friendship can last forever. And when one side is guilty of such a vast betrayal...”
I wasn’t the only human who stiffened at those words. Every politician in the inner semicircle sucked in a preparatory breath, while every magician in the group went as taut as a hunting dog waiting to be set loose.
My own magic should have been a vital part of our defense...but for once, that bitter seed had no chance of taking full root in my chest. It was overpowered by the cold certainty that we would still have been hopelessly outmatched. Lady Cosgrave had prepared for a political ceremony today, not a battle.
Everyone knew what had happened in our last, epic battles with the elves, when our nation had prepared with all its might. The blood shed then, on both sides, was a nightmare passed down all the centuries.
“We share this land,” Lord Ihlmere said, “but we do not alter it, on either side. To call down an unnatural storm such as the one that currently torments our pets and threatens our own traditional hunts is an abomination that spits in the face of our longstanding treaty. And when it comes to the human who made a promise to one of our own—a daughter of the Boudiccate herself...”
He smiled at me with glittering intensity.
“Well, woman? Have you identified and brought us one of your own, for the culprit to be punished by our laws? Or are you ready to join me for my own private hunt...as I am certain your friends and family will allow without a word of protest, for the sake of protecting our precious treaty?”
Beside me, Jonathan sucked in a breath through his teeth. Standing in the circle before me, Amy lifted her chin. At the edge of the outer semicircle, Wrexham’s posture was as stiff as a bayonet.
I stepped out of my place, leaving all of them behind.
My mother, if only she were here, could have warned Lord Ihlmere of exactly what ultimatums and threats did to my resolve.
All of the fear had drained out of me when he’d threatened my family. Now I glared back at him with every bit of the fury and contempt that I felt. “I won’t break our agreement,” I told him sweetly, “any more than my nation has.”
His eyebrows rose in open disbelief. “How...very...noble of you.” He looked around, drawing his companions into the conversation with a sweeping gesture. “So? Which of your compatriots have you brought to face our justice? Or are you turning yourself over now without any resistance? Because as you know, any resistance whatsoever from anyone in this gathered group—”
“Yes, yes,” I said, and flicked one hand at him in dismissal as I turned to the elven king in the center of their group. “Your Majesty,” I said, “may I repeat the terms of my agreement with Lord Ihlmere?”
Every other elf in the group had stiffened at my disrespect to their spokesman.
But the elven king tilted his head, his attention piercing. “You may,” he said in a voice like sparkling ice. “We are listening.”
“Thank you.” I smiled.
I had never been a good daughter of the Boudiccate. I would never, ever follow in my mother’s political footsteps.
But I knew how to memorize and recite a spell, word-for-word, without a single shift of intonation.
“I agreed,” I said clearly to the whole gathered group, “to protect the elves’ pets by discovering the one who cast this unnatural storm, whether the perpetrator was human or not.”
“And?” Ihlmere snapped. “Have you brought him to this gathering? Or do you officially declare forfeit to me now?”
“No, I didn’t bring him,” I said, and kept my gaze on the king. “You did, Your Majesty.”
A hiss of sucked-in breaths sounded from both groups.
Lady Cosgrave’s face was bone-white. The elves, glittering and undefeatable, were glaring at me en masse, the magic that they carried within them building like a second storm and thickening the air all around us with menace.
But as I watched, one corner of the king’s mouth unmistakably curved upwards. “Indeed?” he said coolly. “Do explain. To all of us, if you please.”
“Humans lie, and we all know it!” Lord Ihlmere started forward, shining with fury. “You cannot trust any human to tell the truth, or—”
“But you can trust an elf-lord, can’t you?” Jonathan said behind me. His voice came out as easily as if he were engaging in intellectual debate, and when I looked back, I found him in a relaxed pose, his arms crossed and head tilted with scholarly interest. “Isn’t it true, my lords, that you never lie?”
“Never,” snapped the elf-lord on Lord Ihlmere’s left, his eyes narrowing. “Any such abomination would be identified immediately by every other member in this group. We can all attest to the truth in each other’s words.”
“Well, then,” Amy said, from the inner semicircle. “Why don’t you tell us, Cassandra, exactly what Lord Ihlmere said to you? And he may tell us all whether you’re repeating his words correctly.”
“Of course.” I bowed respectfully to the group around me. “Lord Ihlmere,” I said to the gathered elves and humans, “claimed that the laws in his kingdom utterly prohibit any such atrocity of nature as this spelled storm—and that it is your kingdom, not our nation, that is most harmed by it, as it has injured your pets and ruined your hunts. Therefore,” I finished, “he pointed out, as I recall, that any observer with a shred of logic would tell us that one of our own magician
s must be the ones directing all of it.”
“Well?” The king turned his clear, cold gaze upon his elf-lord. “Is the human lying? Yes or no?”
Ihlmere’s words sounded as if they’d been ground out through his sharp-edged jaw. “No,” he said harshly. “Which is why any elf lord in this group, unlike a human magician, would never cast such reckless magic as an experiment!”
“As an experiment? I don’t think so.” I tilted my head. “But in order to break our treaty...and perhaps win yourself full power, too?”
For the first time, the group of elves broke formation. Heads turned. Booted feet shifted.
Suddenly, there was a space between Lord Ihlmere and his fellows.
“I expect there’s been a great deal of unhappiness in the elven court,” said Miss Fennell knowledgeably, from her space in the outer semicircle. “Based on my reading, I would guess that a good deal of blame has probably been cast about in this past se’nnight. Perhaps a few questions might even have been raised about the fitness of a ruler who wouldn’t step up to defend his realm when mere humans were causing such disruptions?”
“And our own disruptions,” Lady Cosgrave added sharply, “were all to the detriment of this particular ceremony. This sudden storm, so carefully timed, made it nearly impossible for all of our intended attendees to gather...as I recall you noting, Lord Ihlmere, in your unexpected visit to us last week.”
More elves stepped away from Lord Ihlmere.
One of them shook his head in open shock. “Without our hunts...”
“I cannot believe any of you would listen to human slander!” Lord Ihlmere spat. “You know they care nothing for the truth. You know—”
“I know how good you are at twisting it.” I took another inexorable step forward. “You chose your words very carefully last week, didn’t you? You said that any observer would tell us that a human magician must be behind it all. But you aren’t just any observer, are you? You’re the architect behind it all.”
Snowspelled: Volume I of The Harwood Spellbook Page 12
