by Sara Raasch
“Trouble?”
A Cordellan soldier ducks into the tent, flanked by three others. The moment their armored frames fill the space, my council yanks to attention, casting off any pretense of ease.
I growl deep in my throat as Theron enters the tent too.
“I’m sure they’re discussing how best to proceed with the Tadil’s spoils,” Theron guesses, moving to stand beside me. He tips his head at his men. “No trouble here.”
The soldiers hesitate, clearly unconvinced, but Theron is their prince. They back out of the tent as Theron tucks his hand around my waist. The chill of magic palpitates through me, only marred now—I shouldn’t need someone from another land to sweep to my rescue. Especially to fend off the very men who are supposed to be protecting us.
“Thank you for interceding, Prince Theron,” Sir offers.
Theron bobs his head. “No need to thank me. You should be allowed to gather in your own kingdom without Cordellan interference.”
I cock an eyebrow at him. “Don’t let your father hear you say that.”
That makes Theron tighten his grip on me, drawing me closer in a protective lurch. “My father hears whatever he wants to hear,” he says. “What were you discussing, though?”
Sir steps closer. My eyes flick to the side, noting Finn and Greer striding down the road, most likely heading to freshen up so as not to appear travel worn.
“We were discussing only—”
But whatever lie Sir might have been about to tell proves unnecessary. Theron unwinds himself from me and snatches the tapestry from the table.
“Ventralli?” he asks. “Why do you have this?”
Of course he would know where the tapestry is from. His mother was the aunt of the current Ventrallan king—Theron’s room in Bithai is stuffed with paintings, masks, and other treasures from his Ventrallan side.
I glance at Sir, who holds my gaze. The same emotion coats everyone else—Dendera watches me, Alysson grips the edge of the table. All waiting for my response.
All wanting me to lie.
Finn and Greer’s journey was supposed to be secret, one frail act of Winter in the face of Cordell’s occupation. Proof that we could do something, be something, on our own.
But lying to Theron . . .
Sir’s jaw tightens when I hang silent for a beat too long. “The rubble of Gaos,” he says. “We found it in the buildings.”
I don’t realize until the words leave his lips that Theron might find out the truth anyway—if Giselle and Raelyn welcomed Finn and Greer, news will spread. Noam will eventually hear that his Rhythm brethren had Winterian visitors.
I choke, but the lie has been told. Backtracking now would only look worse—wouldn’t it? I can’t very well ask Sir’s opinion on this—besides, he’s the one who lied. Maybe . . . it’s okay.
No. It isn’t okay. But I don’t know how a queen would make this okay.
“It’s beautiful.” Theron runs his fingers down the threads. “A Winter–Spring battle?”
He looks at me, expectant.
I actually manage a chuckle. “You’re asking me? You’re the one with Ventrallan blood.”
Theron cocks a grin. “Ah, but I’d hoped some of me had rubbed off on you by now.”
My cheeks heat, egged on by the group of my advisors still watching us, by the way Theron straightens, tilting his head to me. I can’t tell if he knows Sir lied—all I can see is the look he gets whenever something artistic is around, a softening at his edges. Seeing him like this is such a nice change from his recent tension, balancing on the edge of fear and memories, that I almost miss where else I’ve seen it before.
I jolt with realization. It’s exactly how he looked at me on the fields outside of Gaos, and every time he wants to kiss me—like I’m a work of art he’s trying to interpret.
My heart thumps so loudly I’m sure he can hear. If we were standing in his room, he the prince of Cordell, myself a soldier of Winter, I would have swooned without another thought.
But I look around the tent, at Sir, Dendera, Alysson. Even Conall, Garrigan, and Nessa. They all look at me with similar gazes—like they’ve only ever known me as the queen of Winter, a figure owed reverence and worship.
I’m not a work of art or even worthy of their reverence. I’m someone who just helped lie to one of her closest friends.
This is what Winter needs. This is who Winter needs me to be.
I hate who I am now.
A deep rumble bubbles up through the earth. The vibration catches me off guard, numbness washing over me while the world quivers in a violent cacophony of tremors and belching thuds. A few abrupt seconds and it all drops as still and quiet as if nothing happened.
But something happened. Something that makes the families of the miners, still in the square, scream in terror, knowing what that noise and sensation means:
A cave-in.
Clarity hardens every nerve and I launch away from the table. My skirt tangles around my legs until I bundle it and push faster, but just as I angle across the square, someone grabs me.
“My queen!” Sir’s voice is his familiar tone of command. “You can’t—”
“There are miners down there,” I shout back. I can still feel the tremors in my legs. The people around me rush toward the mine entrance too, crowding against Cordellan soldiers who fight to keep them in the square until decisions can be made. “My people. I’m the only one who can heal them, and I won’t let them stay down there!”
I knew we shouldn’t have opened this mine. And now, if some of my people have died because of Noam’s insistence on searching for something we will never find—I’ll kill him.
Sir’s grip tightens. “You’re the queen—you do not rush into collapsed mines!”
I almost scream at him. It fizzes in the back of my throat, and already I can feel parts of myself sigh at the familiarity of yelling at Sir.
But no scream comes. Because over the ridge rushes one of the Cordellan soldiers charged with guarding the entrance to the mine.
“A miner!” he announces over the square to cries for details. “Coming up the shaft!”
Relief springs in my gut. The magic—it gave them endurance and strength. Maybe it let one of them escape to run desperately fast up the mine shaft.
Sir pushes through the crowd, letting me follow a beat behind.
When we make it to the ridge, the hill on the other side curves down before splitting around a path lined with boulders. The path leads to a cave that seems like any other—dark and fathomless. Sir and I sprint for it, and a trail of people—Conall and Garrigan, Theron, a few Cordellan soldiers—gathers behind us. As I focus on the entrance, I beg the darkness to relinquish the miner, for news that the cave-in wasn’t a cave-in, but something else—
Just as we reach the entrance, the miner stumbles out and falls to his knees. He’s so covered with grime that his ivory skin and hair are gray, and he hacks a funnel of dust into the sunlight. I drop before him, my hands on his shoulders. No thought, no chance to reconsider—the magic swells in my chest, a surge of frost that coats every vein as it rushes down my arms and slams into the miner’s body, clearing his lungs, healing the bruises along his limbs.
All the air drains from me, leaving me to pant from the unexpected use of magic as the tension on the man’s face alleviates. Does he realize I used magic on him?
“A wall collapsed, my queen,” he coughs. “Weren’t expecting it, not there, but—”
Theron falls to the ground beside me, his attention boring into the miner in a frantic pull of pure, aching need.
“We . . . found it,” the miner says like even he can’t believe his own news. He blinks at me, and I try with everything I have left to breathe, just breathe, keep breathing.
“We found it, my queen. The magic chasm.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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HANNAH? I TRY, and my magic sparks the slightest flash of cold. Tell me he’s wrong.
But the emotion that radiates from her is the opposite of what I expected: amazement. Awe. The same winded shock that descends over everyone else.
We were so close, she gasps. The Tadil, all this time—we were so close . . .
Her words fade, but I know what she means.
Before Angra overtook Winter.
The miner shoves to his feet, wordlessly leading me on. Sir lets me stumble after him without protest, trudging along behind me as if he’s being dragged into the mine against his will. We’re trailed by Theron, Garrigan, Conall, and a handful of Cordellan soldiers.
The morning sun lights the first few paces inside the mine shaft, but farther in, when the ground starts to slant around serrated rock walls, everything is coated in darkness. The miner picks up a single lit lantern, most likely the one he carried as he ran out to us, and the rest of us take a few from a pile, strike flames to life, and follow him.
The cave flashes into view, tools littering a corridor two arm lengths wide and little more than a full man’s height tall. Silence ensnares us the moment we enter the tunnel, the only noise the muted shuffling of our feet as we take cautious steps into the shadows.
Fingers brush my wrist, a delicate touch that grows bolder when I pull up a weak smile for Theron. He doesn’t say anything, though I can tell by the way his mouth pops open that he wants to. What is there to say, though, beyond murmurings of disbelief?
I squeeze his fingers and tug him forward, leading him into the darkness.
More shafts open along the way, but the miner at the front of our group leads us past them all, plunging into the deepest tunnel in the Klaryns. The air smells of ancient, musty grime, coating my skin in thin layers that feel, somehow, just as Winterian as snow. That does little to abate the tension coiling in my gut when the tunnel before us ends at an opening.
The other miners’ lanterns light up the puckered wall, clearly an unexpected expansion by the way rocks sit in haphazard clusters of debris along the ground. The remaining Winterian miners seem uninjured, which eases some of my worry. They all stand in the tunnel, gaping at the crack in the wall, too afraid to move inside, too awed to pull away.
When they see us, they step back, all eyes snapping to me. But I’m just as afraid, just as awed, the lantern trembling in my grip, light pulsing in dizzying flashes.
Someone made this space. Beyond the opening, perfect diamond cuttings turn the gray-black ground into a marble-like floor. The walls around the room are the same jagged rocks as the rest of the mine—but even that seems intentional, as it draws all focus to the back of the room, where the stone has been flattened into a smooth wall.
In that wall stands something that makes me gasp with astonishment.
I slide forward, past the crumbled heaps of rock, depositing my light at the threshold since the lanterns behind me brighten this new space. The moment I step into the room, the air crackles against my skin, a jolt like the electric charge of a thunderstorm preparing to unleash cascades of lightning. I shiver, bumps rising along my arms.
The air hangs heavy and humid with magic.
And I think . . . I think I’m looking at the door to the chasm.
Theron touches my elbow and I start. I didn’t know he’d followed me into the room, but he seems the only one brave enough—or stupid enough—to venture after me. Everyone else remains pinned in the entrance, gaping in shocked horror at the same thing that draws my attention like a gnat to a flame.
A door towers over us, massive and thick, made of the same gray stone as the rest of the room. Four images are carved in the center of the door—one, a tangle of flaming vines; another, books stacked in a pile; another, a simple mask; and the last, the largest one centered above the smaller three, a mountaintop bathed in a beam of light with words arching over it, THE ORDER OF THE LUSTRATE.
I step closer, my boots tapping against the stone floor.
A beam of light hitting a mountaintop. Where have I seen that before?
And who is the Order of the Lustrate?
Theron hisses. “Golden leaves.” He slides forward a step. “Are those . . . keyholes?”
I grab his arm, keeping us both from going too far into the room. This place feels dangerous, like it’s waiting for something, and I don’t want to find out what.
But he’s right—in the center of each of the three small carvings sits a narrow keyhole.
“Do you think this is it?” I whisper, barely loud enough to stir the air.
Theron’s hand encases mine where I hold his arm and he nods, absently amazed.
“Yes,” he says, smiling like a piece of him is rising up over the walls of fear that built within him. “We found it. We’re going to be okay now.” He looks to me, back to the door. “We’re going to be okay . . .”
I glance over my shoulder at everyone still clogged by the entrance. Sir’s eyes meet mine, and I wheeze on the choking knowledge of what exactly this means.
The last time our world had more than just the eight Royal Conduits, the Decay was created. People began using their individual conduits for things that harmed one another, murder and theft and evil, and that birthed a dark magic that infiltrated people’s minds, encouraged them to use their magic for evil, and started a cycle of despair.
And when we open that door, if it does guard the magic chasm . . .
We could be wrong. It could just be a . . . room. In a mountain?
What else could it be?
My throat clamps shut. This really is it, isn’t it? I should have stopped Noam long ago. I shouldn’t have let him do this to my kingdom—how did we even find this?
Theron’s face is wide with astonishment. He’s pleased with this find, he’ll want to open that door, and seeing that expression on him makes me reel even more. I didn’t think. I charged in here without remembering who Theron is, who he really is—not just a source of comfort, not just my friend. He wants this. Cordell wants this.
I back up, farther from him.
Theron reaches out for me. “Meira?”
Biting and sharp, a cold sensation cuts through my body in a heave of magic. My magic, not the spark in the air. I slam to a halt.
Meira! comes Hannah’s voice. She’s upset. Afraid. Of what?
Theron follows my retreat. His foot hooks on the floor and he teeters forward, arms flailing as he collides with me and sends us toppling down, closer to the carved door.
Meira, get away from here!
So cold, so cold—
MEIRA! Hannah cries. Mei—
Silence. Utter, aching silence, like a door slamming shut, cutting off all noises beyond.
Fiery, determined heat eats at my body in mad snatches of relentless pain. Just as frigid as my magic is cold, this is hot, spreading in singeing fingers up my limbs and across my chest and neck. It cauterizes my throat into a lumpy, impenetrable knot, intensifying and raging against every nerve so that when I scream, it goes unheard.
Theron’s body presses against mine, and all I know beyond the licking warbles of pain that eat up my insides and remain trapped behind the knot in my throat is that we’re causing this. Or me—I’m causing this, because Theron isn’t in pain. His brow furrows only in confusion.
“Meira, what—”
An invisible force launches us through the air, hurling us back at the entrance to the room. Our bodies pop with a chorus of blows against the stone wall before we collapse in a heap on the floor. Everyone by the door shouts in alarm and dives toward us, but somewhere along the way the knot in my throat released, and the pain comes rushing out of my mouth in a scream that doesn’t even sound human. My body throbs and I curl into a ball, head to my knees, arms over my ears, rocking back and forth, trying to find some position that doesn’t feel like I’m being burned alive.
HANNAH! I shout at her, at the magic, at anything that could make it stop—
Silence,
still. Just silence, that’s all I get from her. Dread plummets through me before thick darkness slides into my eyes and down my throat and fills me top to bottom in a prison I know far too well.
“Meira!” Theron’s fingers bury in my hair, his arms fold around me. “Meira, hold on—”
A blink, and I’m left alone in darkness, fire, and ice.
Blackness subsides, unfurling in the yellow glow of torches. I’m almost grateful for the light—I’m awake; I survived; I’m okay—until my eyes adjust to the room.
A cell reveals itself in the flickering light, grimy black stones glinting with putrid stains. In the corner sits Theron, staring at the door with a concentration spurred by intense fear.
Because in that doorway stands Angra.
“The heir of Cordell,” Angra announces as he walks forward and crouches before Theron, leaning on his staff. “You give new meaning to the word valiant. What was your plan? Sneak into my city and free my latest Winterian slave?” He reaches out, grabbing Theron’s chin and wrenching his attention up.
“Or are you expecting your father to sweep in and save you both?” Angra purrs.
Theron’s stoicism breaks in a gasp that matches my own.
This is what happened to Theron while he was imprisoned in Abril.
Green eyes narrow, Angra cocks his head as if he’s listening to an echo. His expression flashes with a look I never thought his face capable of. Eyes relaxed, lips parted: shocked awe.
Angra recovers, stroking his thumb along Theron’s jaw. “Do you really think he’ll come?”
Theron’s brows peak, a spasm of doubt that he might not even be aware of.
Angra latches on to it. “You and I are not so different. Shall I show you how similar we truly are?” He places his hand on Theron’s head.
Theron cries out. Whether or not this already happened, I can’t let him scream like that—I dive as Angra rips his hand back, letting Theron rock forward, eyes pinched shut.
Theron’s shoulders heave as he retches. “No,” is all he says, his first muffled word. Then, with more terror, “No! He didn’t kill her like yours did . . .”
