“I’m pretty sure we have drastically different ideas of what counts asfun,” I manage, glancing at the door back into the palace. Empty and dark.
The men hoot laughter.
“She’s got a tongue on her, this one!”
“What else can you do with that tongue of yours, eh?”
My legs shake and I step back from the edge, closer to the peak in the roof. The cold ball of conduit magic wiggles against my fear, clashing against their words and making me gag.
The empty stable yard waits, dark and ominous around me. Angra’s face flashes through my mind, on how this area is so like Abril—vacant and eager. Horrible things don’t happen in crowded places; they happen in the hollows of the world, where it’s just a victim and an attacker and no one to hear any screams.
“Hang on there, sweetheart—we just want to talk! Come on down.”
I rub my forehead, skin coated with grime, and draw in stifling mouthfuls of hot air. The sticky wetness of sweat on my hands grows thicker, a layer of moist heat that feels just like . . . blood. Blood like in Abril, when I killed Herod.
Herod looked at me like those men look at me.
The conduit magic flashes ice through me and I rub my hands furiously against my pants, wheezing on air that refuses to go into my lungs. What I wouldn’t give for ice right now—
No, I’m fine—I’m fine.
A shadow moves on the other side of the barn’s roof and I whirl, nearly losing my footing on the shingles as I rip the dagger out of my sleeve. Terror courses through me, lightning bolts of dread as the shadow moves forward. I lunge,but my vision blurs—the deep black sky, the distant flicker of a rooftop fire pit. My knees crack against the roof, the knife skittering down the incline, and the impact jolts a whimper from me along with—
Coldness.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Meira
BLISSFUL, WONDROUS COLDfloods my veins, filling me from top to bottom. I cry out, so grateful for the sensation that everything else disappears for one frigid moment.
A face comes into my line of sight. It’s not Angra, not Herod—Ceridwen.
She grabs my shoulders. “Meira,” she calls to me, her voice distant. “Calm down!”
Blood roars in my ears, and my lungs squeeze like they’re getting trampled beneath a herd of horses, deflating and barely refilling only to deflate again. The coldness retracts, my vision unable to process what I see. Ceridwen, yes, but also—snow?
Flakes of puffy white drift through the air between us.
We’re in Summer—it shouldn’t . . . it doesn’t . . .
Ceridwen crouches, her face stricken. “What did youdo?”
Her question comes jagged and harsh, and I just sitthere, my hands in the mushy snow that gathers on the roof, my body shuddering with coldness and horror.
Snow. In Juli.
I made it snow inanother kingdom.
Conduit magic is linked to each land like it is to each ruler—it only affects its designated kingdom or people. I shouldn’t have been able to call snow in Summer, but here I sit in piles of it, watching the flakes evaporate in the relentless heat.
“I—” I start, lifting a handful. “I don’t—”
“My queen?”
