The chambers he was shown to were barren, and quite as cold as the rest of Avette’s dilapidated ice palace. It was not the crisp cold of the Eisalaan he’d left behind, with its winds that kissedyour cheeks pink and its endless snow blanket glittering with each crunching step.
No. This was the cold of the Laune, and Kai drowned in it each and every night. By day, he sat in the same sparse chambers and stared at the jagged patterns of frost framing the door and window like silver scorch marks. He had noticed the frost was thicker in places that Avette frequented; that the throne room ceiling had groaned with solid ice that hung like the maw of a ravenous snowbeast over their heads. But the more Kai stared at the marks around his door, the more convinced he became that they were growing. Spiralling further and further into the walls day by day. Sometimes, he swore he could hear the creaking over the constant whistle of the wind outside.
He wondered if that slow, insidious spread spoke to the spread of Avette’s magic. If she was losing her leash on that power—or if he was just slowly losing his mind. One pitch-black night, he had finally fallen unconscious with sheer deprivation, and shivered awake to the unmistakable crack of splintering ice. This time, there was no mistaking it; the silver marks around the door had blossomed. And when the handle turned, and the door flew open, he understood why.
Kai bounded from the bed and immediately swayed, exhaustion and the dizzying effects of the brutal cold slamming into him all at once and turning his knees to rubber. His foot slid uselessly out beneath him, and he grabbed at the bedpost for balance, wincing when the chilled metal clung to his palms.
“Careful, my heart.”
“Fuck you,” he hissed, even as he struggled to drag himself upright.
Avette tsked, her black gaze flicking disdainfully over him.
“Foul language is so unbecoming. And after all that time I spent teaching you courtly manners to impress my father. What a waste; no better than housetraining a mongrel, really.”
“Fuck you, Your Majesty.”
She hummed, barely bothered to feign amusement as she circled the room, dragging her finger along an empty dresser and leaving a spiky trail of frost in her wake.
“Very clever. Is that how you speak to my cousin? The one you’ve so clearly defiled?”
His heart gave a painful lurch at the mention of Adeline, but his scowl did not falter.
“Why are you here?”
It was a fair question, he thought. It had to be over a week now that he’d been rotting here, preserved only by the cold and the ever-dwindling stew delivered to his room once a day. But Avette just sighed, beleaguered.
“I am here to ensure that you understand what is expected of you. Tomorrow, we address Eisalaan in open court.” She paused to regard him with a sideways flick of her eyes, then gave a delicate wrinkle of her nose. “Of course, you will need to be bathed and shorn before then.”
“Why?”
“Well, you look and smell like a wild beast, and they are expecting the handsome Drowned Prince of their charming little fairytales.”
“Why am I addressing your people?” he said flatly, though not without venom.
“You know precisely why,” she said. Her pendant pulsed bright blue, a snap of irritation.
Kai just shook his head.
“You don’t want to marry me, Avette.”
“You would not have been my first choice,” she admitted, tone mild even if her eyes glittered with dark malice. She glided slowly toward him, the movement so eerily smooth he could only imagine she was bearing herself across the room on a path of ice. “Does it hurt your feelings, my heart, to know I would have preferred a man to a waterbeast?”
Her voice softened as she drew near. Lower than breath, an intimate hush. She reached up to trace his jaw as she spoke and left splinters of ice flaking between each stubbled hair.
“Tell me, does my cousin mind the gills? Personally, I was rather alarmed to find that they flicker as you spend yourself.”
Kai could not help but tense; at the ice touch, at the blinking of her pendant, at her nearness, at the whisper of that voice that had haunted him for nearly six hundred years in the cold, black lake. But most especially, at her fascination with Adeline. The reminder of their past intimacy, gusting in his ear on a silken breath, made his stomach roil. Her opinion on his gills, on the other hand, meant remarkably little, though he knew this would once have been a knife between his ribs.
Avette knew it, too, it seemed. Had counted on it, perhaps. She took his stillness for hurt, and a soft smile parted her lips.
“Oh, you more than made up for it.” Her fingers trailed over his chin and down his throat, coming to rest on his collarbone, where her chill seeped and throbbed painfully in the cold spotwhere his borrowed pendant had lain. “You had quite the talent for distraction.”
Distraction.
He did not want to think of Adeline in that moment. Wanted to screw his eyes shut against the memory of her standing before him in the water, that teasing smile on her face. The way she’d distracted him, as only she could. Because he wanted her, always.
And Avette wanted—
