He said nothing else at all. Just strode from the stands, toward the side door, and out into the snow.
Kyrja’s fingers curled into her palm. It shouldn’t hurt still, should it? The fact that he’d given up even speakingtoher, only issuing commandsabouther to Einar?
In the air far to the north, she felt her sister’s magical hand stretch, gather, pull more insulating clouds over the land. Without them, Fjordlandi would freeze solid. Without the breaks in them in just the right places, their greenhouse domes wouldn’t have sunlight enough to grow the food the wholekingdom needed to survive. She knew her sister’s task was difficult…but it was also critical. Whether one lived in a city open to the elements or beneath a dome, Krystiana’s control over the storms meant life to them all.
Thinking to offer a bit of encouragement, Kyrja said, “Krysti—”
“I’ll see you at dinner tonight. Try not to fail any more between now and then.” With a flick of her pale-blond braid over her shoulder, Krystiana followed their father’s path out of the practice arena.
Mamma sighed and rubbed at her temples, sinking back to her seat on the bench.
Einar slid to Kyrja’s side and settled a large, cool hand on her shoulder. “Don’t let them bother you.” His voice was a low rumble, comforting and familiar. He’d always been the one to try to shore up her shaky foundations with his solid, dependable ice. “You are a Fjordic princess, Kyrja. You are Blessed.”
“For all the good it does me.” She flicked a frosted design, intricate and whimsical, onto his tunic.
He chuckled and brushed it off. “Proving my point, as usual. Your mastery of the details shows youcouldmatch the rest of us. If you wanted to.”
Hardly. Hers was not the ice hard enough to fortify the Ice Prison, like Einar’s did. Hers was not the magic vast enough to hold a continent’s weather in precise formation, like Krystiana’s. Hers was certainly not the control so complete she could keep the volcanoes in the Ring of Flame that circled Fjordlandi from destroying them all, as Fodur did.
All she could do was paint pretty pictures with frost. Though at least it brought a smile to people’s faces. That was something, wasn’t it? She mustered a grin of her own for her brother. “I should let you go. Ellasandthe Red Hands, all in one day—that’s more important than my training.”
Einar let a frown mar his perfect golden brows. He, like their sister, took after Fodur and most other Fjordic people in their looks. Fairest skin, fairest hair, fairest eyes. She, on the other hand, looked like Mamma—one of the rare brunettes to be found in Fjordlandi. Yet more proof that she wasn’t like her siblings, wasn’t like her father.
“I wish…” Einar sighed, shook his head, and his voice went even softer. Too soft to stretch across the distance to Mamma, though he flicked a glance her way. “I wish wecouldlisten. Freya says unrest in the domes is growing. There is talk of refusing to submit to the Test. Of refusing to farm, to mine.”
A shiver coursed up Kyrja’s spine that had nothing to do with the ice beneath her boots. That cold she never even felt. But the thought of the thanes—the commoners beneath the agricultural domes—actually rebelling was enough to make her throat close off. “If they refuse the Test, they’ll be executed.” She, too, kept her voice a bare murmur, not letting herself look over at her mother.
Mamma was a thane, born in Fjordlandi’s largest dome, Harroby. One of the vast population whose sole purpose was to till the soil, grow the food, or mine metals and minerals from the volatile mountains always threatening to spew molten death out upon them. Well, and one more purpose.
To be given for a term to whatever aristocratic Fjorder had been selected for a Blessed Union, to produce a magical child.
Her stomach churned as she considered it. Neither warmth-loving thanes from the protective domes nor cold-immune Fjorders who lived in the open cities had magic on their own. But when matched, they could. Magic was rare, and never did two magically-Blessed create a child who had their magic, not in Fjordlandi. She knew it worked that way in other kingdoms, that King Seidon, for instance, had needed a wife with magic as strong as his to create new life at all.
But for whatever reason, the Giver of All had doled out His gift differently here. Here, they could not only control the water, like King Seidon could, but its temperature. Perhaps in the scales of the Giver, that extra gift required another weakness to balance it. The right ratio must always be struck in their lineage.
Always one Fjorder parent from the cold-immune elite. Always one thane from the class of commoners little more than slaves. Over the centuries, their physicians had created a single Machine capable of running a Test to show which precise matches would grant that magic. It was Fjordlandi’s greatest asset, coveted by the rest of the world.
And through it, Fodur had found his match in Mamma. A rare gift, that someone as powerful as the king could even find a consort capable of giving him magical children. In the rest of the kingdom, they didn’t even bother Testing those already Blessed. Matches were never found. But Mamma—sweet, kind, loving Mamma, as unlike Fodur as one could possibly be—had turned up in the Test for her king. Had given up her life beneath the dome. Had moved here, where she was always cold, never appreciated, usually dismissed or looked down upon, even as she stood in a fine gown at a state dinner behind her husband. And had stayed even beyond the twenty-year term of the Blessed Union.
Stayed forher. The child she’d petitioned for. The child she’d been granted as a boon because she’d done the impossible and given an already-magical king of FjordlanditwoBlessed children strong enough to take up the crown when he finally relinquished it.
The child everyone was a bit surprised was magical at all. And who no one was surprised to find unable to truly harness that magic. Kyrja drew in a breath and started for the stands. “Will you be helping Freya with dinner, Mamma?”
Mamma and Einar’s consort had bonded instantly, both being thanes as they were. In a way even Kyrja could never do with her mother, not given the amount of Fjorder in her blood that made her immune to the cold—not to mention her magic, however untethered. Freya, though—Freya was more like Mamma than anyone else in Fjordlandi.
Einar had participated in the Test just two years ago, with the expectation that it could take a century or more of regular testing to find someone to match him, if ever it happened at all. No one had been more surprised than Fodur when a solid match was found so quickly—and from among the thanes. The ratio shouldn’t have been right, he’d said. Einar had more thane blood than Fjorder in him. To correct the balance for a hope of a magical child, all logic said a Fjorder should have been his match. He’d had them check the Machine, rerun the Test three times.
The results came back the same each time. Freya. If they could produce a child, there was an eighty-nine percent chance that child would have magic.
More importantly, to Kyrja’s mind, was that Freya was an absolute delight. She brought joy and laughter to the palace, a smile to Einar’s eyes, and had provided the sort of solace for Mamma that no one else ever could.
Mamma smiled now at the mere thought of her daughter-in-law and nodded. “After a trip to the hot springs.” She rubbed at her back, wincing.
Kyrja’s brows knit. “I thought it was your knees.”
Her mother laughed and, when Kyrja drew close enough, reached out to pat her cheek with a gloved hand. “It’s all of me, my little snowflake. I’m old. There’s no getting around it.”
Seventy-five. If she still lived under the domes, she’d probably have been dead years ago. Life was harsh for the thanes, cruel. Disease ran rampant in their hot-and-cold world.As the king’s consort, she had an easier life than any other commoner, access to medicine usually only the rich Fjorders could afford. Even so, she had aged while her husband didn’t, thanks to the magic in his blood. While her children all seemed to stop aging too. Kyrja knew it was hard on her, even as she wondered at her mother’s stubborn smile.
