Page 233 of Winter Gods & Serpents

“Because I am this ill he tasked me, granted me a long wish of mine, to meet you like I met Serene.”

I staggered a step back at the mention of her name. “You knew her?”

She nodded. “My father was a Lyran merchant trading saltwater pearls with Myrdur, we would often be invited at the house Skygard, your mother was fond of her jewellery. You are every bit her, it is almost a gift to have seen you before—” cough interrupted her again. “Before this claims me.”

Tears warmed my eyes. “You knew her from before—before Isjord?”

She gave me a wry smile and nodded. “Even your voice is hers,” she said, reaching for my face.

I moved away from her creeping touch. “You let them kill her. You did nothing while they killed her.”

She halted, pulling her hand away. “For that I will repent till wherever gods chose to take me. For having done nothing, I will pay.”

“You could have stopped your son.”

“It was not him whom needed stopping, my asteri.”

“Tell me,” I ordered loudly, my tone deep in fury. “Tell me, all the lives beside that killer’s do I have to claim?” One, five or five hundred million, I intended to take each and every one of them.

The doors of the temple drew open behind me. A loud creak and careful steps of what resembled my fear made toward me.

“Just mine, no one else’s,” an all too familiar voice called.

I froze at how that fear turned to strange comfort in matter of seconds. My brain was betraying me, it had to be. Yet my sight didn’t, catching the queens handkerchief on the floor. Two initials engraved at its corner, D.C.

A breath stuck on my chest, taking my lungs prisoner. I shook my head in disbelief. It had to be a mad nightmare, yet when pain stuck my palms I didn’t wake, only slumbered further into reality. I was awake.

I slowly turned around. He stood there, the presence of a king, draped in black, a crown of might and black diamonds atop his head. The Obscur Asteri. The night king. My true nightmare. All this time king of Adriata had trailed me, surveyed, touched, embraced, kissed me. He had comforted, known my truths, tried to know my pain and I had let him, the one who had caused it. The king of the people who had killed my family. The one that could have prevented what happened to them, the one who made plans and sat through decisions to kill thousands, the one who I was almost…almost nothing.

“Only my life, Snow.”

I felt and I didn’t. I was human and I wasn’t. Yet every part of my soul tore when I inspected the features of the man I’d sworn to kill, when I looked at him with the sweetest care as if he were my world. I saw the man who robbed me of light like I saw a treasure.

I forced my steps forward, my features straightened. My hatred weakened, my venom sugared. The only bit of strength I could gather to speak hate to the one who had softened me, came from a place of care. “I have a bargain to fill and you an agreement. Let us get it over with.” I said, strutting inside the temple and past him, loathing my own shell for faltering. My feet barely carrying the weight of pain that struck me like the bite of a viper, quick, rapid, and deadly poisoning.

“Snow, let us—” He reached for me and I backed away slipping from him.

Laughter stuttered out of me, my body shaking, just not with amusement. “You know, K—” I cleared my throat. “You have taught me something I’d forgotten. That no matter how hurt I am, I can always hurt a little more. You won, Your Majesty, beaten my father at his own game. You won over me in every human way. But I am not human, so now I will win over you in every inhuman way.”

“Snow,” he called, reaching for me again.

I did not stop.

“Snow, stop for a moment and let us speak,” he called strongly, and when I took no notice, gusts of black darkness lift a wall afront me. It withered the wisteria around, birds flew in gusts screeching almost in anguish and even his own guards flinched. This had been what I’d felt that night when he’d fought Melanthe. He’d suppressed this all along. All the signs in front of me, when had I become so inattentive?

I did not stop.

“I said, let us speak,” he shouted, echoing around the hollow temple, and I flinched this time too. He no longer was him, the one I was so unafraid to trust. He was him, my fear, my only fear.

I turned round to the one I’d once submitted too. The nightmare warping around and behind him. He wore the mask of death. The thief of light. A sneer quirked in my shivering lips and I grit my teeth. “I will not kill you before that agreement, so let us get this over and done with because I am not even close to holding myself back right now. I will kill you and then me, and I will not die, king of the damned, before I harvest all life out of this land.”

He reached holding my wrist and I flinched back away from him rubbing away the feel of his skin on mine. My skin searing where he’d grazed. “Don’t touch me.”

The temple stood between darkness and magic grazed skies that flickered pretend starlight above us, the only source of light. I took my place afront the oddly young priest, blending among the darkness in his velvet black robes, clutching Astrum liber between his visibly shivering hands that took a tremble at my sight. Moments later he stood beside me, his warmth wrapping around my skin, the scent of spring yet with him, luring my senses to deception.

“Welcome, child of Henah,” the priest greeted his king, waving an incense of sage afront him.

Turning to me, the mist wavered from the stick in directionless patterns. “Welcome, child of…Krieg.”