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I was running through the castle hall now, years after Mother died. Orla was screaming, and when I slammed open the door to her room, I found that the fire from the hearth had burned her dress. A nurse was supposed to be looking after her, but the nurse must have fallen asleep. I remember feeling that no one except me was capable of looking after her.
In the Court of Sorrows, I stared at red leaves raining down on me, struck again by the realization that I was dying and that I would never see Ava again, or Orla. Even if my thoughts were about to stop forever, I felt certain I’d miss them horribly.
When I brought Ava to the craggy cliffside overlooking Faerie’s valley and pointed out the mountain ranges and tribes, I could never have predicted that one day, I’d intentionally step into the blade of a heartbreakingly beautiful Unseelie.
20
SHALINI
Delicate white webs of frost spread over the old panes, obscuring my view of the snowy world outside. I breathed on the glass, fogging it up, and ran my hand over it to get a view of the kingdom.
The cold seeping through the glass made me shiver, so I pulled the blanket tighter around myself to get warm and glanced back at the fireplace. Once again, the blaze had simmered down to embers. I couldn’t keep the damn thing lit. The temperature in the castle kept plummeting, low enough for me to see my breath form a mist around my head. Right now, I was wearing three layers: long underwear, pajamas, then leather pants, a shirt, and two sweaters—and a blanket over it all.
My mind slid back to two years earlier, when I was working in an office and drowning in a perpetual torrent of Jira tickets. Every night, I’d work till nine and get takeout curry or pizza for dinner. I’d started to growincreasingly bored with my life, until the day I’d marched into my manager’s office and quit.
Gerald had been a patronizing fifty-five-year-old man who’d once gotten drunk at an office party and claimed he’d had a former career as a “stunt cock” in Canadian porn.It had beendeeplysatisfying to tell him I wouldn’t be coming back.
I hadn’t needed the money. Who in their right mind worked ten hours a day when they had millions in a bank account from the last startup?
And the first several months of retirement had been amazing. Yoga, lunches by myself, endless books, a wine tour in Sonoma…it had all started with euphoria that drifted into contentment, then complacency, before settling into absolute boredom. The amount of wine I was drinking kept creeping up. I’d pour the drinks earlier, first at five, then four. And wasn’t two p.m. acceptable when you didn’t have anything else to do?
I’d been starting to get desperate for a story I could tell, an adventure.
And that was how I’d ended up here, in a frigid castle with temperatures that beyond all expectations continued to get colder.
That was also how I’d lost my best friend two weeks ago. And that was why I was still here, waiting for her return.
I wasn’t leaving without her.
I pulled the blanket tighter around me, my thoughts once again roving over the landscape of Ava’s disappearance.
I hadn’t been there to see how it had happened, but Aeron had been. Ava had plunged through some kind of magical portal, and Torin had followed after her. Within moments, the portal had sealed with ice, then stone. The king’s throne had broken, and a wintry hoarfrost had snapped across the kingdom.
So now, the biting cold seeped into every stone in Faerie, into every piece of fabric and glass. It cooled hot tea before the cups were even filled and stung cheeks and exposed fingers. It made my teeth chatter when I crawled into bed and slid into my body like a phantom when I slept. Here, the cold was an unwanted guest that would never leave.
As I stared between the blooms of frost on the window, a large black and red dragon swept through the stormy skies in the distance, his wings outstretched in the setting sun. A shudder rippled up my spine.
I knew I was safe in the castle—at least, IthoughtI was safe here. But it was an instinctive terror, and the sight of the dragon made my heart hammer faster. I didn’t think humans had evolved to mentally cope with the sight of actual dragons.
From what I gathered, dragons weren’t normal here, either. No one in the castle seemed to want to venture outside, which didn’t do anything to calm my nerves. Supposedly, the dragon was a sign of some sort of dark magic encroaching, or maybe a sign that the dragon was waiting for people to die of the cold so it could roast our bodies and feast. Dragons hoarded things, and the rumors were that this dragon hoarded corpses.
A knock sounded on the door, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Aeron.” His voice pierced the oak door.
I let out a long sigh. Maybehe’dwarm me. I still couldn’t get him to share a bed with me—not because he didn’t want to, but because of some stupid vow of chastity that made no sense whatsoever. But I could tell he was tempted, lingering around me longer, leaning in to kiss me.
With chattering teeth, I hurried over to the door. I really hadn’t seen him enough in the past two weeks. He’d been working nonstop, delivering food to hungry families, trying to keep homes heated.
When I pulled open the door, I found him standing in the hall, clouds of breath puffing from his blue lips. He held a plate with a single piece of bread on it, and it made my heart squeeze.
“Get in here,” I said. “You’re freezing.”
“I thought you might be hungry.” My stomach rumbled sharply, and yet I didn’t quite feel like eating. Stress had that effect on me.
I sat on the bed with the plate of bread in my lap and the blanket over my shoulders. “What I really want more than bread is for you to get warm next to me. You’ve been out in the cold all day, haven’t you?”
