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With every second that passed, Malys grew more and more aggravated. She reached for me, grabbed my hand, and pulled it toward her. “Now,” she purred, and her eyes flashed cruelly, the violet within them shining brightly, and Frost Stone hummed with power as if it had been awoken from a deep slumber. “This time, I wantallof your happy memories.”
My insides shifted, my stomach suddenly feeling lighter than the rest of me did. It occurred to me in a moment of sudden panic that this scheme we had hatched away from Malys’ prying eyes hadn’t worked. Maybe the trinket’s magic wasn’t strong enough to get a signal out to my grandmothers. Maybe they were still searching for my parents, and unable to answer my call.
Maybe Valerian…oh no…maybe he was dead.
He had to be.
He was my soulmate, my belore. Malys’ spell hadn’t worked the first time because he existed, because he lived. Though she claimed so long as I was behind the castle’s walls her spell would work, I had no doubt in my mind that Malys hadn’t recalled all of her Wenlow and let Valerian live as she had claimed. She would have made sure there were enough of them on that mountaintop to finish him off while she returned to the castle to prepare for this.
Without my grandmothers’ help, Valerian stood no chance.
My stomach sank again, a disorienting experience considering how it had lightened and lifted only a moment ago. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to be forgotten. I wanted to live, I wanted to be with Valerian—I wanted my world to go back to the way it was, not plunge further into Malys’ hands. If Valerian was dead…if he was dead… then I had just given Arcadia to her on a plate.
Panic took hold of me as I realized that the plan, our plan, may not have gone off as I had hoped it would. What if Valerian was dead in the snow right now, and Gullie along with him? What if my grandmothers were still off searching for my parents, out of our reach and entirely unaware of what was going on here?
What help would Melina have been able to offer from the cabin she was in? Either my grandmothers were about to burrow their way into the castle with the help of the emerald around my neck, or I was about to give Malys everything she had ever wanted.
As Malys’ magic began to flare and rise around me, the panic gripped my throat in a way I had never experienced before. Physically, I lost the ability to take a breath. My chest muscles refused to work, my lungs refused to take in air. As a wave of violet light encircled me, I saw my entire life flash before my eyes.
Memories of my parents came unbidden, and though I tried to fight them away, they came regardless.
The earliest image I had of my mother’s smiling face came up. I saw my father there as well, and he looked so proud, so happy to see me. I remembered falling out of my bed one night, and my father rushing in to tend to my skinned knee and help me get back to sleep. I remembered my mother, the first time she called me Snowdrop. She had plucked a snowflake out of the very air, held it in one finger, and I had watched it transform into a drop of water that then froze over again.
It was magic.
Realmagic.
The first time I ever saw anything like it.
Dread filled me as I felt those memories begin to fall away from me. The images took physical form, becoming strands of light that began to fall upwards out of my body. Each of these strands floated up and into the air, where they tightened and became taut. Malys reached for one, and with a snipping gesture with her fingers, she cut them, making the memory disappear and fade to black.
With each memory she took, I felt more and more pieces of me fall away. Faces, places, voices, all of my connections, the very thing that tied me not only to the people in my life, but to my life itself, were being cut before my very eyes. All this time I thought she had wanted them for herself. She didn’t care for them, nor did she need them.
She only wanted to destroy them.
That’s what made this whole thing worse.
I saw Valerian’s face in my mind, and I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I saw him as I had the first time I laid eyes on him, marching down the palace halls on the way to a trial. He hadn’t wanted to speak to me or to my mother, and I hadn’t wanted to speak to him either, but I couldn’t deny he wasn’t nice to look at.
This memory, like the others, became a thread that emerged from my chest and began to rise into the air. This thread, though, was golden, and it sparkled as it trailed its way up toward the sky, falling up and out of my body, reaching toward the sky until it tightened… and was ready for Malys to cut.
Tears filled my eyes.
I couldn’t speak. I could barely think. I was sorry for what I had done, for the pain I had caused. It was right that I should pay the price if it meant no one else would suffer. But they were going to suffer. Malys wasn’t going to let anyone resist her. I saw the venom in Malys’ eyes, her excitement was palpable… but something happened that she wasn’t expecting.
When she went to cut Valerian’s thread, it resisted.
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
Malys’ eyes moved rapidly from gleeful ecstasy to deathly concern as if in slow motion. She tried once more to snip Valerian’s golden thread. So many other memories had fallen so easily, but his… his seemed impervious to even her most determined efforts to slice it clean away from me.
I stared at the thread, bathed in its golden glow, Valerian’s face staring back at me from across the span of memory. He was smiling at me. He hadn’t smiled at me that day, not in the way he was now. I hadn’t even been aware of his presence before that day, and he hadn’t wanted to be fifty feet from me or any other royal at that time.
This smile was… a loved one’s smile. Charming, warm, and perhaps a little cheeky, as if he knew a secret I didn’t. How was it resisting? If my grandmothers weren’t here by now, it meant Valerian was dead, and if he was dead, then the tie that bound us together was already broken.
Unless.
Malys pulled me up by the scruff of my neck. “What have you done,girl?” she hissed.
