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“He’s in the wagon,” she said. “Bleeding to death. Stop his bleeding at once. Then bind him. He must make it back to Frost alive.”
“But the mission—”
“There is no mission,” Elma cut him off, relishing the vengeful rage that had already begun to wash away her fear. “Not anymore. That assassin is the most important thing in the world to me.Keep him alive.”
She didn’t say it because she didn’t have to. Keep him alive so that she could bring him back to the citadel. Keep him alive so she could question him. Keep him alive so that she, with her own bare hands, could kill him the way he’d so gleefully tried to kill her.
Six
Elma insisted on riding in the wagon with the assassin. She knew Luca and his men had him under control; there was no fear of his escape. The Slödavan was bound with chains, a blade at his throat at all times.
Not that he could have made an escape in his condition. He was in and out of consciousness, head lolling on the furs like a newborn infant. But Cora had managed to slow the bleeding, applying a poultice of herbs and snow and whispered words of strength and vitality.
Elma studied the assassin from where she sat across from him, a mirror of how she’d woken in the dark. Now, she held the upper hand, and she would not give it away. She tamped down a heady excitement that rose in her, the anticipation of hurting him. Of carving into his flesh.
Her father would have encouraged it. Hehadencouraged it, loved the rare occasions when she found the Death Games enticing rather than dull. “We live in a cruel world,” King Rafe had said to her, time and time again. “But we Volta embrace the cruelty, the bloodshed, until we thrive in it.”
She told herself she didn’t yearn to hurt the assassin forthe sake of it, because she enjoyed it. No, she wanted to know why he’d come, and what her death meant to him. She would wrench every last secret from his dying lips.
Elma had always suspected the tales of Rime Ice to be exaggerated, specters of fear created by soldiers in the thick snows of battle. A blade might come out of the white and strike a man down, and his comrades might remember things differently, more fantastical than they were. She often wondered if her father’s obsession with the stuff was a delusion of age.
“Rime Ice may well change our destiny,” her father had often insisted. “A king of Rothen who wields such a weapon would be a thing of legend. A king who commanded an army of such blades… this man would never be forgotten.”
Yet, even in the seven years since Elma’s arrival in Rothen, her father had never declared open war on the Slödavans, nor had he succeeded in stealing any Rime Ice for himself, despite several attempts.
The assassin’s eyelids fluttered, his brows furrowed even in unconsciousness. He was so different to the rugged browns and grays of Elma’s guards, his stark white hair painting him as almost ethereal. As if he was a ghost, come down from the frozen glacier alone. As if he might dissipate into mist at the slightest touch.
He did not wield a Rime Ice weapon, Elma noted. Perhaps there weren’t many in use, if they existed. Or maybe they were reserved for only the greatest soldiers. This was but a lowly assassin, after all. A man who, in repose, appeared strikingly youthful. Sweet, even, with strands of white hair falling over his forehead.
All at once, he shivered, a wracking, violent movement, and groaned in pain.
“Is he dying?” Elma asked, eyeing Luca, who sat nearest the assassin.
Luca glanced sideways at the Slödavan. “Hard to say. They’re hearty folk, the men of the north. If the wound remains clean, and the bleeding is controlled, he has a good chance. You just missed the artery, Your Majesty.” This last was said with a hint of pride.
“He deflected me,” Elma said. “It’s a good thing he did, or we’d be questioning a corpse.”
Cora shivered against Elma’s shoulder. She had been quiet since the attack, her eyes wide and her lips pressed in a thin line. Elma knew that her maid had never seen war, had likely never experienced death in such a manner, with blood on the floor of the wagon, in Elma’s hair, under her fingernails, flecking the skin of her face. Death in the city of Frost came slowly, insidiously, with a hunger ache or a shiver in the night. Those were familiar deaths, a horror that dulled over time. Even the Death Games were contained, a dramatic play of gore and brutality carried out behind a sheen of unreality. Because Elma, Cora, and all those who lived in the Frost Citadel — they knew they would always be above, watching. They would never be below.
They would never shed blood for the kingdom in the arena or on the battlefield.
“Explain it to me again,”said Godwin. “One more time. Slowly.”
Elma, dressed in fresh wool and velvet, draped in fur and smelling of the bear fat and pine soaps the servants used to wash her, took a steadying breath. “You heard me the first time, Uncle. I wish toquestion him myself.”
It was so dark outside, the sky heavy with snow, that Elma couldn’t tell whether it was night or day, morning or some middle hour, dusk or the gloom before sunrise. They had ridden nonstop back to the citadel, and things had transpired in a blur.
Snow fell upon dark glass windows. Godwin’s study had always been bleak, by Elma’s standards. But now it felt claustrophobic, a room of heavy beams and hardly any windows, a too-large fire, and far too many scrolls and parchments lying about. A full suit of armor, decades old, hunched in one corner on display.
Godwin half sat on his desk, arms braced against its edge, eyeing Elma with disapproval and no small amount of pity. His deep-set eyes were limned in red. “It’s not the questioning that gives me pause,” he said, as if Elma were silly not to have guessed his feelings already. “It’s the fact that you want to interrogate himalone.”
“I don’t see that it makes a difference,” Elma said tightly. She didn’t. The assassin was bound so thoroughly that not even a sorcerer — gods forbid — might free himself from the restraints. “What are you afraid of, Uncle? That I’ll conspire with him?”
“That you’ll— for the love of gods, Elma, be serious. I’m concerned for yoursafety. You are the queen. And uncrowned. And though it makes little difference to you and me, it makes a world of difference to Slödava. If they overthrow us now, with no heir to contest it, there will be no one, no law or army, to stand in their way.” He shook his head, glaring at a pile of scrolls to his left. “You should not have come back here, Elma. You’ve put us all in peril.”
“What should I have done, then?” Elma said. “Continued on to Ordellun-by-the-Sea as if nothing were amiss?”
“Yes. You did not need to accompany the assassin here. Itis under control. We need you to broker a new trade deal with Navenie before our people starve.”
