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Elma threw herself to one side in unthinking panic. There was no strategy here, no plan. No defense. She knew what Slödavan assassins were capable of; she had seen Rune in battle. Here, unarmed in her flimsy undergarments, she was no better than dead.
She landed hard on the floor, shufflingbackwards until her back hit the far wall. She bent her knees up to protect herself. The air in her room had turned to ice as if the frozen sky itself had come to swallow her up.
The assassin stalked toward her. He was silent now, his prey laid out and ready to be slain. Unlike Rune, he did not seem the talkative type. Then a sound permeated the haze of Elma’s terror. A small thing, the faint slide of metal against wood.
And as the assassin’s blade came slicing toward her throat, she recognized the sound as her bedroom door opening.
Had she not sensed that there might be some escape, that someone had come to her aid, Elma might have simply let the Slödavan kill her. Perhaps, for an instant, just before the infinite darkness fell, she might know peace.
Instead, she rolled sideways along the wall toward her bed. But too late, she realized there was nowhere else to go, and in the next moment, he would have her.
“Well, well,” said a voice from the doorway, “what have we here?”
Elma froze, blood thrumming in her ears.Rune. She was shaken by how calm he sounded, how unsurprised to find a killer in her room.
Her attacker spun away to face the door, and all at once, he seemed to relax. His shoulders eased, and with an almost careless movement, sheathed his weapon. “Rune. I thought… we weren’t sure…”
“That I was coming back?” Rune scoffed. “Please.”
They know each other. The realization hit her like a blunt force to the chest.
Needing to see what was going on, Elma struggled to a kneeling position, using her bed as support until she could see over it to the far side of the room. There stood Rune, eyeing the other Slödavan with a look she couldn’t quite read. Hisstance was casual, friendly even, but something about his expression remained stiff. Guarded.
A small, pathetic glimmer of hope remained in Elma’s heart that he might defend her. That even if this stranger was Rune’s comrade in arms, the deal they made was stronger than loyalty to a countryman. That Rune’s desire for peace between their nations might win out, above all.
And some even smaller, even more hopeless part of her wished that he might take her side for some other, more personal reason.
“Word came that you’d been captured by the Rothen filth,” said the intruder, still facing Rune, his back to Elma. His tone was contrite, apologetic. “I came to retrieve you if you lived. And, well. King Rafe may be dead, but his daughter remains.”
“And you’ve decided to clumsily bludgeon two birds with a single stone, I see. Might it have occurred to you that I had the situation under control?” Rune tilted his head, falcon-like in his keen intensity. “The girl has been firmly leashed since the moment I arrived in Rothen. Whose idea was it to sendyou, anyway?”
Elma’s fear and uncertainty curdled into something darker, something worse. Her fingers curled in on themselves, her fingernails digging into the soft skin of her palms.Firmly leashed.
The taller assassin shifted in obvious discomfort. “Word came from an anonymous source in Rothen. Someone needing a job done. And your mother—”
“Isn’t a fool, so whose idea was it?” Rune interrupted. “You’re really starting to annoy me, Edvin. In no world would anyone in their right mind send you to buy a loaf of bread, let alone assassinate the Queen of Rothen.”
“But Ihadher,” Edvin protested.
“Then why is she still alive?” Rune asked, gesturing toward Elma.
It was as if the floor dropped out from under her. She had been betrayed. The revelation of someone within Rothen — that wasn’t a shock, though it felt like a knife turning slowly in her gut. But Rune — his betrayal hung in her mind like a mote of dust, as if, were she to touch it, it might become true. Real. Faced with a real Slödavan, hisfriendno less… Rune could have killed the other assassin at any time. He could have shown his loyalty from the instant he entered the room.
But his loyalty did not lie with Elma.
“I was about to,” said Edvin, his words growing distant in Elma’s ears. “Until you barged in.”
“I don’tbarge,” protested Rune. “I’ve never barged in my life.”
As the two bickered, their obvious familiarity driving a wedge of ice deeper into Elma’s heart, she reached under the bed. Upon her arrival in Frost, she had hidden knives all about her rooms. She had no chance against two Slödavan assassins, but she refused to go out whimpering and unarmed.
“How on earth did you manage to get inside the citadel, anyway,” Rune asked, “let alone the queen’s rooms?”
Elma dragged her shaking fingers along the bottom of the bed, but there was no knife.
“She’s not the queen yet.”
“Semantics.”
