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“Majesty?” He waited, curious.
“Thank you,” she said at last. “You’ve been—”
But she never got a chance to finish the sentence. An arrowhead was suddenly protruding from Luca’s neck, black-red in the firelight. He gurgled, his eyes wide with mild surprise. And then he crumpled to the ice. Unending darkness seemed to stretch out around Elma from where she stood.
“Luca,” she said, unmoving. “Luca.”
Shouts rang out, and the twang of arrows loosed in the night.
“Elma!”
Rune’s hand was on her arm, pulling her down to the ground so roughly that she lost her breath. Guards trampledpast, some issuing orders, others falling, arrows coming out of their bodies like pins from a cushion.
“Stop,” said Rune, when she tried to struggle free, to get up and help her men. “You can’t die. You, above all, cannot die.”
But she thrashed, wild and single-minded all at once, desperate to save them. Surely, she could save them. She was their queen.
“Stop,” Rune growled, practically dragging her as he crawled through the tents, away from the firelight. Chaos surrounded them as they went, as Elma’s men were shot down again and again. Bodies slammed into the ice, eyes staring sightless into the night.
And then bodies she didn’t recognize, men with strange armor and weapons, appeared in the camp. Their attackers. Elma looked for white hair or blue eyes, but saw none. These were simple highwaymen.
Highwaymen. That was all.
“Luca,” Elma said quietly. She no longer tried to struggle free from Rune’s grip. Like a woman caught in a dream, she crawled obediently across the ice with Rune, not caring that it scraped her knees, that its cold was so harsh it threatened to burn her hands, even through her gloves.
They came to a breathless stop behind a tent. Elma roughly wiped her eyes, ashamed of the burn she felt at their corners. She was Queen of Rothen. She had known the risks. Peace was more important than…than Luca?came the unwanted thought.More important than the life of a friend?
“There was nothing you could have done,” Rune said, seeing her shaking hands, her terrified gaze. He took her face in his hands. “There is nothing you can do now but survive. Do you understand, Queen Elma?”
She nodded. A world of anguish sat heavy on her chest, suffocating her.
“Then I’ll get you out of this alive.”
A highwayman burst out from behind the tent. He was behind Rune, and fast — his masked face a pale blur in the darkness. Elma had no time to cry out, to warn her bodyguard. She watched as if in slow motion as the attacker’s blade arced down, down toward Rune’s neck.
I can’t lose him too, Elma thought, but her body wasn’t fast enough. She had only just begun to cry out, Rune’s name rough and strangled in her throat, when the assassin moved.
The speed was something out of a dream, or nightmare. Rune fell back and spun, his back slamming to the ice as he dodged the highwayman’s attack. And as Rune fell, his arm shot out and — one second, he was holding his sword, and then his sword was discarded, clattering to the ice. A crackling sound like shattering ice filled Elma’s ears, and Rune’s arm glowed white-blue, suddenly engulfed in a glittering, swirling mass of frost. In a breathless instant, the frost expanded and resolved, solidifying with horrifying quickness, into an ice-sharp blade that seemed to sing as it cut the air, frigid and deadly.
Rime Ice.
The highwayman, so terrifying and inevitable only a moment before, crashed to the ground in a heap, severed in half at a sickly angle, painting the black ice with sticky dark blood. He stood no chance against the magic blade. Because that was all it could be —magic.
Rime Ice was not some strange ice mined from the glaciers of Slödava, forged into weapons. It was magic.
There was no time to think, to consider what this meant. One after another, Rune cut down three more attackers with ruthless ease. He had leapt to his feet and was killing as if bornto do it, his weapon a streak of icy glow in the night. He was preternatural in his movements, the ease with which he put men down. Elma had seen him fight in the Death Games, but this was visceral and close, his weapon a beacon of otherworldly power.
She watched in a trance-like state, watched her assassin’s surety in combat, how efficiently he killed, how his attackers’ blood stood out so starkly against his hair. The moment, horrific as it was, felt somehow intimate. Rune cut their lives short for her. He killed forher. The death cries of men caressed her ears, the smell of blood and gore assailing her nostrils.
It was as if time, for a while, stood still. Or perhaps it ceased to exist altogether. Elma could not tell how long she and Rune made their way through the camp, exterminating highwaymen, Rime Ice crackling in her assassin’s grip. She pointedly did not look at the bodies of her men, the blood-stained ice, the unseeing eyes in the night.
Instead, she fought. Rune did nothing to stop her from drawing her knife, from pressing her back to his and joining in the fray. Whenever a shadowed figure came at them from the darkness, they were a pair of blades, their movements in sync. And though Elma’s blade was far inferior to his, somehow, she felt bolstered by him, stronger, faster, as if the frost were collecting at her arm too, as if a blade of ice extended from her hand as well.
When Elma’s blow was knocked sideways by an enemy, when the man took her by the neck and would have snapped it, Rune easily dismembered him with two swipes of his blade.
Elma watched the man fall, then turned to Rune, who stood panting. His face was spattered with blood, his hairplastered to his sweaty brow, and in his gaze was the fierce flame of something that could have been love.
She had never understood life, Elma thought, until that moment. Blood and death swirled around them in a maelstrom. Terror warped her thoughts, made her lungs burn hot. But she was free, and the wind was on her face, and grief, sharp, painful grief embedded in the recesses of her soul.Only a Volta, she thought, heart slamming in her ribs,finds life at the edge of death.
