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Hugh broke away from the few remaining guards where they stood watching the funeral pyre. Heavy circles hung under his eyes, and his jaw was tense, his shoulders restless. “Your Majesty,” he said, his gaze catching on Luca’s sword at her hip. “We must go now.”
She nodded wordlessly. There was never enough time for grieving.
The small company rode out just after daybreak. As the column of black smoke faded behind them, a terrible, itching thing began to burrow its way into Elma’s thoughts, more persistent and disturbing than the Rime Ice.
“Rune,” she said, when the thought couldn’t be ignored anymore.
“Yes, Majesty?” He had ridden in silence beside her all morning, his usual sarcastic demeanor gone in place of a shadowy thoughtfulness.
“I’ve been thinking about the attack.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And?”
She lowered her voice, hoping that only he could hear. “We’re not on the main road. We’re not anywhere near it. Yet the highwaymen knew exactly where to find us.”
“I thought the same,” Rune said, and seemed to relax somewhat. Elma knew he had expected her to ask about the Rime Ice. “But the ice song can travel miles.”
“All the way to the main road?” Elma asked, unconvinced. “And even if it did, it would have taken the highwaymen a day to reach us. Maybe more. The ice isvast. I know that much.”
Rune’s lips turned down in thought. “You’re saying they knew we were coming.”
“I’m saying that no other explanation makes quite as much sense. Could they have been hired by Slödava?” she asked.
He shook his head. “The Queen of Slödava wouldn’t have seen us coming until we reached the Frozen Sea. Not enough time to organize something like that attack. And anyway, it’s not her style.”
Elma sighed. Frustration and suspicion knotted in her stomach. “I don’t believe it was a coincidence,” she said at last. “It was a targeted attack. I’m almost certain of it.”
Rune leaned toward her, his voice low. “You suspect Bertram and Ferdinand?”
“Who else?” she replied. “They hate the idea of peace. War keeps their dicks hard. And you saw my guards — their loyalty to me isn’t all-consuming. There was mutiny in their eyes. It wouldn’t take much to turn them.”
A vicious wind rolled over the traveling company, and Rune’s hair buffeted his face. Elma closed her eyes against the stinging cold.
“Surely,” she said, when the wind had died down, “that was the only hand they meant to play.”
Her assassin pushed a mess of hair out of his eyes. “Didn’t I say you were handing yourself to them on a platter?”
Elma shot him a glare that stopped that line of discussion in its tracks.
Rune swallowed. “It doesn’t matter what I think. If your men set up two traps along the way, we’re no better than dead.”
Elma’s thoughts rolled away on the wind, a myriad of scenarios springing up unbidden. More highwaymen, Slödavan assassins, the advisors themselves, emerging from the mist to demand that Elma feed their lust for war.
But despite her fears, and the looming specter of what she’d seen the night before — the deaths, the Rime Ice, — they crossed the Frozen Sea with no further incident. At one point, just after midday, an enormous bird flew over their company. Its wings were snow-white, its talons blueish in the shadow of its body.
“One of the Slödavan Queen’s snow hawks,” Rune said. “She knows we’re coming.”
“Will she attack us?” Elma asked, as if there was something she could do about it if such were the case.
But Rune only shook his head. “The city is well fortified. There would be no point. If she doesn’t open the gates, Queen Hildegard knows we’ll either turn around and leave, or starve on the ice.”
“Comforting,” Elma murmured. She still had said nothing about the Rime Ice. But it nagged at her, an open question that was an itch in her brain. Why hadn’t he told her? Why had he never used it until then? And was it truly magic? She had begun to wonder if it was all some trick of the light, her terrified brain, the chaos of the fray.
But something in Rune’s eyes — a knowing glint — told her that what she’d seen was real.
Dusk crept up on them slowly. By the time night was falling, just at the edges of darkness, the city of Slödava loomed into view, solidifying out of a cold wet grey.
Elma had never seen anything so strange or imposing in her life. The city of ice, as it was sometimes called, appeared from a distance to be nothing but an enormous stronghold. It rose upvertically from a high wall at its perimeter, with spires and crenellations that defied Elma’s understanding of architecture. As they rode closer, she saw that the city was built on a hill, its buildings tall and narrow, clustered closely together, and reaching upward toward the close sky like the spires of one massive citadel. Everything glimmered as if truly made from ice.
