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Or have you reduced yourself?came her traitorous thoughts.Rune is just one man, a man who came to kill you. How do you know he and his mother weren’t manipulating you?
Her mind was at odds with itself, accusing and jagged with self-loathing. Elma curled up on her furs, fully dressed, and allowed herself to cry. Just one tear, a hot, pathetic thing, but even that felt like poison sucked from a wound.
Sleep came slowly, and when it did, it was fitful. Her dreams were nightmarish, painted red with death and gore, full of broken hearts and disembodied heads. When she awoke the next morning, just before light, Elma washed her face with snow. She straightened her skirts and arranged her hair; she pulled herself together and strode tall to join her uncle at the head of the traveling party.
Slödafucker or not, she was Elma Volta, queen to her last breath.
Godwin was oddlytalkative that morning. They had ridden the first few hours in silence, Elma sullenly chewing dried meats, when Godwin began to point things out in the landscape.
“That peak in the distance, the one by itself, do you see? A temple sits atop the thing. Madness, I always thought, but the ancient religions are nothing if not ridiculous. I went there once. It was cold, though inside the temple, a raging fire burns and never goes out.”
“Which deity presides there?” Elma asked, interested despite herself.
“Mm, I can’t remember. A strange one. Fasta, or Fleet, or something.”
Elma didn’t reply, but a few minutes later, Godwin pointed out another mountain, this time some sort of remnant of a centuries-old volcanic eruption. She listened reluctantly, hating how much it hurt to ride alongside him, to hear him speak as if things were the same as they’d ever been. As if she was simply his niece, and he was beloved Uncle Godwin.
A lump rose in her throat, and she tried to swallow itdown with brute stubbornness. There was no going back from this. He had betrayed her; hurt her in ways that no one had ever managed to hurt her before. He had cut her from sternum to naval, reached inside, and pulled out her organs. She was an empty shell.
And she wanted the same for him. She wanted to twist every knife available to her.
“Uncle,” Elma said abruptly, when he was in the middle of waxing poetic about the glacier that used to occupy the very sea they rode on, “you know your quest for Rime Ice is doomed, right?”
“Is it?” he said, uncaring. Elma knew he would see this as a desperate last-ditch effort to set him off-balance.
“Do you even know what it really is?” she asked, glancing at him as she spoke to make sure the words hit home.
Godwin’s look was sidelong. “Let me guess. You claim to know and hope to manipulate me in some way with this knowledge. It won’t work.”
Elma shrugged. “I just thought you ought to know, before you send innocents to death in service of your pointless war, there is no Rime Ice to steal. They don’t forge the blades from some ancient glacier or whatever the legends say. The weapons are magic.”
“The same thing.”
“No,” said Elma, “it’s not. Only monarchs, or those with royal blood, can call it forth. But it’s not an object, you can’t simplytakeit and use it for your own purposes. This war will be your ruin, Uncle. If you take Slödava, you’ll have nothing but a mountain of corpses to call your own.”
She didn’t know what exactly she meant to accomplish with this truth. Perhaps if her uncle realized that what he pursued didn’t exist after all, he’d give up on the aggression with Slödava. If he believed her at all.
Godwin was silent for a moment, his brow creased. Then he turned to her at last, and said, “You believe I have but one goal in mind, one aim. I was wrong. You’re very like your father, but in the worst way. You miss the bigger picture. War is money, it is power. It is glory. You’re short-sighted in the extreme if you believe that the nature of Rime Ice will keep me from the battlefield or stop me from using it.”
Elma nodded, a silent acknowledgment.Fine, then. Let him be cut down on the Frozen Sea. She was done reasoning with a warmonger.
The Frost Citadelhad never looked less welcoming. A heavy, dark sky hung behind it, blackening the stone with deep shadows. Thick snow began to fall as they rode up the winding ascent to what had once been Elma’s home. It felt like a prison to her now, more than it ever had. An isolation sentence that would carry on through life and, if she was unlucky, beyond.
Her rooms were exactly as she’d left them over a week ago. A stray, fur-lined glove lay draped on one of the chairs by the fire, which roared brightly in the hearth. A small pile of books sat on the table by her bed. Snow fell in soft, heavy flakes outside the window.
Standing alone there, still in her traveling clothes, Elma couldn’t stop the tears from burning in her eyes. It was as if nothing had changed. Yet outside her door stood a retinue of guards, ordered not to keep her safe, but to keep her on a short leash. She was no longer free. She was no longer a queen. In a day’s time, or in a week, however long it took for the paperwork to be drawn up, Elma would be ousted from the throne and executed publicly.
Disgraced queens did not die peacefully.
No one would give her any news of Rune. He was taboo, as if speaking his name might strike down the speaker. Her guards were utterly useless. She wondered, vaguely, had Luca been there, whether he would have answered her, spoken kindly to her. But Luca was dead. She couldn’t bear to think what might become of her few remaining men if they had stayed behind in the Slödavan palace. They were hostages or prisoners now, undoubtedly.
When she had changed into her warmest robes, her furriest slippers — at least her clothes were all still intact — Elma retrieved her seven candles from their drawer. She arranged them by the fire, one by one, and lit them. When at last her mind was clear, she asked them:Are my men safe?
Breathing in the pungent smoke, her eyes closed, she listened to the snap of dark wicks, inhaling the candles’ wisdom. When she opened her eyes, the smoke trailed upward like narrow ghosts. But no messages lay within, and no comfort came.
“They’ll be all right,” she said aloud, wrapping the candles in twine, tucking them away. She would have done anything to see her mothers, to speak to them just then. But she wouldn’t be allowed to write them or send for them. Not even for her execution.
Thirty-Seven
