Heart of Ice (The Snow Queen #1)(5)

“Pleased to meet you, Princess Rakel. Will you listen to our request?” Kai asked.

Rakel raised an eyebrow and considered them. Why would they wish to speak to me? “Very well. Follow me.” She led the way into her castle, taking them through the maze of silver corridors and passing through ice-blue rooms.

“This place is so big,” Gerta said, giving a frosted spiral staircase an awed look. “It must be bigger than the royal palace in Ostfold!”

“Perhaps,” Kai said.

Not knowing what to say, Rakel awkwardly kept her silence. She’d built her castle over years and years of reading architecture books and testing building methods with ice. She had no way to gauge her castle and compare it to others—she could barely remember what the Verglas royal palace looked like, much less know how big its innards were. She had, however, built it to be quite large in comparison to the architecture plans laid out in the books and was quite proud of it. Resting just atop the mountain, it was built out of ice so pure it glowed the gold of the sun, and its shadows were the blue of the sky. Many of the castle towers were topped with pinnacles—icicle-like caps—and were supported by flying buttresses.

The inside of the castle was ornamented with painfully constructed archways; precisely cut support columns that glittered like crystal; and snowflakes and reindeer that were artfully carved or beveled from the ice walls depending on the room.

Rakel led the children deeper into her castle, taking them to her small library, which was packed with books, models, and maps.

“Wow,” Kai said, gawking at a model of a Ringsted ship encased in a bottle.

Gerta was more entranced by a number of flowers Rakel had preserved in ice. “Pretty!”

The library was one of Rakel’s favorite rooms. Not because it was a masterpiece—she had other quarters that she had made a thousand times more exquisite—but because the library was the only thing that proved, on a distant level, someone cared about her. Why else would she receive a monthly shipment of books and novelties to study? It was this distant token of love that had pushed her into becoming a prodigious reader.

Someone had even gone through the trouble to give her several books about the history of magic users. Reading of the horrors her fellow users were forced to experience made her appreciate that her parents and brother allowed her to live, even if she was alone and isolated.

Rakel watched the children, waiting to see what they wanted. “Has Fyran recovered?” she asked after waiting for several minutes.

“Not yet,” Gerta said, hopping away from the flowers. “They were still repairing homes when we left.”

“They buried the dead yesterday,” Kai said in a much more subdued tone.

Rakel warily studied Gerta. “Your mother…?”

“Hurting, but she’s awake. She’s very thankful you saved us,” Gerta said, nodding vigorously.

“I see,” Rakel said, not believing her for a moment. “If the village is well enough, why, then, have you sought me out?”

Gerta clasped her hands together and bowed her head. “Please save Vefsna.”

Rakel blinked. “Who?”

“It’s a village,” Kai supplied, pulling himself away from the model ship. “It’s on Ensom Peak, but it’s more than halfway down the mountain.”

“My grandmother lives there,” Gerta said.

Rakel placed her hand on an ice sculpture of a reindeer—it had taken her months to learn how to get the antlers right—and tapped its back. “Vefsna was taken over by the invaders?”

Kai nodded.

“Can you free it, like you kicked the invaders out of Fyran?” Gerta asked, moving in alarmingly close to Rakel.

“No,” Rakel said. Privately, she considered the idea. Could she? How hard would it be?

“Why not? Does your magic not work off mountains?” Gerta asked.

“Vefsna is still on Ensom—it’s only near the base,” Kai said.

“It has nothing to do with my magic.”

“Then what is it?” Gerta crowded even closer.

Flustered by the close scrutiny, Rakel took a step backwards. “It’s because I’m not going to embark on a campaign to save all of Verglas.”

“But you’re the princess,” Kai said.

“In title only.”

“What does that mean?” Gerta asked.

“It means I’m not really a princess.”

“Your parents weren’t King Ingolfr and Queen Runa?” Kai asked, scandalized.

“They were, but they discarded me.”

“And that means you can’t save Verglas?” Gerta asked.

“It means I won’t,” Rakel said, even as she continued to weigh the possibility. Without Oskar there, would the villagers kill me once I rescued them? It seems fairly likely…

“But the people need you!” Gerta argued, waving a mitten-clad hand in the air. “Mommy says all the other villages are a lot worse off than Fyran. She says the invaders have got their teeth in our throat.”

“So many have died,” Kai said in a small voice. “You can’t do anything?”

Rakel remembered the crossbow bolt and the scrape of the sword. She didn’t want to die like that. “No.”

“You saved my mommy…why not my grandmother?” Gerta asked, her voice shaky with unshed tears.