Snow Like Ashes(16)

It’s possible to live without magic. We’ve been doing it for sixteen years—barely, but we have. We grew a small garden in the Rania Plains. We train our bodies to be strong. But those things will never be enough when all the other kingdoms in the world have something that transcends human limitations, when Spring is able to wipe through our strongest soldiers, when the Rhythms are able to do the same.

Mather was right: Primoria may seem balanced, but . . . it’s not.

Sir closes the box with an abrupt click and I flinch. I was quiet too long. He stands, shaking his head, and a gut-wrenching certainty forces me to stand too.

“It was too dangerous,” he says. “When we start looking for the other locket half, you’re not to argue your assignments, do you hear me? You’re back on food-scouting missions.”

“No!” I shout. Sir turns but I grab his arm. I’m starting to feel the effects of traveling—legs wavering, head spinning. But I will not let him take this from me. I earned my keep today, a hundred times over, and I’ll be damned if he casts me aside so easily again.

“I brought you half of the locket!” I shout. “What else do I have to do?”

Please, tell me what I have to do to feel like I belong.

Sir looks at me so severely that I drop my eyes from his face and my hands from his arm, blood roaring through my head. I’m so tired, exhausted to the point where I’m not certain this is happening. I can’t deal with this right now. I need sleep; I need to collect myself and stop feeling like what I did wasn’t significant.

I stomp out of the meeting tent, ignoring whatever Sir or Mather calls after me, and run to my own tent. The size of our camp doesn’t allow for dramatic stomping sessions, though, and I fly into it in less than a few seconds. But my tent isn’t only my tent, so when I shove inside, Finn and Dendera look up at me with wide eyes.

Dendera refocuses on patching a hole in one of her boots. “Just once I’d like to see you leave a meeting with William like a lady instead of a panting bull.”

I snarl and flop onto my bedroll. Finn retorts something about me not being a lady, which makes me smile, but it makes Dendera rant about how there’s still hope for me. I bury my face in my pillow and tune them out.

Dendera once told me that she had been a member of Queen Hannah’s court. She was respected for her opinion and her mind, and no woman under Hannah’s rule was allowed to feel small. I’ve asked her, and everyone, about Winter so often and heard so many tales that their memories are my memories now, and I can trick myself into feeling like I remember. The frozen berries and iron fire pits. The mines in the Klaryn Mountains. The thick, earthy aroma of refining coal hanging over every city.

If I close my eyes and cover my ears and block out everything else, I can see the court Dendera described. I can see the city Sir told me about. Jannuari’s great white palace stands above me, its sprawling courtyard filled with ice fountains. It’s so cold that foreigners have to wrap in layers of fur to walk from building to building, while our natural Winterian blood keeps us warm even in the worst conditions. And snow is everywhere, always, so much that the grass beneath it is white from lack of sun. An entire kingdom wrapped in an orb of eternal winter.

But here is where my made-up memory always crashes around me. The cold and snow dissolves into explosions. The screaming starts, pushing over the palace complex like a wave, and I’m running through gray streets choked with smoke as hordes of people run too, more explosions corralling us into Angra’s grasp. That’s what they’re doing—corralling the Winterians like sheep so they can lead them to a life of slavery and pain.

Except for us. Originally twenty-five refugees who kept Angra up at night, reduced to the seven who still live with Winter’s future king.

But no matter how dire our situation, how desperate Sir gets, he will never see me as an asset. Just the overexcited child he had the misfortune of raising.





CHAPTER 6

THOUGHTS OF OUR kingdom’s destruction aren’t exactly fodder for restful dreams. Only a little while after falling asleep, I’m shaken awake by nightmares of a shadow engulfing Jannuari’s desolate streets, a darkness so complete and absolute that all buildings and people disintegrate into oblivion. I fly up, gasping on my nightmare, thankful that the tent is empty. The only noises come from the fire crackling on the distant edge of camp. It must be suppertime.

I stand, still fully clothed, and pull my white hair into a braid. The sun is just starting to set when I step outside, casting the Rania Plains in the gray-yellow haze of a day about to die.

To my left, the flap of the meeting tent swishes, and my muscles tighten. I have no desire to face Sir yet unless his face is apologetic, which is less likely than the Kingdom of Summer freezing over. So as the tent opens I hurry away from it, running until I reach the southern edge of camp and crest the hill.

The setting sun pulsates directly in front of me, and a hint of relaxation creeps into my muscles. One of the only good things about this place is the sunset. The fiery hues bleed into the landscape until the world around me is nothing but colors—the encroaching black night, the flickering yellow sun, the reaching beams of scarlet, the waving brown prairie grass.

I slide to the ground, elbows resting on my knees as the campfire crackles somewhere behind me and the wind hisses somewhere ahead. In the face of all that has happened, it feels good, really good, to just breathe for a moment. So in my mind, I sketch out the map I saw hanging over the desk in Lynia, my nerves calming as I focus on the withered yellow edges, the faded brown lines, something simple when everything around me is so . . . not.