Snow Like Ashes(85)

In the background. There’s something in the corner, something I didn’t see before.

“I’m so sorry,” Hannah tells Alysson. “You don’t have to obey me. You can still choose not to do this.”

I step around Hannah and Alysson. I walk past Dendera, Finn, Greer, and Henn. Crystalla and Gregg huddle by the fire pit, alive and holding each other. I walk past Sir, his looming body curving protectively around his wife and the baby.

In the corner of the room, forgotten, sits a bassinet. Mather’s bassinet?

No. It’s not empty.

A tiny hand shoots up, grasping at the air. Small, fat fingers curl against a plump little palm, two gleaming blue eyes stare with wide curiosity at the stillness around her. Her. A pale pink blanket is wrapped around her small body, the hem folded down and stitched with pink silk thread. The stitching forms snowflakes all around the hem until those snowflakes form a name, the pink silk bending and twisting into five small letters.

“No, my queen,” Alysson says. “We will do it; of course we will do it. Winter needs us. We will raise our son as yours.”

The name. Those five letters stitched so perfectly.

MEIRA.





CHAPTER 27

THE FLOOR OF Angra’s throne room gleams in the light from above, letting my reflection stare up at me as I cower on my hands and knees at his feet.

I’m Hannah’s daughter.

My eyes flit back and forth, my lungs inhaling and exhaling panic. I can’t be Hannah’s child, because Mather . . . but Hannah asked Alysson and Sir to say Mather was the prince. Angra knew Hannah’s heir escaped that night, so they couldn’t just say the child had died—he would never have believed that. They said it was Mather so Angra wouldn’t care that Winter’s heir was just a boy, not a girl, not a threat even if we got the conduit put back together and the magic returned to it.

But the locket is powerless now, has been powerless since Angra broke it sixteen years ago, because all that power sought a new host. It went into me.

I’m Winter’s conduit.

No one knew it was even possible except Hannah, because she let her conduit tell her what needed to be done to save Winter. Her locket needed to be broken in defense of Winter, a sacrifice so its power couldn’t be taken away, couldn’t be broken or cast off, wasn’t limited by an object. This power is me, is Winter, is unfettered because it’s connected to my life now. . . .

I’m Winter’s queen.

I suck in a breath, forcing the air into my body to keep me alive under all of this, a weight heavier than anything I’ve ever felt.

Sixteen years of everyone keeping this secret. Of Sir training me, treating me like I was some nameless orphan who should be grateful to be free. And Mather . . . no. All this time, his true parents have been right there, until Sir—

There’s my sweet girl.

The cottage. Sir hugging me. That wasn’t real. It was a cruel trick of Angra’s, a horrible toying with my dreams. Everything I want out of life, everything I will never, ever get—a simple, happy family in some cramped little cottage. But Hannah—that was real. That was her attempt to save me from Angra, a desperate ripple of protection urged by her connection to the conduit magic, to her bloodline. My bloodline.

I fall forward, forehead touching the cool obsidian, mouth opening in the beginnings of a sob. Tears stream down my face as I remember Sir’s arms around me, the way he held me in Angra’s evil dream, completely unafraid of loving me.

But he isn’t my father. He’s Mather’s father. My own father is Winter’s dead king, and my mother is Winter’s dead queen. She’s been using her connection to Winter’s conduit to talk to me. Because I—

I’m Winter’s conduit. No matter how many times I push those words through my head, they don’t make sense.

“Herod!”

Angra’s shout, dripping with uncontrolled menace, shakes the palace apart. He’ll kill me, destroy me here and now, rend every piece of me into inconsequential bits and scatter them over Winter’s desolate land. He’ll win.

I fly up, stumble back, not sure where I can go or where I can hide. I can’t just die—not this easily. It can’t end now, just like that—

Angra throws open a door. “Herod! Bring him, NOW!”

I pause, hands out, chest heaving up and down. Him. Has Mather been captured?

Angra turns back to me as footsteps draw closer from the hall. “Winterians, always getting in the way of greater things,” he says, riled into a fantastic desperation. “You may be able to resist me, but there’s another way to get you to talk.”

Resist.

He didn’t hear any of it. He doesn’t know. For him, the image of Jannuari must have dissolved once I left the cottage. Hannah used the conduit magic to keep us hidden because she needed to prepare me; she took the risk to give me a fighting chance to save our kingdom.

My chest gets cold again, a small shiver that darts down to my hands.

Footsteps pound into the throne room, shadows falling on two figures. One is Herod, his looming shoulders recognizable anywhere. The other is smaller. Still strong, still big, but—

Herod throws the other man into the beam of light in front of me. He collapses, clothes ripped and stained with blood, body bruised and decorated with cuts and gashes. When he looks up at me, everything else vanishes.