The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(79)

There were other hints that there was something more to my life. Some secret that lay just beside it, ready to crack open like an egg. Sometimes at night I heard a shower of rocks at my window, like fingertips tapping. Sometimes I saw a face that was almost familiar, in a place where none should be—in the woods, or looking up at me from the frozen yard. If I peered too long the glittering sparks flared up and my head ached, so I stopped looking.

It felt good to be cruel. I let it wash over me like a warm black bath. My mother never punished me—she made her servants do it. Every stripe they laid on my back I paid out on my mother’s other children. She didn’t treat me like her own; she treated me like a cuckoo. I think she almost believed I wasn’t hers. She hated that we had the same silly hair.

I was fascinated by ice from the first time I tried it. Cream and honey and lavender syrup stirred into chipped ice, after a banquet dinner celebrating one of my father’s bloody victories. It slid into my stomach and lit a tiny fire. After that, in the cold months, I’d go outside and suck on icicles, eat snow. In the summer I’d hide in shadowy places, unmoving. My siblings felt safer then.

They weren’t safe in winter. I played tricks on them, put nasty things in their beds and ruined their chances at balls. After my little brother broke my hand mirror I led him deep into the woods on an icy night, promising him we were looking for erldeer. I left him alone in a clearing and trekked back alone. He returned home hours after me, led by a stranger who’d found him in the woods. He didn’t dare tell what I’d done.

When I came down to breakfast one morning in a woman’s body, as shaky on my new legs as a fawn, my father looked me in the eyes for the first time. He looked down my body and up again. He smiled in a way that made me afraid.

Soon after that, my mother announced it was time to marry me off. She didn’t do it to save me, but to deny him. She did it with the air of a woman withholding a toy from a hated child.

I didn’t care from which direction safety came. By then I knew the king wasn’t really my father—a contingent of men had spent a few weeks at the palace some months before I was born. They lived in the ice caves at the very edges of the Hinterland, and answered to a warrior queen. Rumors say she was briefly the king’s mistress. My mother got her revenge with the man who gave me my ice-chip eyes.

When my eligibility was announced, I knew I could be frivolous. A princess can set rules for her suitors, even a blackhearted girl like me. It was high summer when I told my father I’d marry the man who brought me a velvet purse full of ice from the distant caves. It wasn’t sentiment that drove me, it was curiosity.

No, it was something else—instinct. I felt, not for the first time, the influence of some unseen force in my life, some hand that wasn’t my own. That feeling was what once made me throw my brother’s toy cart into the fire. The way he tugged it carefully along with its little wooden handle put me in mind too much of myself.

The suitors came. They presented me with ice, but not from the caves. I knew by sight, by touch and taste, the ice dug out of sawdust in a barn, the ice from a frozen creek, from the glacier atop a mountain. Summer became winter, and nobody had gotten it right.

The brothers who finally won me were both tall, with hair the color of a fox’s pelt, but the similarities ended there. The older brother was broad-chested, hard as flint, with a flat brown glare. He had a dirty face when he presented himself to my father. The younger one stood behind him, looking down. He was lean and favored one leg. He looked like someone I could break.

They came at the raw edge of spring. Where other men had gone down on one knee to present me with their gift, the older brother slung it into my lap. I knew before I opened the bag he was the man I would have to marry.

The ice was beautiful. It danced with the phantom green lights the skies over the caves were said to hold, and was cut into delicate cubes. I looked at the first brother’s heavy hands, then the narrow fingers of the second. He was the one who’d done the cutting. He kept his head down, like he was ashamed of himself. I couldn’t see his face.

The first brother spoke his intentions out loud—they meant to make me a servant, not a wife. I could see on my parents’ faces that they didn’t care, so long as I was won fairly. They couldn’t save me from this. Wouldn’t.

So I swallowed the ice.

It left a burning trail down my throat and hit my stomach like blue fire. It coiled there, and it sent its vines into my arms, my legs. It froze the last bit of life out of my deadened heart and slowed the workings of my mind. I had a quick mind, and there was just enough time to feel fear lance through me before my thoughts turned into cold honey.

I heard my mother’s distant scream, my father’s shout. I watched everything through a latticework of frozen tears: the brothers arguing, the eldest hefting me over his shoulder like I was a bag of grain. My littlest sister sank her teeth into my hand before I was carried away, and reeled backward, coughing.

The brothers tied me to the back of the horse that was my dowry. I saw nothing but the curtain of my own hair and the puffs of my breath freezing whitely on the air.

Someone followed us out of the castle yard. Down the muddy road, into the trees. Someone who made my head throb and sparks sizzle over my sight. I heard their tread like an echo to the brothers’. I was frozen, trussed, on my way to a life of servitude, but the follower—that was what filled me with fear.