Ice Like Fire (34 page)

Noam seems just as shocked as I am. But when Raelyn addresses him, his eyes dart up to her, resuming a small flicker of his power. “Cordell is not part of any larger scheme. Winter is ours, and I came here to inform the queen of this development.”

Theron steps in front of me as his father talks, his back to me, shoulders hunched so I can’t see his face.

“The Seasons are, at long last, where they belong,” Raelyn coos. “Isn’t it wonderful? Winter and Autumn have been subdued by Cordell—”

Cordell overtook Autumn too?

“—Summer has been cleansed, and Spring—well, Spring is the only Season that has proven itself worthy of kingdom status. It will be the deliverer of a new world, and by its example, we will purify Primoria of insufficiency. We do not need the Royal Conduits anymore; we do not need the allegiances of weak bloodlines. We will form our own governments and kingdoms based on proper leadership.”
Slowly Raelyn takes one step forward and bends down on the stage so she’s level with Theron. “And Cordell
is
part of this bigger scheme. Isn’t it?”

“Absolutely not!” Noam shouts.

Theron whips to him. “You know nothing of this!”

I can’t tell whether Theron aims it as a question or a statement—it should be a question, him forcing his father to admit to not knowing about this. But the way it hangs before him . . .

No. It
has
to be a question.

Noam’s control flickers, his jaw working. He turns to Raelyn. “Cordell has no need of the things you offer. We have true magic, not this infectious evil.”

Theron coils his hands into fists. “It isn’t just Cordell’s magic. It belongs to the world—everyone deserves power. That’s what I’ve been trying to accomplish on this trip—uniting everyone to show you how the world could truly be. I drew up a treaty, did you know that? A treaty linking the world together in
peace
.”

Noam’s shocked rage makes spittle fly from his mouth. “You naive, selfish boy! You go behind my back to make alliances for the world with that Winterian whore whispering weak Season politics in your ear!”

Theron falters for one moment of brokenness before he lunges forward in a snarl. “Of course you refuse to share power. That’s always been your problem. Cordell is important, but you cannot behave as though we are the only
people worthy of life!”

Noam matches Theron’s anger, his hands knotting into fists. “I always do what our kingdom needs. Do you know what happens when a ruler doesn’t do what their kingdom needs? They end up like that.” With a disgusted wave, he motions to Simon’s head, still silently watching the chaos unfold. “They end up as a castoff that other kingdoms take advantage of, and I will die before I see Cordell fall so low.”

I keep myself from looking at Simon, my body slack under Noam’s meaning. Summer is no better off than Autumn was for so long—helpless to use their conduit without the proper gender as heir. Assuming Raelyn doesn’t just destroy Summer’s conduit now, while no male exists who could provide a host for the magic, and kill Ceridwen to end Summer’s lineage. The thought makes me sway.

Theron scoffs, the tight, pinched laugh of a man close to crying. “This is why my mother died—because you were too arrogant to admit that Cordell needed help in any way. She
wasn’t
Cordellan, and no matter how hard you tried—”

“Stop!” Noam shouts. “I order you—”

“—you couldn’t cure her. Cordell wasn’t enough, but rather than admit that and let her go back to Ventralli to be healed by her bloodline’s conduit, you let her—”

Noam’s face turns a violent shade of red, spittle flying from his mouth as he shouts at Theron over the stage. “Silence!”

“You let her die!” Theron shouts. “And you destroyed our chance at peace, at ending this, because I just want us all to be safe.”

I think Raelyn says something, or Jesse struggles to reach her—but all I see, hear, feel, is the look Theron gives me over his shoulder. His face twists with a sickened pallor—brows curved, lips twitching, teeth bared. And behind it all, rising up alongside his anger like light brought with the morning, comes every moment he stood against his father. Every second of being a pawn, of wanting one thing and watching his father do another, of being so tantalizingly close to changing the world, only to have it all snatched away by people with stronger agendas.

This is the boy I saw in my visions, crouched in Angra’s prison, weeping over the power his father wielded. That was all Theron ever wanted—for everyone to be safe through unification.

Raelyn said that word specifically, as if she knew the weight of it.

“Today, we will rejoice in the knowledge that unification has been achieved.”

Understanding rushes through me.

The key-magic said it was supposed to make whoever had the keys ready for something. So what if the scenes I saw were things that I, personally, needed to prepare me to open the magic chasm? Theron himself said before this began that if he had something this powerful locked away,
he’d have made it so only the worthy could access it.

What if the keys are supposed to help whoever finds them become worthy of accessing the magic?

The keys showed me the vision of my mother so I would know there was more to magic than rulers transforming into their own conduits. So I would know to ask the bigger question and learn the way out that
I
needed.

Those keys held magic that bent specifically to me, because now I know that the only way to save everyone is to throw myself into the chasm—

And that Theron,
Theron
, all this time, has been a threat.

“I’m sorry, Meira,” he groans. “I’m so sorry.”

Panic slashes through me, bursting in the wake of all the emotion he shows me. I’ve only seen someone break once before. The exact, horrible moment back in Bithai when Mather decided he would rather sacrifice himself to Angra than let us continue to fight indefinitely. I stared into his eyes just as I stare into Theron’s now, watching as he worked through the reality before him and arrived at the only possible solution.

“Theron”—I reach for him and he extends his arm, reaching for me too—no, not reaching for me.

He swings his hand over my shoulder to grab my chakram.

“No!” I shout.

But he shoves me back as I try to grab it from his hand, and in the beat between me stumbling backward and
launching at him again, he aims the chakram at his father and lets it fly.

The blade spins through the air, twisting for so long I think maybe we’ll all just stand here forever, poised between nothing and everything.

But it reaches Noam. It reaches him, and slides through his neck, a perfect blow.

Everyone moves. Mather scrambles for me but gets pinned back by Cordellan soldiers; Garrigan ducks around them, angling for me; Ventrallans shield Jesse and Raelyn, more Cordellans catch Noam as he falls, plummeting backward with unbelieving eyes. And I fly toward Theron still, my mind hooked around the need to stop him, but to stop him from
what
? He already threw it.

My fingers connect with Theron’s arm and he whirls on me, rage tearing apart his features. He’s never been this angry before, this inhumanly livid, and he grabs my arms, shoving me back until I slam into the wall, paneled molding biting bruises along my shoulders.

The shock of Theron treating me like this makes me numb when movement behind him grabs my focus. Garrigan makes it out of the soldiers, sliding into the place Theron occupied before he forced me away.

This has to be a dream. A nightmare. Because as I look at Garrigan, his clear blue eyes pinch with urgency . . .

And my chakram returns.

The entire world dissolves and rebuilds in the seconds
between Garrigan turning and noting the blade. He can’t catch it, not that fast.

The chakram sinks into his body with a solid
thunk
.

His eyes slip down, dragged by the weight of the weapon sticking out of his chest. Even when Sir fell during the battle for Abril, his wounds weren’t this deliberate. This certain.

Garrigan is dead before I can even think to use the magic to save him.

He drops to his knees, to his side, nothing but a body now.

The world speeds back up, a burst of noise and movement that jolts me into the present. Someone says words that don’t make sense, babbling incoherently.

“He’s dead. The king of Cordell is dead . . .”

I look at Theron, hands shaking, arms shaking, everything shaking in the earthquake of this moment.

Theron glares down at me, his eyes almost as lifeless as those of the people he killed.

Meira

RAELYN AND HER
soldiers smile, the only people in the room not rocked by disbelief. They’re
pleased
by this chaos.

My body stiffens with shock, that single emotion shoving all others away so that all I am, all I feel, is action. I rear my knee up and hit Theron in the gut, shoving him off me, and dive at Raelyn. Angra isn’t here, and that lingering fact makes me dizzy, because if he’s causing this much pain and he isn’t even present, what’s happening to the rest of the world? I may not be able to fight him now, but Raelyn—Raelyn will die. Someone will suffer for this—

I leap for her, but the ballroom shifts, retracts, and before my feet connect with the stage, a wicked force sweeps my legs out from under me. I crash onto my elbows, pain reverberating up my already bruised arms from my earlier chase across the rooftops of Rintiero.

Dazed, my mind swirls with the wrongness of soldiers
lowering Noam’s body to the ground and taking Cordell’s conduit out of his belt. The wrongness of Mather and his Thaw trying to get to me but struggling against soldiers, of Conall and Nessa kneeling over Garrigan, Nessa cradling his head in her lap and mumbling a lullaby through the turmoil.

“Lay your head upon the snow,”
she sobs, stumbling over the words, and the more she tries to force them out, the more my body wells with misery.

The force that yanked me to the ground pulls my attention, but I can’t get it to make sense with everything else. I only see that word pulsing through me,
wrong
,
wrong
,
wrong
, and the numbing, empty blanket of shock that clings to me, becomes me.

Theron tips his head and surveys me like I’m an animal he brought down in the hunt, some prized trophy he’s deciding how to skin. The expression itself isn’t what makes me tremble—it’s seeing that expression on Theron, who has never in all the time I’ve known him looked at me with such possession.

“My king!”

The voice precedes an object thrown into the air. Theron catches it, his eyes never leaving mine, his fingers tightening around the hilt of the dagger through the purple haze it emits. Cordell’s conduit—
his
conduit.

He’s the king of Cordell now.

That thought alone would be enough to cripple me,
but when another sight catches my eyes, I dissolve entirely. Every bit of fight, every last flicker of drive—it all evaporates as someone else emerges from the door beside the stage, stepping out of the shadows and into the light as if he’d been lingering there all along.

I could almost dismiss him as another vision or something in my own head, except for the way Raelyn looks at him too. And Jesse, and my Winterians, everyone staring with either joy or horror at the king of Spring.

“Convincing, King Theron,” Angra purrs, meeting his eyes. “Convincing indeed.”

I can’t look back up at Theron. For once, I choose to focus on Angra, to keep gaping at him rather than face the horrifying reality that Theron is just as possessed by Angra’s Decay as Raelyn. And now that Angra
is
his conduit too, the Decay is limitless. It can spread to anyone who doesn’t have pure conduit magic in them.

Without thought, I reach for the magic within me and will it into the Winterians in the room, filling them up in a protective burst of icy chill.

But Angra took Theron. Started working on him long ago, in Abril, when he used the Decay to worm into Theron’s mind and pinpoint his weaknesses. Those weaknesses are all Theron is now, has been, for months. I should have seen the change in him . . . I should have pressed him more about why he was so hurt, should have
helped
him. . . .

But does he even know the Decay has him? Does he
realize that’s what it is? He is the wielder of Cordell’s Royal Conduit now, but if the Decay is already planted deep in his mind and he doesn’t know to use the magic to block it or fight . . .

The magic is all about choice. It won’t save him unless he wants it to.

I scream again and try to claw my way up the stage to Angra. There’s nothing left inside of me but desperate, pure instinct, fingers curved in deadly hooks and teeth gnashing like a rabid wolf. I will stop this, I can still fix this, I can still—

Someone grabs me, fingers tight over the fabric of my shirt, and I wither, knowing whose hands they are, how very, abominably different this is to all the other times he held me. I catch a glimpse of Cordell’s dagger tucked into his belt and as Theron pulls me to my feet and Raelyn turns to Jesse, who watches all this happen with the empty eyes of a man in complete disbelief.

“Please stop this,” Jesse murmurs, his voice sad and brittle.

“If you want your soldiers to obey you,
make
them.” Raelyn’s statement is a dare. “But you won’t, because you are weak. And we will not stand for weak rulers anymore.”

She signals one of her men to rip Ventralli’s conduit off Jesse’s belt. The soldier tosses the crown to Raelyn, who catches it. It’s powerless in her hands, though—this object-conduit only reacts to Jesse. But she doesn’t need
object-conduits anymore. She has Angra’s Decay.

“Such a pretty bauble,” she coos, lacing her fingers through its spires. “And so fragile too.”

I gape. She can’t mean what I think she does—Angra wouldn’t let her
break
it. Jesse would become like us, endlessly powerful.

Raelyn squares her shoulders. “Something awfully fantastic happens when a Royal Conduit is broken in defense of a kingdom, I’ve been told. But if it were to break by
accident
. . .”

Jesse dips forward, watching his wife in numb terror.

She turns to him and steps closer. Before anyone can intervene, she cuffs him over the jaw with the crown. Jesse rears back, blood exploding around his face as the ballroom resonates with the delicate sound of two of the crown’s spires snapping off and hitting the floor.

It broke. His conduit broke.

The gray glow instantly snuffs out.

I stare at Jesse, waiting, hoping Raelyn was wrong. His conduit wasn’t broken in defense of his kingdom, because he hangs there, not reacting at all, but maybe the magic still sought him out . . .

He looks from his conduit’s broken spires up to Raelyn, blood dripping in ruby tendrils from his mouth. This is a man who wasn’t defending anything, caring about anything, when his conduit broke. No emotion to spur the magic on.

What happens to magic when a conduit is broken carelessly? When the conduit-wielder has no emotion in his eyes, no act of selflessness or sacrifice in the way he stares up at his wife, his eyes glazed with aching defeat?

The magic is all about choice. And if Jesse chose not to care, maybe the magic is just . . . gone.

My body sags in Theron’s hands.

Angra’s control is widening.

A crack slithers up my mind, letting a single question slip through.

Why?

Why now? If Angra has been planning this takeover since he fell in Abril, why wait so long to enact it? Why not just sweep through the world immediately?

Angra steps off the stage, smiling at me like a long-separated friend. “Why now, indeed, Highness?” he taunts, and I jerk with disbelief, slamming into Theron.

Angra heard me. He heard my thoughts. We possess—we
are
—the same type of magic now, though, so maybe we’re connected? The thought is too disturbing to consider.

He leans closer to me. “You have such flimsy control of that magic, don’t you? I expected more from you after the chaos you unleashed in Abril. But no matter.”

“Meira!” Mather’s pained shout comes from the ranks of the soldiers who have him and the rest of the Winterians. A clanking of armor follows as he thrashes to break free.

“You have a plan now, don’t you, Winter queen?” Angra purrs. He reaches up, running one finger down my cheek, and I brace for an onslaught of visions—

But nothing comes.

He grins. “Yes, such lofty plans.”

Angra saw something, but I didn’t?

He . . . blocked me.

I tremble, every muscle in my body an earthquake of horror.

He can control his magic more than I can.

This—the carnage of death at my feet, the victorious smirk of Angra before me—is everything I’ve feared my entire life.

And I can’t move, can’t fight him, every nerve limp with the knowledge that despite everything I’ve done, everything we’ve endured, we still failed.

I still failed Winter.

“I’ve always been more powerful than you,” Angra spits. Theron adjusts his grip on my arms, fingers tight. “But you think you have a way to defeat me—by getting yourself killed, hmm? No, Highness. I’ll make sure you stay alive for a long, long time, enough to watch me kill everyone else in your kingdom. Once everyone in Winter is dead, once I own every flake of snow in that miserable land—” He pauses, reaches into my pocket, and yanks out the key, wrapped in the square of cloth. He keeps his eyes on me as he reaches into Theron’s coat pocket and takes out the one
he had, holding them triumphantly before my face. “I will make you watch me destroy your mines once and for all. I will bring those mountains crumbling down.”

My mouth pops open, a flicker of clarity pushing through my throbbing dismay. Our mines?

Angra’s green eyes tighten on mine and all the questions break around the one answer I’ve been wanting for years.

When Spring overtook Winter, Angra never used our mines. He boarded them up and let them rot despite the riches they held.

Any time another kingdom tried to take the mines from Angra—whether by force, as Yakim and Ventralli attempted, or by treaty, as Noam did—he retaliated. Violent, destructive retaliation, slaughtering the armies that invaded or marching into the kingdom that dared negotiate with him.

Angra seized the one person in the world who wanted to give pure magic to everyone—Theron, who in turn killed the one other person who wanted to open the chasm—Noam.

The mines. The magic chasm.

That was the reason for the whole war. That was why Angra slaughtered Winter for centuries—because he knew one day we’d find it. Angra even let Theron continue on his quest for the keys, waiting to overtake the world so he’d be in thorough possession of the one way to open the chasm.

That’s his weakness. That’s what he fears.

Pure conduit magic as a counter to the Decay.

Angra catches my revelation—I see it in the way his face tenses with fury before smoothing into a forced grin. He flashes his eyes to Theron and leans in, hissing words just for me.

He doesn’t want Theron to hear whatever he’s going to say.

I beat down the thought, not wanting Angra to see any more revelations I might have.

“You will never defeat me,” Angra whispers. “I will destroy everything long before you get that chance. You are nothing in this war, no matter how high you think yourself, but I will gladly let you be the one I blame for every moment I had to wait for this freedom. You are unable to stop this, Highness—you see that now. No matter what path you take, it will end the same for you—death and failure.”

I yank against Theron’s grip, unexpected strength leeching into my veins. Angra has a weakness, still. He fears something. “What you offer isn’t freedom. The world will know that—they won’t fall to your control.”

Angra’s sickening grin returns. “King Theron,” he announces, eyes still on mine. “Restrain our guests. They may need time to learn what you have.”

“Theron.” I writhe against him as he takes a step back, pulling me on. “Theron,
stop.
You’ve seen what Angra has done to the world! You can fight it—you have magic now!”

My voice crashes out over the ballroom, everyone holding
still as if they’re just as desperate for Theron’s response as I am.

He looks down at me, his expression flickering with a rapid array of emotions. Resolve, grief, hope.

“You’ll see,” he tells me. “This is the best way to unite the world. I’ve spent months going over it, Meira—I’ve spent months searching for other options. Angra is offering this power to
everyone.
No more conduits—no more limitations. You’ll see. You
have
to understand.”

I’d feel better if he sounded insane. If his words came angry and harsh, babbling of plans to make the world bow to him, like Angra. But Theron sounds like . . . himself.

Angra watches Theron as he tries to convince me, his smile softening. It catches me so off guard that I almost miss it. But no, Angra actually
smiled
at Theron.

Is there more happening here? Did I miss something in the visions of Theron’s memory in Abril?

On the edge of my mind, I’m aware of Cordellan soldiers dragging Nessa and Conall away from Garrigan’s body, Nessa’s piercing scream when they kick his corpse in passing.

“You’ll see,” Theron says again, absently, and hauls me toward the door. The rest of the soldiers follow the unspoken command, the men holding Jesse taking him toward the other end of the ballroom, presumably to be dealt with by Raelyn later.

Theron drags me away, the rest of my party in the hands
of his soldiers. I can’t even bring myself to offer some encouragement to them, my mind caught on how everything collapsed so quickly. Why didn’t I see it happening? Why didn’t I feel Angra’s evil infiltrate one of my closest allies—one of my closest
friends
?