“Ugh,” Michelle groaned. “It’s always something with you. I’ll fix it in a minute, okay? We have an important meeting right now.”
Lethe glanced sideways at Michelle. “We have an important meeting? I have an important meeting, and we were in the middle of a conversation when it was announced. You made it very obvious that you wished to attend the conversation.”
“Because I’m your queen,” Michelle reminded Lethe stiffly. “I should be present at important meetings!”
“It has nothing to do with you,” Lethe murmured.
It seemed as if they’d forgotten me entirely—and blazed past Theon in the alcove, as well—though I continued to tag along with them. I wanted to hear what the harpy had to say, too.
Nell
The throne room was empty, with the exception of the large auburn and brown bird-woman I remembered from the cliff at the beach. Parnassia’s face was shrewd and humorless, and in spite of our agreement and our history together, the harpy mentioned nothing of it. I worried she would say something, but her eyes stayed on Lethe.
“King Lethe. When you were last seen by my sisters and myself, you were only a prince.” An icy smile formed on her lips. “Do you recall that meeting?” she asked.
Lethe glanced at me, nervous. “Er,” he said. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
I frowned. Interesting. I hadn’t known that Parnassia had struck a deal with the ice dragons.
“I’m Queen Michelle,” Michelle introduced herself, suddenly unsophisticated in her desperation to be recognized as an important figure at this meeting. She offered her hand, then awkwardly retracted it, noticing that Parnassia had nothing to offer but two withered, useless hands and a powerful set of wings folded over her back.
“We were very trusting in our acceptance of your offer,” Parnassia went on, ignoring Michelle. It gave me an odd sense of vindication. “You claimed that your mountaintops would be reserved for my sisters and myself. We would have free reign of the air, and no need to fear the ice dragons. And now, King Lethe, the harpies of Thundercliff would like to view the territory we have been promised, and begin to build.”
“And what territories of Maine will our people possess?” Michelle interjected.
Parnassia finally acknowledged Michelle. Her black eyes swung to behold the insolent queen. “Excuse me?” she snapped. “No territory of our land was ever discussed in the trade. King Lethe, I beg you to control your female, for she speaks out of turn.”
I was kind of amazed when Lethe turned to Michelle. “Control yourself, Michelle. You did not know the terms of my arrangement with the Thundercliff sisters. No territory of Maine was ever discussed. Parnassia is correct.”
But Michelle wouldn’t relent. She whirled to face Lethe, and her pout blossomed into a full, sullen lip. “If the harpies are getting a piece of Everwinter,” she argued, “which is partially mine, isn’t it?—then we should get a part of their land: Beggar’s Hole.”
“Beggar’s Hole is not ours to give, human,” Parnassia growled. “You must understand that.”
“I don’t see why not. You know, I came here from Maine by sheer… happenstance. And even though I had an alliance with the fire dragons, I helped the ice dragons. I gave them a piece of technology—no, you know what, Lethe? I gave you a piece of technology that you needed in order to win the war. I gave you a crucial piece of technology, and it solidified that crown on your head, didn’t it?” She poked his chest. It was almost too much to watch. She was such a hellion. “I was brought here for questioning following the destruction of the fire people’s shelter, and your father especially liked me. He saw that we would make a good match… and so did you, Lethe.” She crossed her arms over her bust and smirked at him knowingly. “I know you saw us together, too. You can’t hide anything from me. So I stayed. This isn’t my country. This isn’t my world. But I’ve stayed. I stayed for you, Lethe, and I stayed for the ice dragons, and I stayed for the Eraeus dynasty. You think about that!” She stomped one foot. “You think about how I gave up my entire life to you, and I asked for nothing in exchange. Don’t you think it’s time that I get a little something back? Huh? Don’t you think it’s time that I get—oh, I don’t know—a wedding present?”
Parnassia’s mouth turned down into a grimace. “Beggar’s Hole has several valuable assets to its name,” she said to Lethe, still not deigning to converse with Michelle. “It is not a mere wedding present, like the head of an enemy.”
“And isn’t the mountaintop of Everwinter worth something, then?” Michelle shrilled. “Lethe! Don’t let this bird-woman disparage our country like that!”
Lethe sighed and rolled his eyes. “If you really want to try to procure some space in Beggar’s Hole…” He winced. “I guess we could try to work something out.”
Michelle simpered. “I would so love to be able to see my family during the winter there,” she purred.
Parnassia scoffed. “These were not the terms of our arrangement,” she sneered. “I have yet to see the section of your land staked for my sisters and myself. And I have yet to be reassured that we will not be made the target of any dragon attacks.”
Lethe’s mouth opened, but no words came out. “Uh,” he stammered again. “When we made that deal, I was only a prince, and now I am a king… but a new king. Things are uncertain. The city is just beginning to settle now that the fire dragons have been fully driven from the territory. Parnassia… Miss Thundercliff… we will need more time to figure out this arrangement. I’m just not sure—”
“These are your people!” Parnassia screeched. “They obey you, or they don’t! My sisters and I completed our portion of the bargain! And now it is your turn! But the words mean nothing! Nothing!”
With that, her powerful wings beat at her side, carrying her into the air, and she wheeled out of the throne room, tearing through the palace and out of sight.
“Wow,” I murmured. If this meeting was any indication, the kingdom which lay sprawled before this king and queen was a dysfunctional one. After all, the queen was sullen and heavy-handed, imagining herself as more a prize than she truly was, just because a man who was losing his mind took a shine to her. And poor Lethe… he didn’t have the spine to say no to her demands. He didn’t have the spine, and he didn’t even like her that much.
“Who asked you?” Michelle snarled, whirling on me. “Didn’t you say there was some mess in the washroom that you needed to clean up? And that’s why you weren’t working when we found you?”
“Yes,” I agreed, not wishing to incur her wrath.
“God,” she sighed. “Lethe? Who would be good to send with Nell, to help her figure out how to sweep up some broken porcelain?”
“None of them,” Lethe answered. He didn’t smile or laugh. He wasn’t joking. “They’re ice dragonesses. They’re all as mean as… Oh! No! You know who’s actually quite nice?”
Michelle rolled her eyes. “No,” she muttered. “Who is actually quite nice?”
“That Merulina girl.”
Merulina… Where have I heard that name before?
“Let’s pair her with Merulina. Merulina will be fair. Yes? Nell, go to the servant wing and ask the head maid to pair you with Merulina. Tell her this was by the king’s command. She’ll reassign whatever Merulina’s task is, and we can get that floor cleaned up.”
“How sweet and considerate you are.” Michelle slid her hands over his arm, perhaps incited to show affection by some stab of jealousy. “What a wonderful king I have.”
As I strode from the door, heading to the servant wing, Lethe’s voice drifted up behind me, directed at Michelle. “I’m not just your king,” he reminded her. “I’m your husband.”
Theon
I was creeping closer to the western tower when the sound of wings beating brought me to a standstill. My eyes scanned the hallway. My blood ran cold. Had someone shifted into dragon form in the palace itself?
“Theon!” a harsh female voice called to me. I glared at the approaching
figure of the harpy. The meeting must have gone very poorly. “Come with me,” she commanded, “and let us talk of further arrangements regarding these dragons. Place your satchel around my neck.”
“I can’t just leave,” I hissed. “I’m finally here. My wife is here. And the astrolabe is here. It’s the last hope of my people.”
“You can come back soon enough. Trust that the astrolabe is not the only hope of your people. You also have an alliance with a nest of harpies located at the pinnacle of Thundercliff.”
I shook my head, uncertain. “How can the harpies—”
“Come with me, I said,” Parnassia repeated. “We will discuss this at length in a safer location.”
I was hesitant, particularly about leaving Nell… but she was safe here for now. She was safe in the role of a servant girl, however humiliating it might have been, and as much as I hated to say it, I believed that Lethe would secretly go to great lengths to ensure her continued safety. If anyone was placing her in danger right then, it was me, simply by being here, and I did believe that the harpy would form an alliance with the fire dragons if I went with her. Her hot emotions had flared, and it might have brought about a sudden change of heart.
And the astrolabe, besides, was certainly guarded. I might be able to procure it, but not without significant losses. It was possible that I myself would die, and Nell would pay the price along with me.
So I climbed into the satchel, and the harpy’s wings beat, carrying us through the palace halls, out its gates, and back into the frigid nighttime air, back to the shores of one of our beaches.
* * *
It was only when the temperature changed from icy to balmy that I knew Parnassia had borne me across the waves and to the ogres’ beach, where my people made camp. When she landed, it was amid cries of surprise and alarm from the fire dragons, whose suspicions were rightly roused by the sight of such a beast in their camp. The appearance of a harpy was never an omen of good tidings.
“What brings you here, snatcher?” my own mother’s muffled voice demanded.
The leather satchel lost its tension and collapsed into the sand with me, splitting open. I came rolling out, and found that a wall of fire dragons stared down at me, awaiting an explanation.
“Theon,” my mother exclaimed. “There you are! We were worried.” Her eyes were warm with relief. She’d already lost one boy, and her husband. Neither she nor Nell could stand to lose me now.
“Your son, the dethroned prince and future king of your land,” Parnassia explained, “intercepted me this evening as I had lost my way in search of the portal between the island and Earth. He learned of a deal I had struck with his wife, but our commerce did not end there. In exchange for a valued item from his satchel, I snuck him onto the property of the palace—”
A murmur of confusion rose from the crowd.
“What barter have you made with those devils?” my mother demanded, eyes flashing between myself and the harpy.
“It is no concern of yours what past the harpies and the ice dragons may have once shared,” Parnassia sneered. She must have felt awfully secure to speak in that way to a fire dragon, particularly to the queen. “The concern of yours is that the deal between us has soured. The new queen, a human, oversteps her bounds. And the king, a man of no guts or spine, will not rein her in, nor will he deliver on his own claims. This has made me… vengeful. And it will bring my sisters to the same desire of vengeance. We will retaliate for this deceit… and you will want our aid in this battle.”
Mother smirked. “What aid can a harpy be to a fire dragon? You are only a quarter of our size in battle.”
“But in the snow? In the storm? Are we so much weaker?” It was a solid point. While we became stiff and slow in the cold, harpies, like ice dragons, flourished. “They do not trust you. They would kill a fire dragon in an instant. But we harpies have forged an alliance with them. They do not realize their misstep by allowing the new queen to speak so boldly of her demands.”
Mother grimaced. She knew that these points were true.
I dusted the sand from my breeches and said, “What do you expect from us in return for this supposed alliance? I will be the first to admit that I don’t know you very well; the ways of the harpies remain mysterious, even to the other winged peoples who traverse these portals. But the most obvious trait you all share is your—forgive me, my lady, for saying—cutthroat and self-serving nature. The only creatures about whom you seem to care are, at best, other harpies. One of your kind, or so I’ve been led to believe, would never strike a deal in which there was no gain for the self or the nest.”
“You’re right,” Parnassia replied. “You don’t know us very well. We are not just, I prefer to say, excellent brokers. We are also… wrathful. And a deal broken with a harpy is not only a deal broken. A deal broken with a harpy is a new deal struck. But in this new deal, the harpy will ensure the destruction of the dishonorable party.”
I nodded, satisfied, and even managed a smile… but the smile did not quite reach my eyes. I was thinking about Nell. She too had struck a deal with this harpy. And I knew now that it was a deal she could only ever break.
Nell
The head of the bustling servant quarters in the Everwinter palace—Dorid—was a gaunt older woman with pure white hair.
“Ah, the new girl,” she greeted me. “What have you dirtied?”
“I didn’t dirty anything,” I stammered, small beneath her wintry gaze. She must have been an ice dragoness.
“Lost?” she snapped.
“Nothing,” I said again.
“Broken?”
My cheeks flushed. “Yes,” I whispered.
Dorid rolled her eyes. “All right,” she said. “I’ll send Misty and Ronquil—”
“His Highness Lethe instructed me to request to be paired with Merulina,” I interjected.
Dorid glared. “Merulina?” The name twisted and rolled off her tongue as if it was an item of zero worth, but then the woman did a little shudder, as if to shake the exchange from her thin shoulders, and forged on. “Very well. Merulina is in the scullery. I’ll call her. What have you broken, child?”
I wanted to correct her usage of the word “child,” but I didn’t suppose it would do any good. Her lined face dictated that, to her, many adults were in fact children.
“A porcelain bed pan—”
I would have gone on, but Dorid’s guffaws cut me off. Apparently there was something which could break the stoic witch from her stony stare, and it was the image of me covered in dragon feces.
“Go on, go on,” she begged, rubbing at the corner of her tearful eyes.
“In the wash room,” I finished, cheeks still blushing with embarrassment. You would think that being removed from my homeland, and thrust into this war, and separated from my husband, not to mention discovering my infertility, might have hardened me to such trivial assaults on my dignity. But it hadn’t. I was still lamentably human.
“Well,” Dorid said, clapping her leathery hands together, “I will guide you to the scullery and we shall fetch Merulina together. She’ll go with you the rest of the way to the wash room and help clean up”—Dorid giggled and cleared her throat—“everything.”
* * *
Merulina was hunched over a sink which appeared to be filled solely with bubbles when we approached her. She was a tall girl, willowy, with kinky auburn hair which spilled down her back, unkempt, from out of a stained bonnet. Her skin, like the skin of all ice people, was an ivory that looked like it had never been touched by the sun. She was scrubbing a large, flat pan, and amid the clatter and clank of all the dishware, didn’t notice either of us entering the room.
“Merulina,” Dorid snapped, breaking the girl from her daydream and causing her to spin around.
She had a heart-shaped face, unusually soft for her lineage of ice, with deep olive eyes. It was only the eyes that betrayed her to be an ice dragon, for they, much like Lethe’s, seemed to bluster and howl with the
elements of a savage storm. A blush rose to her cheek, and just as quickly drained away. She dried her hands on her apron and curtsied.
It was noting her beauty which gave me the epiphany about where I had heard that name, Merulina, before. This was the “imprisoned” girl Altair spoke of.
Of course. The meaning of the imprisoned fire dragon’s words dawned on me. Merulina had been no prisoner. She was a servant… and the reason their love was impossible: they were from two different sides of the warring world.
Dorid swept forward and placed an arm over Merulina’s shoulders. “This is the new girl, Penelope,” she informed Merulina. “She’s a human, and she is an old acquaintance of the new queen.” The way Dorid spoke made clear her distaste for Michelle, which did not surprise me. “It garnered her a position amongst the staff, though she once knew the manacles of the dungeon quite well.” Dorid winked at me, as though we were old girlfriends and my history with torture was an amusement to us both. I didn’t let my face show how unbelievably rude Dorid was being. “Today is her second day, and she’s broken a”—Dorid had to pause to straighten her facial expression yet again—“a bed pan,” she finished. “It’s in the wash room. Go with her and help the poor thing get the place in working order again. We can’t have the castle looking like an outhouse.”
As we walked, Merulina continually glanced at me from the corner of her eyes. I knew she had something on her mind, and finally it came out. “How… how is everyone in the dungeon?” she broached. “Is everyone all right down there?”
“You mean Altair?”
At this, Merulina whirled on me and brandished a trembling finger. “Don’t you dare,” she hissed. Then, looking right and left down the corridor, she straightened her shoulders and withdrew the offending finger. “I don’t understand—or appreciate—your implications.”