Mother’s face shifted into such a glower that she resembled a woman of wintry lineage. “You’re not suggesting that we abandon our flames in the city to do what they will?”
“Some ice dragons will stay, certainly, and fight,” I confessed, “but you know that ice dragons are by and large creatures of comfort, creatures of leisure. Many of them will abandon the fiery city for the Obran peninsula. And those who stay—well—for what do they stay? For the charred shell of a once great city?”
“And to what do we return?” Mother shrilled.
“To what do we return now?” I shouted back. “Is there any return for us at all without sacrifice? You said it yourself. What purpose is a perfection we cannot touch? Start small, you said. All we need is somewhere to start. A place to rebuild. And the island can be ours again!”
“You are talking about the destruction of the centuries. You are talking about the forfeit of our history, Theon. The sacrifice of our traditions.”
“You are talking about the past, which is gone,” I retorted, “and the future, which is made of air. I am the only one of us still talking about now. Today. Tonight.”
Theon
Per my agreement with Parnassia—whatever “agreement” a man can ever come to with a harpy, anyway—she and her companions traveled through the portal over Everwinter to join us on the ogres’ beach. Only three of them could come, as I had broken the wing of the other auburn bird some time ago. It didn’t seem that long ago… and at the same time, it seemed like another life. In those days, my biggest concern had been winning Penelope O’Hara’s heart. I hadn’t even understood the attacks of the winged women, much less the condition of my homeland. To think, whilst I had been wrapping my arms around Nell, tilting her face up to mine, my family had been shunted off to a shelter, sealed beneath inches of ice and snow.
And now…
Now Penelope O’Hara was my wife. The future queen. And a slave in my former palace, laboring directly beneath her own former best friend. My mother was the last of the family to remain. My younger brother had been missing and likely dead for at least a month. My father… beheaded on the very steps of the castle where he had raised us.
As the three shadows of harpies approached in the sky, and my mother cast a glance in my direction. She had acquiesced to my plot, particularly because I was technically the new king of The Hearthlands, and deep down, she knew that. Deep down, she also wanted to trust me, I was sure. I was her own son, after all.
“Business with harpies is never good business, son.”
“That’s fine. I do not employ their services for good,” I answered her.
“But they always want something in return,” she went on. I glanced at her with sympathy. This war had changed her; it had made the strong and brave woman who had raised Altair and I into a former queen who only was willing to cower. But I supposed war had changed us all. I had lost my gentle touch, perhaps forever. I regretted the easy trust I had bestowed on acquaintances, even on ice dragons themselves. “What will they take from us?” Mother breathed.
“They want nothing from us because we want the same thing; it’s a collaboration, not an exchange,” I reminded her. “We both want revenge.” The word felt heavy, twisted, and satisfying in my mouth. “We both want the ice dragons ousted from the territory.”
Mother’s eyes were cloudy; she clearly had more to say, but could not, as the harpies were too near. All three women were massive: Parnassia, the auburn and chestnut, mottled creature, muscular and trim as a field hand; the coal-black, sleek one, whose body was cut into narrow lines, with almost no breasts or hips of which to speak; and the snowy white one, whose figure was round, both soft and strong, like a farmer’s wife. All women had deceptively beautiful faces: arched cheekbones, full lips, and large, black eyes. There was something missing from them, though: that element of humanity even some ice dragons possessed. Some.
“Theon,” Parnassia greeted sharply. “And Lady Aena.” Her head slightly bowed. “These are my sisters of Thundercliff. Ispa, the black-hearted. She was born without remorse.” The raven-looking one bowed slightly. The women were not used to showing respect to anyone or anything. That much was obvious. “And Keke, eater of the wicked and thief of their children.” The dove-looking one bowed slightly, her pretty face hard and unshifting. “Though we all exist to punish the wicked.”
“I was not wicked,” I blurted. “Nell was not wicked. You tried to kill us both. And certainly the children of the wicked are not—”
“Well,” Parnassia drawled, “although we are punishers, snatchers, we have a will toward destruction which can be… sometimes whimsical.”
Ispa and Keke tittered behind her.
“At times, we do make mistakes,” Parnassia went on, ignoring them. “Particularly for prizes which draw our eye away from our missions. But in these events, I think you’ll agree that you have benefited from our weakness of will.”
I acquiesced to this point. “Granted. I never would have imagined that a harpy and a fire dragon would share a vision—but then I also never imagined that the ice dragons would destroy The Hearthlands as they have.” I glanced at Mother and then back to Parnassia. Upon the loss of her sister—though they were all sisters, but with no true family allegiance—it seemed that she was given deference by the other two. “We have agreed on a plot to send them from the territory, though it is admittedly rash, and almost as spiteful as it is destructive. We will, when our seer divines that the storms move in our favor, send agents of flame to burn the city, pushing the ice dragons from the castle walls and into the wilderness again. We hope that they will abandon our ruined structures and return to the Obran peninsula, allowing us to rebuild.”
Parnassia, Ispa, and Keke seemed to consider this amongst themselves.
“Destructive, rash, and spiteful, yes,” Parnassia agreed. “It will do little to ensure that the self-appointed rulers of the domain do not return, exactly as you have. Ice dragons are not known for their… emotional maturity. I would not be at all surprised to find the lot of you squabbling over a ruined city for another few years, as occurred on the same land some half a century ago.”
At her words, Ispa cackled. Fire leaped in Mother’s eyes, and her thighs shifted and twitched, as if on the verge of a lunge. I held out my hand to still her before we lost our new—however shady—allies in the fight for our home country.
“Yes, they’ll be back,” Ispa predicted. “Just you wait and see. Give them another twenty years… right after you poor asses rebuild.”
“Forgive me, your majesties,” Parnassia snarled, “but what exactly does this have to do with our revenge? So far, I have heard nothing to relieve my mounting anger with the ice dragons. Their queen! Augh! Have you met their queen?”
“Once or twice,” Mother answered dryly, shifting a glance in my direction.
My cheeks darkened.
“Yes, we know the woman of whom you speak,” I agreed. “She is human—”
“Human!” Keke cried. “Humans are the worst! So much worse than any harpy could ever dream of being. Our madness at least knows reason. Our cruelty knows boundary!”
“My point,” Parnassia went on, “is that your plan does nothing to satisfy our own needs. We must humiliate and deface the frauds and liars of the royal ice court, as they used our services, changed their terms, and dishonorably discarded us.”
“And what do you have to offer by way of manpower, if you’ll forgive the phrase?” I asked her. “What of weaponry? We have precious few men to sacrifice for your wounded ego, Parnassia. Precious few resources to squander in multiple battles.”
“We do not want to fight them,” Ispa snapped. “Fighting is honorable and fair; it is the kind of thing a damned fire dragon would do. We have no interest in honor. We have no interest in fairness. Our only interest is in torment.” My nose curled as her gnarled, withered hands, otherwise useless, petted each other as she spoke, as if this scheming brought her great pleasure. “We have not
used the portal in Beggar’s Lake to exact our revenge for over a hundred years. But now… I feel it is time, sisters.”
“Beggar’s Lake,” I murmured.
“Beggar’s Lake houses a unique portal which, due to the force of the vortex atop it, is impossible to escape from,” Ispa went on. “It has become a dimension of torment and loss. Perhaps there exists some creature strong enough to battle up from the whirlpool and back into the world known as Earth, but if such a creature exists, we have yet to see it. Even we would be trapped if we descended into those depths, strong as we are.” She smirked.
“What’s down there?” I asked.
“The ghouls,” Ispa answered with great relish. “The ghouls are down there.”
My eyes bulged. I gulped and nodded.
The realm of the ghouls was almost a fate too horrific to wish upon the soldiers of the ice people. They were ethereal beings, almost fleshless, entirely monstrous. Their blood was as black as pitch, made thick with the entrails and ichor that were their regular diet. They could drive a person mad, and then disappear before your very eyes. I knew of them, of course, but I had somehow never imagined that one of the many portals might lead to their home. I couldn’t even imagine what such a place might look like. And to send living creatures there… just for revenge…
But then I thought of my father’s face, hanging on his skull like a flag of surrender, white as ash and bruised, tattered. Thought of how they’d left him shackled for weeks, until he couldn’t walk anymore, couldn’t use his arms anymore, and had begun to starve. Were they truly so much better than the ghouls? Perhaps it was the ghouls I should have pitied.
“I like it. But how will we get them to go into the portal?”
“We have relations with the royal court,” Parnassia reminded me. “We’ll invite them to Thundercliff, under the guise of a meeting to discuss territories. Certainly, Maine is the closest province in keeping with their climate. It’s only one portal away. They would be interested in discussing the possibility of inhabiting the land.”
I recoiled at the thought, though it was all nothing but a plot, a ploy. To think that the ice dragons wouldn’t just infiltrate the homes of honest, hard-working fire dragons—but move on to the homes of honest, hard-working humans… not to mention helpless…
“Still,” I said, “you mentioned a vortex which creates such force, the portal is inescapable. How could you, relations or no, convince one of them—or any of them—all of them—to go through?”
Parnassia smiled softly. “How could we, you mean,” she corrected me. “How could we convince them to go through?”
My mind turned over the question a few times before a light flared on. “There is something for which any ice dragon would dive,” I said. “But you’ll have to wait for us to retake the castle.”
Nell
I had told Merulina to let me get some bandages for my hands, and we would venture down to the prisons, where I would be her lookout, and she could see Altair again. But apparently servants were the last people who got to decide what they were going to do over the course of their day. The life of a servant girl in the Eraeus castle was more like the life of a dog, or a ball of trash, or a speck of dust; you just got whipped from one place to the next, and if you got a moment to even think, you were lucky. It wasn’t until nightfall that I was finally able to pull Merulina aside without Dorid looming behind us. We’d been shunted from dinner to dishes to making beds to cleaning fireplaces and now laundry. We had folded a giant stack of white linens and deposited them on a cart to be taken by another couple of maids to an upstairs closet. Dorid had just departed for the servants’ quarters to settle some dispute about a missing vase.
“Come on,” I hissed in Merulina’s ear. “If we don’t go now, God knows we’ll never get the chance.”
Her emerald eyes shifted between the door to the hallway and the pile of folded laundry. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “You don’t understand, Nell—they’ll kill me if they find out.”
“Oh, I understand. And you’re right.” I wanted to tell her about how I had been carried off into a gigantic nest by some horrific bird-woman because I had dared to follow Theon out across the beach one night. I wanted to tell her that I had been tortured for him in the same dungeon Altair inhabited now. I wanted to tell her that I had stolen the mystical astrolabe and disappeared into a wild snowstorm for the mere chance to see him again, the mere chance to give him an edge in this war that wasn’t even my own to fight. But I held my tongue. It would be nothing but boastful. Merulina had to make her own decisions. It was possible that she didn’t love Altair in the same way that I loved Theon… and if that was so, it would do her well to realize it now and not waste too much of their time.
“If you don’t want to go, you can just say so,” I reminded her. “No one is forcing you. The risk is yours. The decision is yours.”
Merulina’s eyes shifted again between the folded sheets and the waiting door. She expelled a violent sigh and marched to twist the knob in her hand.
“Let’s go,” she said, flinging the door open and darting out into the hall. “Before I change my mind.”
As we trundled down the stone steps, I thought that perhaps I should have considered whether or not being caught would be worth it for me, too. After all, it wasn’t as if I would be innocent in all of this. I already had enough strikes against me. I would need to invent some reason why I was down in the dungeons when I was supposed to be up at the laundry bins.
“I’ll stay here,” I whispered, lingering at the final twist of the stairwell, where I could see up, to the station where guards would often pass for the changing of the shift, and down, where meager torches lit the cells of the remaining fire prisoners. “I’ll speak loudly if I’m asked why I am here.” From my days as a prisoner, I knew that the timing was almost impossible to speculate. Sometimes guards would mosey down into the dungeon as if by happenstance, chatting amongst themselves with nowhere to go and no true task to which to attend, and other times we’d been forgotten for what felt like—but couldn’t have been—hours. “I don’t know how much time you have.”
“I used to be the dungeon’s water girl,” Merulina explained. “I can say that there is never a guarantee that a sentry or a servant will not pass through. But if you’re lucky, you can have all the time you need to express your love. We shall see. But—you were right. The risk is mine. The decision is mine. If a guard comes, tell him that you were sent to look for the missing vase.”
I scoffed. “Dorid would never agree that she had said—”
“Not by Dorid,” Merulina hissed. “By me.” With that, she whirled and descended the stairwell to hunt for Altair among the cells. It was almost impossible to see them—an occasional shift in the shadow let me know that a body was moving—but I heard Merulina’s expression of gratitude, and heard Altair join her chorus in surprise. Her silhouette moved to the bars of a dim cage and the torchlight played over her hair, showing me that his fingers had found their way into her tresses.
They kissed, a long, luxurious kiss, as if they had all the time in the world.
I stared after them and thought helplessly of Theon. Our interaction the other night had been so brief…
I wished I could go with Merulina and tell Altair that I knew his brother, if only to in some way be with Theon again by being with his family—to tell him that I was his sister-in-law now, and possibly the queen of The Hearthlands, if they ever became The Hearthlands again. But I didn’t want to ruin their moment. Merulina was gasping with tearful breath—an ice dragoness crying for love, what a beautiful thing—and Altair murmured sweet nothings in her ear… which traveled quite well due to the acoustics of the dungeon.
“I was starting to think I’d never see you again,” he confessed. “It’s been days since a beautiful girl brought me water.”
“Dorid suspected,” Merulina sobbed. “She said I was awfully happy to be doing such abysmal shifts, and perhaps I deserved to be promote
d. She was trying to keep us apart—and she succeeded. The only reason I’m here now is that your sister took pity on me… she’s being my lookout right now.”
“You should know that the fire dragons do not have sisters. We are a race without women since the war under my grandfather’s reign.”
“Your sister-in-law,” Merulina answered. “Theon’s wife.”
“Theon’s wife?” echoed in the prison. I resisted the urge to go. I would need to be here, looking, in case a guard approached—
“The new girl, aren’t you?” a voice emanated from behind me, and I jumped, whirling. My heart slammed into my ribcage with every passing second.
“Uh, yes,” I said. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. “I just… it’s so dark down here!” I threw my voice farther to catch Merulina and Altair’s attention, to pull them from their lover’s embrace. “I was supposed to be looking for that missing vase, but—but—I think I lost my way?”
The man behind the blue cloth mask considered me, skeptical, then nodded his head back toward the guard post. “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll take you back to the servants’ quarters. The vase got found already. It was in the library with a different set of finery. Mismatched. Bad housekeeping. But never mind that. The servant responsible was apprehended and punished.” His eyes were cold as he spoke. Apprehended and punished for misplacing a vase. I could only imagine what they’d do to me, much less Merulina, if they knew the truth.
“O-okay,” I said, loudly again. “Thank you!”
I glanced over my shoulder once—I risked it, like a fool—before following the guard up the stairs.
Merulina was gone.
Theon
The stars over the Ixwane Ocean were large and bright, shimmering down onto the beach like photographs, reminders of the sky under which The Hearthlands had once resided. Of course, that land mass was now more often than not covered by clouds. But the stars had not changed—except in position, perhaps.