Snow Like Ashes

  “I’m moving up in the world.” I heave again, coughing out air. At least there’s nothing left for me to vomit. My ribs, silent during my need to puke, scream at me now until I roll onto my back. Even that doesn’t entirely appease them. I need medicine, a splint better than my padding and armor. I doubt I’ll get any of that here.

  Herod laughs. “How quickly the mighty fall.”

  I close my eyes, the sunlight casting red and gold on the inside of my eyelids. I will not give Herod the satisfaction of seeing me break. I will be strong.

  People had conduits once to make them strong. I saw them, conduits like stones and pendants and sticks. I shove the dream away, refusing to let it poison me with more worry, but something catches me and won’t let go.

  People had conduits like stones.

  The stone in my pocket, the one that Mather gave me, that he wanted to believe was magic when he was a child. A piece of lapis lazuli that Winter mined. It could be …

  This is insane.

  But … I have nothing left to lose for trying, do I?

  I shut my eyes tighter, focusing on the lapis lazuli ball, on whatever might be inside it. I imagine the stone’s strength flowing into my body, twirling through the cavity of my chest, and filling my ribs with vitality and health.

  Nothing happens.

  I do it again, gritting my teeth, begging the blue thing to do something, please, to help me in some way—heal just one rib, just one—

  Something jabs my side. Hard. I gasp in the sudden shock of pain and swallow down a wave of nausea, my focus shattered by the hilt of Herod’s sword.

  “You’ve slept enough,” he says. “Angra will want you conscious when we arrive.”

  I shut my mouth tightly once my stomach calms, body curled away from Herod and ribs well beyond the point of screaming pain. Stars poke my vision, threatening me with a long, slow sleep, and I try to hold my chest in a way that would make the pain stop. There’s no relief. No help from magic. The snuffing out of that one flicker of hope makes me feel even more hollow, but I can’t think about that. I have to stay awake. I have to know what dangers lie ahead.

  Like magic more powerful and potent than we ever knew, a great, destructive force contained in one man. If it went into Angra’s ancestor … has it passed down, generation to generation, like the Royal Conduits themselves? Why hasn’t it spread throughout the world again?

  There are only a handful of magic sources now though, and the Decay grew when people used magic for evil. Maybe there isn’t enough for it to spread beyond the Spring monarch, so it stays in him, leeching power from him and him alone.

  I shudder. No, it’s just Angra. It’s just the man we’ve been fighting for years, an evil, sadistic monster who uses his Royal Conduit for evil. Just his Royal Conduit. Nothing more.

  Angra is never just anything, though.

  The wheeled cage clunks down, the steady swishing of the wheels through grass giving way to the clomp-clomp of wheels on stone. We’ve passed onto a bridge, one of the many that links the Rania Plains with Spring over the Feni River. The narrowness of this bridge tells me we’re no longer with the bulk of Spring’s army. We must have broken off to reach Abril, Spring’s capital, more quickly.

  As the cage clunks into the grass on the Spring side of the river, the empty expanse of the Rania Plains gives way to blossoming trees, the kind with white-and-pink buds that cast floating petals into the air. Spring’s forest is pretty, honestly. But a marred pretty, a mask.

  Herod jabs me in the back with his sword hilt again. “Sit up. We’re nearly there.”

  “Sitting is easier said than done right now,” I croak, but one more jab from his sword hilt and I wiggle into a semi erect position, black dots swirling through my vision.

  Abril sits in the northwestern tip of Spring, close to Winter. There are no outlying villages nearby, no signs of life outside its massive stone walls other than the occasional field of crops cutting through the forest of eternally blossoming trees. Laughably peaceful representations of a kingdom that has been anything but.

  The small army of men around my cage descends from a side path onto a wide main road that cuts through the trees. Abril’s walls rise before us, casting the surrounding land in shadow, looming rows of black behind the pink-and-white trees. After a few moments of shuffling, we pass through a gate and into the city itself. I cling to the details around us, forcing my mind to stay active instead of losing myself in the dread pulsing in the pit of my stomach.

  Angra’s banner, the black sun on a yellow background, dangles from four- and five-story buildings, the tall structures casting us in an eerie shadow. As we roll by, heads pop out of smudged windows, eyes peek through cracked doors, but I see no people in the streets and hear no chatter of city life. Like they’ve been choked so long under Angra’s suffocating use of his magic that they’ve forgotten how to be alive.

  We cross a bridge and the buildings get a little nicer, windows cleaner, walls painted and whole. People stand around now too, smirking over another Winterian prisoner, another show of their king’s dominance.

  Fear is a seed that, once planted, never stops growing.

  Sir’s voice whispers that phrase in my memory, keeping the fear at bay.

  A black iron gate sits at the end of one last road. Soldiers march on the wall above it and eye us from towers, a reminder that Spring is a kingdom crafted by war. When we pass through the gate, a grand green yard rolls around us, leading up to a palace of black obsidian. Even from as far back as we are I can see colored etchings in the rock, green ivy vines, butter-yellow and sunset-pink flowers—Spring in darkness. It’s both poetic and sad how well it embodies this land.

  The gate thunks shut behind us, and Herod nods to the men, who near the cage. I stifle a cry as they drag me out, my bones grating, shocking bursts of pain as I collapse, helpless, hanging off two men. Dried sweat and bits of vomit cling to my skin, crunching as I move, and a few cuts along my leg burn. But I’m just here, draped between Angra’s soldiers, wholly at their disposal. Helpless and useless and alone—

  The piece of lapis lazuli is still in my pocket. A piece of Winter. I straighten a little, wincing. I may be alone, the stone may not be magic, but I am not weak.

  We start to move forward and something clinks to my right, a shovel banging on stone. It makes Herod flinch enough that I jerk my head toward it.

  I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d kept looking forward, let my worries about Angra suck me into a numb thoughtlessness.

  Off to the right, in a garden, a group of Spring guards stand watch over a pile of gray bricks, a deepening hole, and … Winterians.

  Everything about me drops away, flimsy and weightless. Three Winterians, their white hair matted with sweat and dirt, their pale faces gaunt, stand waist-deep in the dirt. It’s a wonder their bony arms can even hold a shovel, let alone dig with one—they’re so frail, so thin, they could be mistaken for ghosts.

  Tension cuts off the air to my lungs. I want to cry out to them, run to them, fight off the guards, whisk them to safety. But I can’t do more than croak feebly in their direction.

  One of the Winterians stops digging. She lifts her head, face caked with mud, and when her gaze meets mine across the lawn, light dawns on her face. A ray in the shadows of Spring that makes me heavy with guilt—she can’t be any older than me.

  “Get back to work!” one of the guards yells, and readies a whip. It curls around the girl’s forearm and yanks her forward, but she keeps her eyes on me, her face alight with wonder.

  “No,” I whisper as the guard raises the whip again. “Stop!”

  Herod steps between the Winterians and me. The whip cracks, the girl cries out, and Herod leans in so all I can see is his face. “Keep moving,” he growls, and pushes the soldiers holding me. We plunge up a set of gleaming black steps as the girl cries out again and again, the whip cracking harder and faster.

  “Stop!” I scream as we enter the shadow of Angra’s palace. “Stop i
t!”

  I reach back for her, for all of them. As I do, a deadly will rises in me to help them. As hard and fast as the whip, as brilliant as the girl’s hope. But the soldiers pull me inside the palace, yanking me away from doing anything more than hurting.

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  20

  ONCE THE DOORS shut, all links to the surrounding city vanish, sealing the palace around us like a tomb.

  The entry hall is a cave of gleaming obsidian with sconces throwing yellow light onto the reflective surface, a never-ending echo bouncing off walls that toy with it just for entertainment’s sake. The only breaks in the light are portraits of Spring’s past rulers that hang at perfectly spaced intervals on the walls. A woman, her long blond hair pulled over one shoulder in a tangle of curls, beams at the painter. A little boy with pale green eyes stares into the distance, his blond curls exploding out of his head in disorderly rebellion. The same two people are in at least a dozen portraits, posing in front of Spring’s cherry-blossom trees or rivers or plain blue backdrops. The riots of color in these paintings don’t belong here; this place should be nothing but darkness. Who are these people?

  When I see the signature of the artist in the bottom corner of one painting, my body falls slack. Angra Manu. If Angra really painted these, then the outside of his palace makes more sense. He embraces art in a way that would make Ventralli proud.

  I turn my gaze downward, staring at the black floor instead of at the bombardment of life and color and happiness painted by the king who has brought nothing but death to Winter.

  The doors at the end of the hall groan as a soldier pulls them open. I’m not allowed even a moment to gather my wits before we enter the throne room, wide and dark and filled with the poetic collision of sunshine and shadow. A series of windows has been cut into the high ceiling, circles of sunlight that create a path to the dais at the other end of the room. On that dais, the largest beam pours directly onto a towering obsidian throne, the rock absorbing the light in a subtle yet daunting show of power.

  But it isn’t the throne that sucks away the most light—it’s the figure slouched on it. The figure who shields his eyes as if the sun pains him, gripping a staff as tall as I am.

  All those years of fearing him, and I’ve never seen Angra. He rarely, if ever, leaves his palace, never bothers with leading his army or getting his hands dirty. From this distance, I can see the blond curls cascading over his head, so very similar to the man who joined with the Decay in Hannah’s vision. They’re undeniably related, and it makes me wince. I still don’t want to believe that the vision was real.

  We get to the middle of the room and stop. I’m sure Angra can hear my heart humming in my throat, could taste the stench of my fear as soon as we set foot in his palace. It’s so quiet here—there’s no distant shuffling of courtiers, no gentle hum of voices in the next room. This fake calm is more frightening than if Angra were raging in anger. He’s the eye of a storm, everything around him waiting with growing anticipation for his madness to break.

  Herod steps forward. “My king,” he says, voice echoing through the empty hall.

  Angra stays silent. Herod nods at the guards and I grunt as they chuck me forward, my armor clanking on the floor. I can’t suppress my cry, the feeble sound bouncing off the walls.

  Herod laughs as I writhe on the obsidian. “I have brought you a token of Winter’s weakness.”

  “The boy?”

  Angra’s voice stabs at Herod’s mistake—I am not Mather, and no matter how much Herod might enjoy toying with me, he failed.

  A low growl resonates in Herod’s throat. “No. The thief who stole half of the locket.”

  Boots descend the dais and swish across the floor. I don’t move, hands around my torso, eyes closed, neck bent. Sir trained me for this. For Angra, for Spring.

  They make decisions; they mold your future. The trick is to find a way to still be you through it all.

  Theron’s words run through my head, his smile, his gentle surety. I cling to that image, to anything that will help me remember that I am Meira, and they cannot take that away from me.

  Angra stops beside me. I can feel him there, a warm presence just beside my huddled body. He bends down, his staff making a heavy clunk as he adjusts it on the floor.

  “She’s hurt,” he says. The booming echo is gone from his voice, reduced to a whisper that rolls over me.

  I open my eyes and a desperate, throaty wail bubbles in my throat.

  This man doesn’t just look like the king who bonded with the Decay in Hannah’s vision—this man is that king. The same translucent green eyes, the same pale skin, the same gleam on his face when he tips his head and adjusts his grip on his staff, black through and through, with a hollow ebony orb on its tip. This is the same king.

  How is that possible? Could Hannah’s visions have been more recent than I thought? No, I felt how long ago it was. But Angra doesn’t look any older than the man in his twenties he was in Hannah’s vision.

  I know Angra was the one who led the charge against Winter when it fell sixteen years ago, but this man couldn’t have been old enough to ransack our kingdom. Now that I think about it … I don’t know who was king before Angra. Sir’s lessons never touched on Spring’s history beyond our war with them. Is this mystery that cloaks him part of the Decay? He never leaves Spring. He never shows himself in public. It would be all-too easy to hide this power, this immortality, from the world.

  I pinch my mouth shut to hold in the wail, my need to scream fighting me like a wild horse pinned inside a gate. If this is all true … what else is he capable of?

  Angra stares at me, unconcerned. His pale green irises flicker and his yellow curls bounce when he moves—the same wild, untamed locks of the boy in the paintings. Was that him too? He painted portraits of himself—and a woman?

  He tips his head, his mouth lifting as he surveys me. He looks young, calm, filled with something that terrifies me more than Herod’s malice—an ancient determination and patience. And around his neck, dangling above a black tunic, hangs the front half of Hannah’s locket.

  I gasp. It’s here. So close. The silver heart etched with a snowflake, its shine muted and dull on Angra’s skin.

  “Would you like to be healed?” he whispers suddenly.

  I frown, tearing my eyes away from the locket. He wanted me to see it. He wanted me to know he has it just like he has me, dangling and useless. But I hear his question, and my ribs scream out Yes! while the rest of me quivers in the dark, waiting for this all to shatter around me.

  Angra leans closer. Madness dances behind his eyes now as he revels in me writhing at his feet. “You are in pain. Don’t you want me to heal you?”

  “Go heal the Winterian girl,” I manage. “The one your soldier whipped.”

  Angra smiles. He takes pleasure in me fighting back too.

  I don’t have a chance to add anything else. Angra’s fingers curl around his staff and I’m thrown into a world of searing red, everything collapsing behind a single shriek that echoes off the walls. It’s me. I’m screaming, arching on the ground in breathless pain. My chest caves in, every rib cracking and bending under an invisible force that crushes me, presses me into dust. I scream again and every bone pops back out, realigning and knitting back together. I can feel them healing, the bones itching and tingling, telling me exactly where they run through my torso.

  It stops and I roll to the side, mouth open, unable to say anything, do anything. On top of the pain, more certainty makes me hum with fear. If Angra was just a monarch like all the others, and his staff was nothing more than a Royal Conduit, he wouldn’t be able to affect me, someone not of his kingdom’s bloodline. But he can use his magic to break me, to heal me—so he must have something helping him. Something more powerful.

  Something like the Decay.

  Th
at thought is like the final blow of a fight, the one that makes me waver toward unconsciousness. Everything Hannah showed me—Angra’s true power—his agelessness—

  It’s real.

  “You still wish me to heal the girl?” Angra asks.

  I shake my head, a spiraling migraine making the world shift.

  Angra leans the staff down so I can peer into its black orb. “You are one of the few who escaped me,” he says. “You couldn’t have been more than an infant.”

  He twists his hand and the pressure returns, collapsing on me like a boot pressing on a bug. I draw in a few quick breaths and focus on the light filtering through the ceiling. Focus, Meira. Don’t—

  I’m able to bite back a scream as the first few ribs crack, but it falls out of my mouth as Angra snaps the rest. The scream turns into a pathetic whine as the pressure rises, ribs reshaping and knitting back together with agonizing slowness.

  “How, exactly, did a child manage to evade me?”

  My ribs heal again. Sweat trickles down my face, and words come in broken gasps. “Two … children … escaped … actually.”

  He twists his hand again. Quick this time, every bone snapping at once and knitting together in less than a few seconds. Stars flash over my vision, darkness and swirling light.

  Angra glares up at Herod. “Where is the boy?”

  I choke on Herod’s pause. “My men are pursuing him.”

  The hope in those words makes it impossible to breathe. As long as Mather lives, there’s still hope for Winter.

  Angra grabs my hair, forcing me to stare up at him. “Your resistance is crumbling. It’s only a matter of time before I kill Hannah’s son myself.”

  The hope in my chest flares against his threats. You’re wrong, Angra, because Mather is alive. There is still hope.

  But it snuffs out as quickly as it came, as thoughts collide in my mind—Sir is dead, and this war is worse than we thought.