I pushed through the spinning kitchens, vaulted across the cellars, and stumbled into the depositories, drunken while sober. Weapons… medical supplies… I collapsed into a bed of mink, hyperventilating.
How could a man have so much in one instant, and then so little in the next? My brother was missing, and with increasing likelihood, dead. My father had been sequestered to the infirmary since our return, and though he showed marked improvement, he was bedridden. He could not lead a kingdom, much less regain one.
And me… What was I, if not a prince?
Without the kingdom at my feet, without the princess at my side, what was I?
Just a man named Theon.
A man with nothing.
* * *
When Michelle found me, I was huddled between a row of shields and a large crystal mirror—this one not necessarily magical.
“Hey,” she said as she lowered onto her haunches beside me. “Are you… okay?” She cocked her head to the side and squinted her eyes at me. Where had she found mascara in this shelter? Or had she been desperate enough to dig soot from the hearth?
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Go away, Michelle.”
Again, Michelle acted strangely. She did not retaliate. Instead, she placed her palm on my thigh and stroked it.
“What do you want?” I snapped. “Do you think that now, now that I’m weak, alone, sick, and single, is the best time to strike?”
Michelle grimaced. “Maybe I deserved that. I’ve just never seen you so… so…”
“So what?” Not that I cared. A kind of catatonia had taken its grip on me—after the panic attack, anyway.
“So… pathetic.” She winced, finally meeting my eyes. I glared in response.
“You think that’s why she chose him?” I demanded, within inches of grabbing her and shaking the answers out of her head. “You think he’s more of a man than me?”
“Jeez, no,” she answered, shaking her dark curls. “Truth?”
“Always,” I reminded her.
“She’s a woman,” Michelle said. “She’s probably just making the best of a bad situation. You’d be surprised how many women ‘love’ their captors… in whatever way they have to… to get by.” Her eyes became melancholy, as if she spoke of herself. “And besides, Theon,” she said, nudging my shoulder with her own. “I can’t imagine anyone picking somebody over you.”
I threw a glance her way. “That’s kind of you to say,” I allowed. I still did not know how much I could trust her. She was like a domestic cat who had been raised roughly: at times sweet, and then in an instant clawing. Beautiful things could be so treacherous that way, like fire roses. “Thank you… I think.” My gut pulled me in two separate directions when it came to Michelle Ballinger.
Michelle’s eyes, softened by the torchlight, tipped to mine, and then down to my lips. In an instant, I knew what she was thinking, and in another instant, she was leaning toward me.
I leaned toward her, too, still torn.
Had Pythia been right? Did Michelle love me more deeply and truly, in spite of her flaws, than Nell ever would? And could I find my way to love her?
“Theon!” Mother’s voice intruded on our moment.
Michelle and I reared away from each other simultaneously.
“What?” I asked, feeling caught, as if it had been Nell calling my name—but then, did I owe her anything anymore?
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Mother went on, sweeping in front of Michelle and me. With her looming and us seated, I felt mired in a second childhood here with Michelle. Caught. “The Theon I have known my entire life has never been dependent upon the emotions of his females. Are you not a man of your own?”
“Mother—you don’t understand,” I told her, shaking my head. “You don’t understand what it’s like to think that you’re showing your future queen your kingdom… and then, when you cross the portal, you find that the entire world has been turned upside down. Even the winds themselves know no reason, and she’s robbed from you, to become the bride of the same man who would have killed your father, given time.” I pursed my lips and trained my eyes on the floor, determined not to let a single tear fall. “How did they do this to us, Mother?” I whispered, my vision blurring as the tears culminated and spilled nonetheless. “How did they rip the entire kingdom out from under our feet?”
I dared to look into her face for the answer, even though I was ashamed to have been crying. The gods knew it was not a common sight to behold, and so did she, as she seemed to go still and to harden as the gleam along my cheek caught the light.
“We would have taken it back immediately,” she whispered. She too swallowed, and I realized that the sight of my tears had weakened her own resolve to not cry. “But they have discovered the astrolabe, Theon. They have discovered the astrolabe… and they know how to use it.” She pursed her lips and broke eye contact. “They know how to plunge The Hearthlands into eternal winter, and it’s not only that.”
“My gods, Mother. What could be worse than that?”
“They have reassembled the very cosmos.”
“The cosmos?”
“The stars, Theon, and the gods. The gods have been set against us.”
Nell
We had only spent one day being unofficially engaged—with the unwilling support of Emperor Vulott, and the willing pens of Lethe’s team of scribes—and already things had shifted greatly in my favor. It was as if the “gods” themselves smiled on me, but I knew that wasn’t possible. I was more certain that Lethe had made it clear that this Earth girl, Penelope O’Hara, was the future empress of the ice kingdom, and it would do the staff well to support her in all that she did. And it showed.
I was greeted by a bright and cheery staff of three maids shortly after sunrise. They took me to an atrium I had never seen before. Its ceiling was an open structure within the castle, and the air was as frigid as it always was. The stones led down several shallow steps, into a steaming basin of crystalline waters.
“You may undress,” one of the ice servants—a dour-faced woman who only smiled when I looked directly at her, though the smile never even brushed against her eyes—informed me. “Enter the waters. It has been a long voyage from your land, we are told.”
As I soaked in the steamy bath, icicles formed in my hair, and when I leaned back to relax, they crunched against my neck. An unexpected smile curled at the corners of my lips. Everything had gone to a bitter, wintry hell… but I could still enjoy a hot soak.
The sky overhead was low and opaque. Snowflakes began to flutter down into the atrium, and the ice dragon servants either left my side or went to sit out of sight, offering me the illusion of privacy. I had to assume it was the latter.
My eyelashes fluttered closed, and I found myself thinking, with a pang, about Maine…
The clearing of a throat brought me back to my senses, and my eyelashes flew open. I started up in the bath. My arms instinctively went to shield my bare breasts.
Lethe stood there with a frozen look in his eyes, drinking me in without moving a muscle.
“Yes?” I prompted him.
Lethe shook his head, but didn’t avert his eyes. If anything, they trailed me more heavily after he had awoken from his stupor. “I thought that, if we are to be wed, you should become acquainted with the castle grounds. I’ve come to collect you for a tour.”
Collect me. I couldn’t fathom a more appropriate term. The three servants hovered at a distance, observing the exchange.
“All right,” I allowed. “Just let me get dressed first.”
At this, Lethe’s lip quirked. “Why? Won’t this all be mine soon enough?”
My eyes flattened and my mouth straightened. “That may be, sir, when I may be a wife,” I said, quoting from Romeo and Juliet.
He stared at me a moment longer, his mouth open as if with retort, hesitated, and then relented. He nodded, suddenly curt, and turned on his heel, striding from the atrium.
“That may be mus
t be, love.” His voice floated to me, quoting the next line of the play, and leaving me speechless, nothing but a frosty plume of breath hanging from my lips in response.
* * *
When Lethe was with me, the entourage of servants departed to allow us privacy. They dressed me in the same light, pure linens, as if I was on the verge of baptism, and receded into the wings. The two of us moved through the castle, and I couldn’t help but think as we strolled down the spacious corridors, some still lined with heirlooms of the Aena dynasty—some of those vandalized—that this should have been my moment with Theon. He should have been the one showing me around his castle…
In between the ballroom and the library, Lethe made mention of my solemnity. “You’re being awfully quiet.”
“I’m a quiet person.”
But Lethe smiled ruefully, his eyes on the carpet. “No,” he said, “you’re not. But it’s all right.” He shook his head to himself. “You were bound to need time to adjust… and I must recognize that. You are a woman. Not my possession. Not really, no matter how badly I may want it.”
For a brief moment, I was even impressed. He certainly was in a position to treat me as his object—but he was… satisfied to wait for me to come to him of my own free will.
For now. Certainly, as time passed, he would become impatient. After all… I was poised to become his wife. His queen.
And so, I would not have all the time in the world, even if he was being particularly human just now. Eventually, he would become frustrated with my hesitation about intimacy.
Lethe gripped my hand, sending an icy shock through my fingers, and I jolted, startled back into reality.
“I noticed that you had pulled out all the cosmology books from the shelf in your room,” Lethe volunteered. His eager blue eyes were blind to my discomfort here, as his simultaneous guest, fiancée, newfound confidant, and hostage. “You enjoy talk of the planets? Their movements in the heavens?”
I had been trying to learn if this world was in any way connected to Earth, even if it was only a member of the same galaxy, as if I might be able to somehow send a missive to my people, or find a hidden path between the planets and return by my own methods. But the names of these stars were so foreign, the effort had been a hopeless one, and had left me more downtrodden than when I began.
“Yes,” I half-lied, clearing my throat. Astronomy was certainly interesting. That much was true.
“Then I have a surprise for you. You’ll love it!” Mouth splitting into a grin, Lethe pulled me down the hallway and into one of the rooms ahead of us.
At first the room seemed empty, except for a small, circular disc on a narrow pedestal, which gleamed with a dull gold. I believed it to be a table, but as we approached, I saw that the “table” was a system of flat, interlocking circles, laid over a complex star map. The stars shimmered as though imbued with some fantastical power.
“What is this?” I whispered, stretching a hand to trace one of the golden discs. But Lethe’s hand shot out and snatched mine from the air.
“No! Don’t touch it!” he snapped. He hadn’t taken such a tone with me since—well—since the last time I’d rejected him. He hesitated, but then pushed forward, releasing my hand. “It’s… It’s called an astrolabe. This one is planispheric.”
“Oh, yeah,” I whispered, still staring at him in a kind of amazed way. “I’ve heard about those. We—on Earth—used them during the Renaissance… to chart, to navigate, and all that. But I don’t think they looked like this one. Ours didn’t… glow.”
“Yours were not true astrolabes.” A smile kinked at the corner of Lethe’s lip. “They are not devices solely for tracking, my dear human. They are devices for control.”
The way he said it was disquieting.
“Control?” I asked. “Control… of the stars?”
“The gods themselves, some say,” he whispered.
“And this belonged to… the Aena dynasty?” I wondered, even tempted to touch its locked discs, its twinkling reflection of the cosmos.
“It did… when we stormed the castle. We will never know if The Hearthlands were in perpetual summer and the astrolabe denoted it, or if the fire dragons assembled the astrolabe to condition the environment perfectly for their own needs. I suspect it was the latter.” He grimaced. “But we have given them a taste of their own medicine now.”
My eyebrows twisted. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I didn’t like the calculating tone to his voice.
“It means that the ice dragons have—finally—taken control into their own hands.” His fingers traced the spheres of the astrolabe with an almost lustful quality. As he did so, frost bloomed on the rings. His eyes tipped to me then, as if remembering that I was once, shall we say, a fire dragon sympathizer. “We’re not doing anything they haven’t already done before.”
“You don’t know that,” I whispered.
“We deserve to live comfortably.”
“It’s killing them.”
In a flash of movement, Lethe’s hands shot to my arms and gripped tightly, giving me a shake. “Why must they live at our expense?”
I glared at him, shrinking from his touch, and his eyes roved my face, finally seeing me through this egotistical haze in which he’d been blinded.
“You don’t understand what it’s like to want and want,” he hissed. “And to finally be able to take. And to have.”
His lips crashed down onto mine and I tried to reel from him, but he held me secured. His hands freely crept over my body, as if we were already wed, but when they snaked down to my buttocks and pinned our hips together, my torso had the leverage to squirm from his embrace. I staggered several feet from him and almost tripped over my dress.
Lethe stared at me, his eyes both cold and hot, his chest rising and falling raggedly.
“Come with me,” he commanded, striding past me as if nothing had just happened. “There is something I must give you.”
I cocked my head, confused by this sudden change, and glanced once more at the mystical astrolabe before leaving the room. I wondered if he was right; had the fire dragons used the astrolabe to make the island habitable for them, but miserable to the ice dragons, as the ice dragons were now doing? It was hard to say… but I doubted it.
I followed his swift steps as he moved through the corridors of the western tower, until we had again reached the wing of the royal family, and traveled to the room I had been confined to for the past… How long had it been? How many days? They all bled together now: the sleepless nights, the odd meals brought by servants, the clothes that weren’t mine, the rooms I didn’t know. At least the tour had served to orient me somewhat. I’d certainly made note of the various depositories in the western tower, such as the closet of furs and the small arsenal of weaponry.
And the mystical astrolabe…
Lethe led me directly to my chambers, and I wasn’t too surprised by this. I had displeased him. This was my punishment.
In the attached closet—through which I had rifled, and as yet only discovered more gowns, each furthering the insult and degradation of the last—from the top shelf, he pulled down a white wicker box and laid it across the mattress for me. He glanced at me and then away, and I realized the truth of the matter: he wasn’t punishing me. I had misread him. He was embarrassed. His trigger-happy emotions had misfired, and he felt weak. He looked weak.
“I was waiting for the right moment to give this to you,” he whispered, lifting the lid from the box, “but I realize now that every moment has been the right moment.”
Inside lay an ermine coat—naturally, as the ice people cared only for the trappings of the arctic, it would appear—clasped at the throat with a heart-shaped ruby brooch.
I swallowed. It was extravagant, yet elegant. In a word, it was queenly.
Lethe lifted the mantle from the box and stepped behind me, circling the luxurious white fur, speckled black, around my shoulders.
My eyes fell upon a distant mirror. The coat see
med to swallow me. I looked very small, however regal, inside of it. My hair spilled in stark contrast over it, and my pallor nearly matched it. I looked like an ice queen.
“I think it suits you,” Lethe whispered into my ear, and I shuddered. He squeezed my shoulders and let his hands trail down my arms, intimate, cupping me to his body for a moment, and then he proceeded out the door, leaving me to my own thoughts.
The key turned in the lock as he exited.
Theon
I could see her in the distance, some illusion created by exhaustion, by despair and starvation. Her dark hair wavered in the air, streaming in an unseen wind. It was Penelope O’Hara as I had never seen her before. She was elemental, god-like. Her eyes were intense, and her mouth was split open in a call. Who was she calling? I kept trying to trek toward her, hindered by some unseen force. I could hardly advance a foot…
But she strode toward me with all the strength and vitality I suddenly lacked. She threw back her head and tore down the front of her blouse, the supple hilltops of her breasts gleaming in the light.
“Theon,” she called to me, ever closer, and I struggled to move, fighting the strange paralysis. “Theon,” she called again, and when she reached me, she poured over me with warmth and eagerness, and my heart broke with gratitude. Finally! Just one little piece of her was all I had wanted… and somehow, the gods had broken through the stranglehold of the astrolabe, allowing me to hold her. All of her…
Her mouth joined the cascade of stroking and coaxing, pulling my tongue forth as her fingers buried themselves into my hair. Her thighs clutched around my waist and my hands went to her hips, guiding her rhythm as we danced together. My body was slow, and the world seemed strange, hazy… but nothing had ever been more real than Penelope was in that moment. Her hair still tumbled and whipped in a magical current, made curly and thick. And her eyes were colorful and cat-like, so feminine they almost reminded me of… of…