Oh, gods.
It was Michelle.
In the half-light of the men’s sleeping quarters, I could see it now. It was she who had the tousled curls. It was she who wore the thick makeup which seemed like elemental flares of fire and water, earth and sky. It was she who had torn open the front of her blouse, and her breasts, not Nell’s, which bore such robust cleavage.
Perhaps at another time, I would have been angered. But so much had already been taken from me—to discover that Nell had been a mirage and Michelle had been attempting to seduce me while I slept was no surprise anymore. Where anger might have once blazed, there was now only a grim disappointment. An onward-trudging soldier.
“Michelle. Get out of my bed.”
“Theon,” Michelle protested, her voice a kittenish mewl. “Why do you keep fighting this when you want it so badly?”
“I do,” I murmured, pushing her off of my lap. “But not from you.”
Michelle’s expression soured. Her lips became more pouty and her eyes narrowed.
“From Nell?” she hissed.
“From Nell.” It hurt to even say the words, but gods damn it, they were still true.
Michelle sneered and vaulted off my lap. She gestured toward me. Her lingerie reminded me of the ice brothels at the Obran peninsula.
“Nell abandoned you, Theon,” she growled. “Nell abandoned you for the man inhabiting your father’s castle; don’t you see what is going on? That pure, innocent heroine act of hers dragged you out to sea, but deep down, her whole life Penelope O’Hara has been an opportunist.” I only let Michelle keep going on and on because I was too tired to fight her, or anyone else, anymore. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was true. I didn’t know anything. “She found what she was looking for in that ice prince. She found the luxury, and the power, and the status. And meanwhile? Meanwhile, Theon? Your fallen empire stands without a princess. Without an heir. With nothing to rally your people.”
Michelle stormed out of the sleeping quarters, and as dawn breached the sky—I could only assume, since I could not return to sleep—I told myself again and again how wrong she was. I knew Nell… didn’t I?
But if I did, then how could I have seen her kissing Lethe Eraeus so passionately in the magical mirror?
And if I did, how could she now be declared his ascendant queen?
The woman who would bear the heir to the throne…
The ice throne.
Nell
In the morning, a servant came and announced the dawn. This servant had a new face; I couldn’t keep them all straight anymore. Another servant came in to offer me fresh garments for the day: another dress of white, naturally. Another servant arrived, perhaps an hour later, to offer me breakfast: a plate of steaming oats with syrup and chunks of dried fruit. When she exited, I couldn’t help but notice that there was no sound of a key turning in a lock. But the servants must have held keys in order to enter the room in the first place—which meant that either they were negligent, or they had been informed that I was free to move about the castle.
Interesting. Perhaps Lethe’s outburst yesterday, and his subsequent guilt, had been useful to me after all.
Assuming that I would no longer be detained or questioned if I was caught wandering, I vacated the premises and stepped into that now-familiar hallway. For God’s sake, how long had I been here? I couldn’t be sure. But the nightmarish landscape and howling winds no longer struck me as otherworldly. The spires and cathedral ceiling and romantic, ancient trappings no longer seemed quite so foreign.
Was it natural to begin to associate one’s prison with one’s home?
I wandered along the hallway, deeper into the royal wing, because I had already toured the main foyer and off-shooting towers yesterday. However, I had never been allowed deeper into the royal wing, where I had to presume other members of the “royal” family resided.
I wondered where Lethe was.
Not because I wanted to see him… but because if he found me, he would latch onto me and find some way to contain me. Even though he was beginning to trust me, I felt more akin to a dog on a leash than a free woman. My independent movement certainly made him nervous, but could you really imprison your queen in a tower and never allow her to leave her room?
I worried about what the answer to that question might be, but I didn’t have to worry about it for long—
“She won’t be happy about that.”
—because I recognized that voice.
Stooping down to my knees at the large keyhole, I glimpsed inside the next room. Lethe stood with a large yet angular man who I had never seen before. He held himself with such severity and brutality, I was immediately positive that the man was the tyrant I had come to expect of Lethe’s parentage: his father.
“I don’t give a damn what makes your weak bride happy!” he roared, and backhanded a crystal decanter of blackish-red liquid—blood?—into a wall. “Where has my son gone? My flesh and blood? The torch in this race? The new king of the land we have struggled to reclaim for almost two generations? Gods damn it, Lethe! Don’t you go weak on me now!”
“I’m not weak!” Lethe cried, though his expression was woebegone. He seemed on the verge of tears. “I’ve given you everything you ever asked of me!”
“Like hell,” Lethe’s father growled. “What happened to my drink?”
“You smashed it. You smashed it into the wall.”
“Don’t talk back to me, you worthless street trash,” his father went on, seeming drunken already. For heaven’s sake, it wasn’t even noon yet.
Lethe’s father stormed to the corner of the room, where his drink had created a puddle, and picked up the decanter. Only an inch or two of blackish-red syrup remained in the bottom, and the man uncapped the decanter and downed it readily.
“I have given you everything you asked of me,” Lethe reiterated. “You wanted me to fight with you… to bring about this kingdom… and I did that. And then you wanted me to rule for you, and take the crown, and be the face of the revolution… and I will do that, too, because I’m ready—because you wanted me to have a queen, and an heir, and a coronation… and I’m ready. I can do all those things for you, Father. I have a bride. I know she’s not what you would call a perfect bride—but she is strong enough to bear dragon seed. We know that, because she was Theon’s chosen mate, and he’s one of the strongest—”
Lethe’s father whirled and raised his hand, and Lethe flinched away, clamping his mouth shut.
His father lowered his hand again.
“You wanted all those things.” Lethe’s eyes flashed to his father uneasily. “And I will give them to you. You will have your prince become a king. The Ice Emperor. And you will have his empress, Penelope. And she will have my son. We will begin our monarchy—”
At this, his father’s hand flashed out and gripped Lethe’s tunic, hauling him closer and pulling him slightly off of the ground. Lethe’s eyes bulged in a panic.
“What did you say?”
“C-continue the monarchy,” Lethe corrected himself. Never before had I worried for Lethe so much. I peered through that keyhole, sucked on my lower lip, and worried that I might have to see him cry, or bleed, or even urinate in sheer terror before this was all said and done. His father was a looming mammoth with the temper of an even more dangerous animal: man. “I meant that we would continue the monarchy.”
His father smiled softly, though the smile was not a real one. He released Lethe and patted him on the shoulder. “You have given me everything I’ve ever wanted. Everything—except that the fire dragons remain a presence on this island, and even within the city walls themselves. It has been little more than a month, my boy, since our dynasty has reclaimed its rightful heritage, and I am concerned by the subversive element a fire dragon population may introduce. Wouldn’t it be better, son—don’t you think it would be better—if we exterminated the lot of them?”
“Exterminated?” Lethe’s voice was hushed with horror. Even though he hi
mself wore cultural blinders when it came to the history between the fire and ice dragons, he had never murdered a single person, as he’d told me earlier. “I thought we were going to relegate them to the peninsula. I thought you said that would only be fair.”
“It would have only been fair long ago, perhaps, when dear father Bram overtook the castle. But we have seen how strong, and how vicious, they can be. Our kingdom is still tentative. You wouldn’t like to have your empress, Penelope, heavy with child when the throne is overturned in their favor yet again, would you? After all, how long does it take the fire dragons to reassemble? To plot? Who knows where they are now. Wherever they are, you can be certain they have not given up. You can be certain they are plotting even now for a future in which they have retaken the castle—and your queen.”
At this, Lethe swallowed, and so did I. Heavy with child?
“We may be able to enslave or imprison some of them—perhaps the children, because they, at least, can still be taught the ways of ice. But the others—the rest of them, the men, and particularly the fighters—must be neutralized. Permanently.”
I fell away from the doorknob, my legs folding in horror and shock. Lethe had said that his father wanted the genocide, but that taking an empress and relieving his father of the throne would delay this fever-dream, which was wrong. Nothing would derail his father’s certainty that the fire dragons needed to be slaughtered, and their remainder brainwashed and used for… labor?
“What was that?” his father demanded.
Fumbling to my feet, I skipped away and had only just ducked around one corner when their door opened behind me.
“I don’t see anyone.” Lethe’s voice filtered from the hall.
There was a pause, and then his father replied, “You’re a fool, boy. You’ve always been a fool.”
Nell
I returned to my chambers, unable to think of anything but the impending doom of Theon, and not just Theon, but all his people. They would enslave even the children. So I paced in front of the fireplace, which servants periodically came to stoke and refill with fresh kindling. Night had fallen by the time my mind came unstuck from this terrified loop.
I had to do something.
My whole life I’d been surrounded by disagreeable situations and felt powerless to stop them. I’d just been a college freshman who lived at home with her mother. But now… I was on the verge of being a goddamn empress. I was in the palace. I was relatively trusted. No one was watching me, and I was alone. I could do something… I could do… something.
As I broke from the protective halo of warmth created by the hearth, I swept the ermine mantle around my shoulders and clasped the heart-shaped ruby. I marched out into the hallway, invigorated by the realization that I had finally become a powerful agent of change.
No one was in the royal wing.
I strode toward the western tower, avoiding any eye contact with the occasional servant and keeping my head high and my step confident, as if I knew exactly where I was going. And I did.
The astrolabe.
The key to the ice dragon domination of The Hearthlands.
I didn’t want to hurt Lethe or anyone in his family—even his atrocious father—or any other ice dragon people around me, no matter how sour their faces. But it was the only way I could imagine tipping the scales in the fire dragons’ favor.
The foyer was dark and hushed. I doubted that everyone had slipped off to bed so much as slipped off to maintain their own individual dramas. Little did they know how much intrigue I was brewing…
I thought of Lethe with a pang as I traveled into the western tower. He would be heartbroken. Betrayed. I had been, after all, the one and only splash of sunshine in an otherwise cold and lonely life, or so it seemed. No one had even smiled at me since I’d been here, except for him. I wondered how he had managed it. Why did he have a sensitive underbelly, when all the other people of ice heritage seemed so callous and detached? Why did he want love, and acceptance, and appreciation, when he had been trained to lust for power, and control, and dominance?
When I reached the room with the astrolabe, I glanced to and fro through the corridor before ducking through. And then I was alone with it.
Its dull golden shine filled the entire room, and I stepped toward it with the kind of awe I was certain was quite natural.
Now that no one was there to snatch my hand away, I dared skate a fingertip over its interlocking rings, signifying the spheres of land and space in this world. The stars had names I did not recognize, as did the planets. Where the hell was I?
Swallowing, I closed my eyes and gripped its rim.
I wondered if dislodging the mystical astrolabe would send this entire world plummeting through space like a ball without its tether.
But, as I took it from the top of the pedestal and held my breath, nothing at all happened.
I peered down at the disc, strangely light in my arms, although it ran the length from my wrist to my elbow.
I held their entire sky in my arms.
And what had Lethe said?
And the gods?
I blanketed the astrolabe with my ermine coat, and the room darkened. I trod from the room as hushed as a whisper, scanning the shadows.
As I passed the depository of furs and boots, I paused and thought better of my thin satin slippers. I would need something much heavier to combat the frigid weather.
A moment later, I spilled back out into the hall with heavy snow boots strapped around my legs and clambered down the corridor, much louder now. I wondered if I should bring some food, but the stress and the adrenaline combined kept my appetite at bay. And I imagined that once I was out in that wasteland, the last thing on my mind would be eating. The only thing on my mind would be escape. Escape with the astrolabe. I would need to find a fire dragon to help me reset its structures to their original placement.
And if I couldn’t find Theon, I would leave a message for him, and I would go home. I would get the friendly fire dragon I kept imagining myself encountering to give me a lift to the nearest Earth portal, and I’d thank him or her, and they would have me spat out somewhere in the Bahamas, hopefully.
If I didn’t freeze to death before finding this imaginary savior.
Maybe Theon would still have the means to reach me with those mysterious letters. Even if I was back in DC. Augh.
Back in DC. Back at The Shenandoah Institute. Back being Penelope O’Hara, college freshman, single virgin. And Theon would still be here… somewhere… with Michelle.
My expression twisted further as I thought on this, reaching the foyer with an echo from the boots that I could not control.
I should have known that this would happen, really. Michelle always won. Even if it seemed like she had lost—she would win. She would make sure of it. And even Theon… who had seemed so strong, so pure, so noble… even Theon had fallen. Of course.
The main gates were always guarded, but there were more inlets and outlets running between the castle and the kingdom. It wasn’t hard to find one which was unmanned. It was, naturally, locked from the inside… but I was already inside. This door was meant to keep outsiders out, but not to keep insiders in.
I wrenched the bolt to one side and pulled the door open. A gust of snow filled the carpet at my feet, and I swallowed, hesitating.
But I had no choice.
I couldn’t stay here.
I couldn’t wear some ice crown with a man who I did not love, no matter how much he thought he loved me; he was my abductor. He was holding me hostage. I could never forget that. And I couldn’t allow him to pump me full of ice dragon babies, which was clearly the next bullet on their list, as if I was some breeding mare and not a human being. And I couldn’t let an entire genocide take place beneath my eyes and do nothing to stop it, particularly knowing they would concentrate on finding Theon first and foremost. They would torture him. They would execute him publicly. It would be a message to both the people of ice and those of fire.
> And I would be forced to watch, wearing some crown made of ice and this damned ermine mantle.
I wished I could throw it off my shoulders, but it was too late for second thoughts now. I’d already come this far, and I’d been lucky to not be intercepted. In fact—no night had ever passed wherein Lethe had not come to see me. He would go to my room at some point… and it wouldn’t be long. He would come out looking for me.
Beyond the door, the icy, black-sky world of The Hearthlands sprawled, howling with wind. Speckled in the distance were a few dim silhouettes, shaped like squares. Homes. I wondered if they had been abandoned, or if they were filled with ice people. Might a helpful fire dragon be hiding somewhere in this city? Sparse, monochromatic, and bleak, the landscape was intimidating. I sucked in a breath and forged out into the tundra, hugging the astrolabe to my torso.
Nell
Have you ever been so cold it began to burn?
As I pushed through the snow, my fingers and toes were the first to go numb, and then they began to burn. With each passing second, my steps became slower.
My spirits had been unreasonably high when I’d been inside the city walls. I had figured that I would find someone, or even find a gate, on my own, and it would be fine. Someone would take care of me. But, alas, no one called my name. No doors opened. No windows unshuttered. The world seemed bare and empty save the light created by the moon on the snow. The snowflakes tumbling down were the only elements to assure me that I had not wandered into a landscape painting.
It only got worse outside of the city walls. From that point forth, there were rolling hills of white and nothing else, save the snowfall standing out in relief against the pure black sky.
That was when my digits began to burn. My face began to burn. Even the tip of my nose began to burn. My lips. My eyelids. And I couldn’t be sure if it was the exhaustion, or if the snow was really falling in thicker and thicker chunks.