I shuddered.
Lethe Eraeus was once hailed by the ice dragons as the destined leader of their people. However, since the brief victory over the fire dragons of The Hearthlands, their numbers had continued to dwindle. A strict regimen of malnourishment, abuse, and training had all but killed the most recent generation to be born into the ruins of ice dragon society. It is with seeming pride that the disgraced Eraeus lineage boasts Lethe as the foremost recipient of this brutal treatment, as the prince of their plot.
My eyes tipped to Lethe. I’d thought my childhood had been difficult—watching my parents’ marriage fall apart, listening to their accusations and counters bleeding through my bedroom wall—but I had never been abused. I couldn’t even imagine hunger. Even on the occasions that they forgot to prepare my lunch, there was plenty of food in the kitchen. I’d quickly learned to prepare my own sandwiches and drinks.
Lethe’s eyes shifted toward me and he froze. “What?” he asked.
My own gaze darted back to the pages of the book to evade his.
“Nothing,” I lied.
I glanced back at Lethe to see that now he, too, was scrutinizing the book in my lap.
“I told you not to read that while I was here!” Lethe sprang up and grabbed the book off of my lap and clung to it.
“Lethe.” I reached a hand out and he flinched from it, glaring at it. I wondered if anyone had ever touched him with gentleness. “Lethe—you don’t need to be ashamed. I’m not going to judge you. I’m your friend.”
“Ice dragons don’t have friends.” Lethe still clutched the tome to his chest. “We have accomplices, and nemeses, and patsies, and henchmen, and on occasion—rare occasion—lovers. But never friends.”
“Well, I’m not an ice dragon. I’m a human being. And we do have friends.”
Lethe just continued to stare, his frosty blue eyes flashing at me.
I took a tentative step forward and touched the book at his chest. His nose curled, a warning.
“It doesn’t matter to me what’s written here,” I promised him, trying to make eye contact. That icy armor that kept the world at bay was still between us. “When I was a small child, my parents forgot about me all the time. I made my own breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. My mother became embroiled in the pursuit of catching my father in an affair—and after three years of fighting, and silence, and rifling through his pockets when he got home at night… she finally got what she wanted, and they separated, with me caught in the middle. Limbo.”
Lethe nodded. “I know that pain. The ice dragons are a notoriously unfaithful people. My mother…” His eyes closed momentarily. “She’s gone now. She was murdered during a brutal season on the Obran peninsula—during which we all suffered the ill effects of cabin fever. But… during her life… she sought constantly to root out the women with whom my father had his dalliances. And she was quite successful. She ordered the executions of at least a dozen different women, and I was only a boy at the time.”
I grimaced.
“So you see?” I reassured him, letting my fingers creep to the outer edges of the book and grasping it, gently prying it away from his grip. “There’s nothing shameful or weak in having a difficult childhood. It only means that you’re stronger now because of it.” Lethe’s grip on the book loosened, and he allowed it to be returned to my grasp.
“Do you really think that?” Lethe asked. His eyes seemed to increasingly open into deeper and darker shades of blue, as if something inside of him was melting.
“That children shouldn’t be ashamed of what their parents have done to them? Absolutely.”
“No.” Lethe took a step closer to me, and I turned my face upward to gaze at his. “That I am strong.”
I frowned, not truly understanding the importance of validating him in that respect. But then, the ice dragons had a very different culture from the human society in which I had been raised. “Well, of course. Of course you’re strong—”
One of his icy hands wove into my hair and roughly pulled me close. I dropped the book, and it thunked to the floor between us. Lethe advanced forward, descending on me, stomping over the book and closer to the fireplace. The stones of the hearth pressed into my shoulder blades—I’d run out of places to go—and Lethe’s cold lips pressed hungrily onto mine. My mouth opened in a gasp, but that only sufficed to allow entrance to his wintry tongue.
Unlike Theon, Lethe moved forward at a breakneck speed. One of his hands tangled deeper into my hair, and the other bunched at the lacework of my dress, pulling it open for his hands to explore my body.
I moved my head in the slightest, as he was locking me into place with his clutching fingers, and dragged in a shuddering breath.
“Lethe,” I began, uncertain of how to gently reject an emotionally fragile kidnapper who seemed to have developed Lima syndrome: the exact opposite of Stockholm syndrome.
I planted my hand on his chest to give myself more space still, but then I felt the hard shard of crystal—the pendant—against his sternum. Of course!
Lethe eagerly and totally misinterpreted my touch, hurrying to remove his tunic from his chest. I might have pleaded with him to stop and explained myself, but Lethe removing his shirt while distracted by our kisses was the exact thing that I needed in order to claim the lost shard of the magical mirror.
So I slid my fingers into his hair and allowed my tongue to enter the fray between us.
Lethe stripped the tunic from his shoulders and let it puddle on the floor. His now bared arms came up to lock around me, and he murmured satisfaction, burying his hands in my singed dress and hoisting me into the air, pinning me between the fireplace wall and his frigid yet sweating body.
He moved much faster than Theon ever had; I could only assume he was significantly more experienced, or more desperate, in the bedroom. His mouth migrated from mine, trailing deep, wet kisses along the curvature of my throat, where he fastened with a pleasant suction. For a fleeting second, I forgot what I was doing.
Shoot! The pendant necklace had become tangled around my fingers. My eyes bulged open again and I moved to unclasp the delicate silver latch at the nape of his neck. He was hard-pressed to notice how my eyes were open and my fingers were committing espionage. In fact, his hands were dangerously close to breaching the second base.
But I was so close to getting the necklace, and he was hardly paying any mind to the world around us. Lethe was wound around me like an attention-starved vampire.
Just as the pendant’s chain unsnapped and disappeared into the bundled gathers of my skirt, Lethe’s fingers tore through the loosened laces of my dress and I yelped with surprise.
“Um, Lethe—!”
At this, he yanked his face from where it was buried in my throat; two bright spots of blush stood out on his cheeks, and the roots of his hair shimmered with beads of sweat. “What?” I felt suddenly cold. For me, this had been staged—but what about for him? “What’s the matter?”
“I just feel as if we’re moving awfully fast. On Earth, we usually—well—” It was a total lie that people on Earth waited. But he wouldn’t know that. “On Earth, we have to wait—until marriage,” I lied, rather smug with the deception. After all, he had no way of knowing whether or not I subscribed to the increasingly archaic practice of chastity.
Lethe lowered me back to the ground, petticoats still bunched between us at the waist. His chest was surprisingly toned for a man who, at first glance, was so much narrower than Theon. His musculature was deceptive. “I see.” His eyes, still so deep and dark, like the waters of a warm lake, were beginning to form their ice crystals again. All he needed was an instant of doubt, a breath of space between himself and his desires, and he would wall up. “But my father would never allow for the marriage of an ice dragon to a human female—particularly the marriage of the ice prince himself.”
I made a show of disappointment for him, and clutched my petticoats close as I stepped away. The pendant was caught somewhere in their gathers, an
d it would not do to let the pendant clatter to the ground right in front of Lethe.
“Then, Lethe, since there can be no future together, I guess we should stop.”
Lethe cleared his throat and nodded, scooping the tunic back into his hands and shrugging it on over his head. For a moment, with my petticoats clutched against my thighs and my hair all crazy and his own complexion stark with sweat, we stared at each other like the survivors of some catastrophe.
“I will have a word with my father,” Lethe informed me, his tone suddenly cold, and then he strode from the chambers. The door clapped shut behind him, and this time, I didn’t hear the turn of any key in any lock.
He had left me alone—alone, to shake out the layers of my dress and search the floor for the shard of Theon’s fallen crystal.
Nell
It was only a matter of minutes before the glimmer on the floor of the hearth made itself known to me, and I scooped up the flat shard of crystal to find that Theon was already there, gazing back at me. The crystal had been activated already—but when?
Oh God, had he witnessed me kissing Lethe?
Peering into the crystal, wishing my hair wasn’t so mussed and my cheeks not as full of blush as they were at the moment, I deduced that Theon was in some kind of dim shop, its wall lined with small drums and funnily-shaped guitars. Behind him stood Michelle, which I tried to ignore—even though she herself looked rather mussed at the moment. Distant firelight fell across their faces.
Well, he couldn’t hear me. I’d realized that by now. So my only option was crude sign language… crude, and quick. I could only assume—and hope—that Lethe had gone to speak with his father on the possibility of wedding an Earth woman; I didn’t want to be too full of myself, but the context certainly indicated as much. I could also only assume—and hope—that such a conversation would be a long one.
But then again, maybe Lethe’s father wouldn’t even be available to see him. Maybe Lethe was already stalking back down the hallway now.
First, I tried to communicate the simple phrase I love you, by pointing to my eye, then my heart, and then Theon, twinkling back at me in the crystal shard. We’d barely said it yet, but it seemed appropriate to remind him of my affection.
Then I motioned, I’m in the castle. I pointed to my eye again, then slid one hand into the other, and then pantomimed a steeple with my fingers.
Next, I leveled one palm and notched upward three times, hoping to relay to him, On the third floor. I wasn’t even positive that it was true, but it was what I had thought I’d noticed when Lethe had been leading me, blindfolded, back into this room.
I shrugged pointedly, to show him that this was a question, and then jabbed a finger toward Michelle. Why is she with you?
Michelle must have recognized the intent of the question even if Theon didn’t, because while he was frowning thoughtfully, she sprang forward, gesturing.
Behind me the door flew open, and my fingers flexed with shock, sending the gleaming shard tumbling to the ground again. I leapt to my feet and whirled, hoping that Lethe had failed to notice the item over which I’d been hunched.
He froze where he stood, the door still hanging open behind him, and stared at me with eyes of a different blue than I had ever seen. They were not hard and cold, as they had first been. They were not warm and deep, as they had later been. They were… fragile.
He stared at me like he couldn’t believe me.
“It was you,” he whispered, shaking his head. “You took the pendant.”
My gaze drifted down to his tunic, opened where the pendant had once hung. He’d noticed that it was gone.
“Lethe,” I said, trying to think quickly, “it was—it was an accident—I—”
Lethe stormed forward and gripped my shoulders, giving me a shake. My head snapped back and forth. “There are no accidents,” he seethed, thrusting me to the side. My heel caught in the edge of my petticoats and sent me tumbling to my side.
I propped myself onto my elbow and Lethe leaned down and scooped the pendant from the floor, examining its soft light.
No. He knew… and the pendant was still active. He could see Theon. He might even be able to deduce where in this city Theon was.
The shard of crystal went dark, and I feared for Theon—but Lethe only closed his fist over the pendant and glared down at me.
“I will send the guards into the streets,” he promised. “They can smell fire dragon stink from the skies.”
Nell
Lethe swept from the room, locking it behind him. This time, I didn’t bother to fling myself against the wood; I didn’t bother to scream, cry, or beg. I knew that it would do nothing to help me. All I could do now… was wait.
I went to the window and watched as a team of guards were dispatched—in dragon form—from the castle, into the skies and the streets, in their hunt for Theon and, inexplicably, Michelle. The moonlight throwing itself down onto the crisp white snow illuminated the entire city. It would have been beautiful, if things weren’t so hopeless. As it was, the beauty of the city only registered as bleak and solitary.
I wished suddenly for my mother. For Dad. Anyone…
The sound of a key turning in the lock wrenched me from the window. Lethe stood in the doorway, disheveled, vengeful, and cold. Everything about him emanated the winter world outside this window.
“I have sent the guard,” he informed me.
“Lethe,” I pleaded, treading forward, into the room. “Please—”
“Please, she says,” Lethe snarled.
“Please don’t punish Theon for my mistake! I’m sorry!”
“Of course you’re sorry. Everyone is sorry.”
“You don’t understand. I just—I was desperate, I—You kidnapped me, Lethe! I don’t live here!” I knew that this was a weak defense. What I’d done was wrong.
“You are more akin to the ice people than you know,” Lethe informed me, his eyes a dark winter’s storm. He strode forward, but halted before he reached me, looming in the doorway. “We, too, are ruthless. We, too, are utilitarian and concerned solely with logic.” I could see the eddies of snow reflected in his eyes. “We care not for the fragility of a heart.”
Dammit, I felt guilty now more than ever.
“Lethe, I’m sorry. I didn’t know—I didn’t think—” I didn’t know what to say.
“Oh, are you sorry, my lady? Do you feel that, perhaps, I was wounded by your minor and pointless betrayal? The betrayal which, in truth, tipped Theon’s hand?” Lethe stepped closer, now peering down at me. “You need not apologize, my would-be queen… for I am as innately composed of ice as you are,” he hissed. His hand plunged into the hair at the nape of my neck, clutching it in his fist. I winced, my neck stretched for him.
But all he did was look at me closely, absorbing every curve of my face, suddenly breathless and hesitant, suspended amid the violence.
I thought he was about to say something, but we only hung there in silence together, and it was someone else’s throat clearing which startled us from each other’s eyes.
“Prince Lethe,” a masked guard announced from within the still-open doorway. “We have found smoke issuing from a merchant chimney in the town square. We await your decree; our forces surround the domicile.”
My throat constricted with terror for Theon.
“Break down its door,” Lethe commanded coldly. “And remove this—prisoner of war—to the dungeon, where she belongs: amongst her compatriots.”
With that, he released my hair and I slumped, oddly surprised and even betrayed by this turn of events… though I supposed I should not have felt either.
Lethe strode from the room without turning back.
The guard advanced with sword drawn and seized me roughly, dragging me from the room and out into the hall.
Theon
With Michelle straddling me, writhing and purring with all the confidence of a housecat, I had gone still in a kind of dumb shock. In truth, fire dragon females—th
ough I had met none my own age—did not behave with the same degree of looseness as did human women. Or should I say girls?
Regardless of her perfect features—the arched cheekbones, the pouty lips, the cat-like eyes—I felt nothing. As Michelle leaned against me, I was still holding the damn lute, dangling at my side.
I didn’t know why I didn’t expect the kiss. Part of me was so removed from this moment, it was almost akin to dissociation. I experienced her kiss—the rush of moist heat as her mouth descended onto mine, the mewl which emanated from within her throat—almost second-hand. I disentangled myself from her grip with a pained sympathy.
“Michelle,” I said.
She must have recognized the tone. A man who is going to sweep you into his arms and tenderly make love to you in some abandoned shop will not look at you with such compassion as he retreats from your heavy-handed play at his heart—or some other such part.
“I—”
I hadn’t even begun the delicate task of rejecting such an egotistical woman when the crystal mirror, propped alongside my leather satchel along the wall, throbbed with light, and I shot to my feet, dumping Michelle onto her hindquarters.
“Hey!” she whined.
I’d already forgotten her completely, covering the distance between myself and the mirror in only four strides. The mirror was alight—which meant that someone had activated a shard of its crystal with their blood, breath, tears, or sweat.
I saw Penelope in the fogged depths of the mirror… but she did not appear to be alone. Her blouse had been pulled slightly open, and her back was pressed against a stone wall. My heart leapt into my mouth; was she being tortured? Molested? If her virtue had been robbed by one of those icy animals, so help me, I would see that the entire universe paid a debt to the both of us. I would tear the stars from the sky. I would forge battle with the powers that be themselves—
But one more moment, a closer glance, and I saw that everything was not as it seemed. Penelope had no expression of pain or horror or despair on her face; if anything, in the split second before the crystal shard was smothered between their two bodies, the expression on her face was one of sheer rapture.