Page 49 of A Frozen Pyre (Villains #2)

Twenty-Nine

Dwyn tasted the copper tang of blood before she realized she’d been gnawing on her lip since Ophir had left. She went to the washbasin and spat out the ruddy evidence of her worry, washing her mouth with a cup of water. She began to pace the room, filled with unfamiliar anxiety.

Sedit made a low, grumbling noise, as if asking her to give it a rest and stop bothering him.

She shot the hound a glare, and he buried his snout beneath reptilian paws, resuming his nap.

Uncertainty of this magnitude hadn’t found her in decades.

She flexed and released her fingers time and time again as she worked to calm herself. Ophir believed that Tyr had left. Ophir was back in Gwydir. Ophir was going to marry Ceneth. Everything was back on track. There was nothing to fret about. And yet…

Her yelp of pain cut through the room as a white-hot starburst of injury filled her eyes.

She’d rammed her shin into the cedar chest at the end of the bed.

Dwyn cried out in fury at the stupid piece of furniture, kicking it at exactly the wrong angle.

The edge of the chest caught her toe and sent her a nauseating second wave of pain.

She crumpled onto the floor as anger spilled out, cursing as steam rolled off her.

She wrapped her fingers around her injured toes and cursed again while waiting for the shooting pain to subside.

She moved her hand away, expecting to see a broken toe and exposed bone, but everything was perfectly normal, if a tad pink.

The aching spot on her shin would surely bruise, but it didn’t look nearly as bad as it felt.

“Fuck!” She bared her teeth as if the injury was an enemy she could chase away.

She was certain there were healing tonics in the washroom, but she’d have to get up from wallowing on the floor if she wanted to heal her bitten lip, her swollen toe, or the steadily swelling goose egg on her shin.

It was a rather frivolous use of tonic, but she didn’t care.

She’d use it for something as mild as the annoying voice of a table guest if it alleviated even a moment of suffering.

She rolled to her side and caught her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror framed with opulent fleur-de-lis. Her memory cut to a banquet, a lovely dress, the moans and gasps and smiles of a flawless princess.

Tyr had been wrong about her.

She did love Ophir, perhaps more than any of them could ever understand.

It was precisely why she’d told the truth.

It was also why she’d needed to massage the message so that its revelation would no longer carry a sting.

She was unwilling to lose her, whether to the stupid dog and his white-knight act or even to the consequences of her own actions.

Yes, she’d been responsible for Caris’s death.

But that was before she’d spent months at Ophir’s side.

It was before her heart had squeezed when Ophir smiled, before she’d seen the power in her eyes and anger in her veins.

It was before she’d realized that ruling at Ophir’s side wasn’t just a convenient way to access the world while pissing off the Pact and withholding knowledge from their gang leader. It was something she truly wanted.

She scooted from her place on the floor and rested her back against a leg of the enormous four-post bed that she and Ophir had shared since their arrival in Gwydir.

It disgusted her to know that they’d rarely been alone in their bed, but she’d been willing to share, as long as it made Ophir happy.

After all, the reincarnation of the All Mother should hardly be constrained by the social conventions of monogamy.

She hadn’t anticipated their relationship would be cut short by Tyr being sickeningly selfish under the guise of noble truths, but if there was one thing men did, it was disappoint.

Dwyn stared at the door, begging it to open.

She wished she could speed up time, but unfortunately, it was a power that didn’t exist. She knew, for she’d tried.

She’d attempted most of them at one time or another.

Small magics at first, then growing bigger and bolder as her confidence developed.

By the time she was ready to go south to Farehold, there was nothing she couldn’t do.

Including infiltrating a royal family and attaining godhood, should she want. And want, she did.

Sometimes people had to die for you to get what you wanted. Usually, they deserved it.

Dwyn had been sixteen the first time she’d taken a life. Never for a moment had she doubted that he’d deserved it.

She’d been making shapes in the river that cut through the mountains, carving dramatic valleys as it divided the territories on its way to the Frozen Straits.

It was unusual for children to access their powers, but Dwyn had been speaking to water for years.

She and her younger sister had been swimming in this very river when its strong spring current swept her sister off her feet.

She’d screeched in both adrenaline and delight as she followed the instructions they’d been taught.

She’d relaxed onto her back and put her feet in front of her while she bobbed down the rapids.

Dwyn would have been content to jog along the banks, giggling all the while, if there hadn’t been a tree in the water.

It had happened before she’d understood what she was seeing.

Her sister’s shift had snagged on the log, and when the current pulled her beneath its waves, only a pale, thrashing arm remained to be seen.

Though only seven, Dwyn had screamed and jumped into the river.

She had no business fighting the current, but rage, panic, and pain had carried her forward.

She fell face-first into the cold water and came up sputtering, hair plastered to her neck and shoulders.

She grunted as she shoved her feet between stones, anchoring herself with every step so that she could make it to her sister without being lost to the river’s pull.

Her heart had stopped when her sister’s pale arm ceased its clawing.

She’d pushed harder, faster, carelessly splashing as she leapt for her baby sister, her family, her best friend.

She’d grabbed her sister’s dress and yanked with a barbaric force she hadn’t realized she’d possessed, snapping the branch and ripping the dress at once as her sister floated into her arms.

“Wake up!” she’d screamed, looping her arm around her sibling as she braced herself for the life-threatening trip back to the shore.

She just needed her sister to hang on for a little longer, but the girl wasn’t moving.

Her chest neither rose nor fell. Her lips were as white as the bloodless skin of her face.

Dwyn took another step and slipped on algae-slick stone.

She tumbled into the river, sister in her arms, and as she fell, a scream tore from her belly.

The cry broke something primal within her, and the river responded.

The water flew up on all sides, solid walls of liquid blowing upward and drying the riverbed as she howled.

She and her sister dropped to the slick stones as she continued to wail.

She didn’t bother to look at the way the water bent to her will, answering her in her time of need.

She saw only the chalky pallor of her only friend in the world.

She had been too little to understand how to pound on someone’s chest if water was in their lungs.

She’d never been taught that she could offer her breath, should theirs falter.

She knew only that her sister should be breathing, but she wasn’t.

There was no flutter to her lashes, no blush to her cheeks, no pulse in her neck.

Dwyn grunted against their waterlogged weight as she hauled her sister out of the empty pit of the river and rolled her body onto the riverbank.

The water collapsed around them and resumed its white-capped journey south while Dwyn wailed on the shore.

She’d screamed and shrieked and begged and pleaded until her father had appeared in the distance.

He’d yanked Dwyn off and tossed her to the side as if she were a bloodthirsty tick flicked onto the earth as he breathed and pumped and prayed.

Dwyn had screamed that he was hurting her, begged him to stop as the loud pops of ribs breaking joined the splashing and tumbling of the river.

When she cried out for him to leave, the river made it so.

It flung out a mighty arm to knock the man from her little sister’s side as she threw herself over the body once more.

She protected it like a rabid animal as her father blinked up in pain, horror, and disgust.

While the magic that protected Sulgrave kept it from being subjected to the backwater norms of winter, summer, spring, and autumn, time passed with snowmelt from the peaks, with age, with the development of a woman’s body, with classmates, with afternoons that stretched into the long shadows of evening by her sister’s grave, with cruel lessons, with church, and with the unforgettable distrust in her father’s eyes.

They’d remained in their house by the river, but it was never again a home.

Her mother carried on dressing her, making dinner, and ensuring that she was in her bed each night, but she never again looked at Dwyn with gentleness or love.

Her father avoided her at all costs, as if their youngest child had been stolen from them by Dwyn, rather than the river.

The time to explain her role in the events came and went while shock still rested heavily on her heart.

She hadn’t been able to speak the awful truths into existence.

She hadn’t defended herself as they’d yelled or talked back as they’d begged.

Her silence had bled into the passing years until the time came for Dwyn to see her second dead body.

“Pretty horses,” came a voice from over her shoulder.