Page 67 of A Frozen Pyre (Villains #2)

Forty

Three Hours Following the Wedding

Aubade and the Frozen Straits

Harland had thought himself a coward for running away, until he realized he was running toward , not from .

A door stood on the cliffs just as he broke free from the coliseum, perfectly at home as if it had been constructed for no other purpose than to watch the sun set over the western horizon.

The screams of bloodshed had died down by the time he wrapped his hands around the knob.

He shot one look over his shoulder, but he knew there was nothing for him in Aubade. Not anymore.

He gagged on the blinding white that hit him as frigid wind filled his lungs.

His eyes watered from the blast, eyelashes instantly feeling heavy as they frosted.

“Fuck.” Harland slammed the door. He wasn’t sure what had happened in the coliseum, but if the Duchess of Yelagin was any indication of the maddening screams that had come from the now-silent stadium, going back would mean facing the blackened pits of hell.

Still, walking through Ophir’s door into the frozen wasteland with little more than temperate seaside clothes on his back would help neither him nor the princess.

Night had fallen by the time he returned to the door.

Numbness beyond a warrior’s fight had descended on him.

Harland had seen death. He’d encountered blood and taken lives.

He’d fought, and protected, and buried. There was no space in his head or heart for what he’d encountered as he’d picked his way through the quiet, lifeless carnage to reenter Castle Aubade and retrieve lifesaving clothes for temperatures that would see him dead in under a minute.

His mind had succumbed to a chill as cold as the weather beyond Ophir’s terrible door as he’d stepped over fallen bodies, open mouths, and unseeing eyes.

His shoes were slick with blood, his eyes glazed with an unseeing, protective nothingness by the time he found his way back to the sea.

The waves continued to pound against the shore as they had long before the wedding and as they would for one thousand years after.

Seabirds called out against the darkness.

The night and its moon burned through the starry sky, promising that time would go on, that the world wasn’t over, that this was not the end, but he felt nothing.

He put one foot in front of the other as he gripped the frosted knob and braced himself against the cold.

It ate him alive.

Harland stumbled into the loud crunch of ice-crusted snow breaking beneath his feet.

He didn’t bother to close the door behind him as he crested the small hill and gazed over the bright silver snowscape.

A full moon cast metallic light over the flat plane that spread out before him.

At the bottom of the hill sat a large black shape.

He scrunched his face against the cold and stared into the howling winter night as he struggled to see the silhouette.

Seeing nothing else and knowing that Ophir had created this door, he set forth toward the ominous gray-black shape that broke up the reflective obscurity of winter midnight.

It wasn’t until he reached the bottom of the hill that a tall, thin shape distinguished itself against the shadow blotting the snowscape.

He was nearly upon it before he realized he was seeing a ship.

He’d run through a number of curious scenarios in the time it took him to discern the wooden structure from the ice around it, but he decided it was a ship that had been abandoned before the waters had frozen beyond passable voyage.

He gripped as tightly to his theory as he did to his thick winter clothes as he trudged toward the shape, until his guess was shattered.

“Look out!” came a loud, strained voice from the ship.

Harland’s face shot up from where he’d been picking his way against the slippery surface to distinguish a gloomy figure on the deck.

He opened his mouth to exclaim but understood the warning a moment later.

An inhuman shriek had him stumbling back into the snow within seconds.

On the horizon, the moon caught the glistening outline of a horrid, ghostly form as its jaw dropped open in a scream.

He could have counted all of the teeth in its too-wide jaw in the moments it took him to draw his sword.

He didn’t have to understand what he was fighting to fall upon a century of training.

His sword came up in a preemptive arc, anticipating the monster’s trajectory before it was upon him.

With a loud cry, Harland landed his blow.

The blade crunched against flesh and spine as the monster gave a guttural howl.

His sword ate into its flesh as it flew to the side.

Blood drenched him as the demon skidded from its path.

Harland stumbled to his feet to dislodge his sword as the creature spun on him.

“What the fuck!” He gasped, staggering backward.

The monster clutched at him from the snow with insect-like arms. Its jaw dragged along the snow as if it lacked hinges altogether.

The cutting, razor-sharp shriek of the beast sliced into him, puncturing his ears with knives made of sheer sound as it wailed.

It twisted through the clotted puddle of inky blood as it righted itself and sprang for Harland a second time.

There was no time for the shock that gripped him. He was a heartbeat away from having his heart torn out and dying on the snowy expanse of this goddess-forsaken wasteland. He shook off the adrenaline as he readied himself for the animalistic lunge.

This time when he swung, his sword ate clean through the monster’s neck. The screaming didn’t stop as it skidded across the ice again. Its hands and legs continued to kick and thrash even as it fell to the ground and began searching through the blowing and drifting snow for its decapitated head.

Harland brought the sword down again and again and again. He left the creature in a pulp of twitching bits before the men aboard the ship shouted to him once more.

Harland looked down at himself to assess the damage, expecting to see torn clothes and evidence of the attack, but instead he found…a lack.

“What in the goddess’s lighted kingdom…” he breathed in horror as vacancies dotted his body.

Where his whole leg, torso, and arm should have been, bits of him were missing.

He could see the snow below him as if pieces of his very being were made of nothing at all.

Harland took his fingers and pressed them into the windows through his body, but they connected with solid flesh. He was still there, he just…wasn’t.

Harland stumbled away from the beast and the baffling repercussions of tussling with such a creature. He jogged up to the boat as a rope was tossed down.

“Where did you come from?” a frantic voice demanded from the deck.

“Aubade,” Harland said. “Did Princess Ophir come this way?”

A small crew gaped at him, and Harland could guess a dozen reasons why.

The most obvious, of course, was because he was stitched together by air.

“It’s the demon,” Harland said. “I don’t know how, but it seems to have had this effect.

One of you, get me some water. I need to see if the damage is permanent.

Someone, for the love of the All Mother, answer my question. Have you seen Princess Ophir?”

A low, sorrowful moan bubbled up from the belly of a heavyset man. It consumed him until his shoulders were shaking, face red with emotion.

“For fuck’s sake,” one of them muttered. “He’d just stopped grieving.”

“She’s dead,” mourned the man. “The princess is dead.”

Harland’s soul escaped through his parted lips.

There was a weightlessness to the sick and terrible denial that took its place, filling the vacant shell of his body.

She couldn’t be dead. She’d escaped the coliseum only to die out here in the cold and ice?

His mouth moved to form a question, but no sound came out.

Instead, he listened to the sobs of the man as they mingled with the wind.

At long last, he forced himself to swallow. He couldn’t cry. Not yet. “Where is her body?”

“She went out onto the ice, and she died,” he cried.

Another sailor shook his head. “He’s been repeating it nonsensically for hours. We can’t get more out of him.”

Harland’s eyes widened. Venom dripped from every word as he demanded, “You left her body out on the Straits?”

“Sir, the demon—”

“Go!” Harland barked. They’d scanned his royal garb the moment he’d boarded the ship.

Perhaps the Frozen Straits weren’t under either Farehold’s or Raascot’s jurisdiction, but in the calamity that had befallen their ship, perhaps they found it comforting to have someone tell them what to do.

Four men hustled to obey. They descended the rope and began to jog in the direction that their pained companion had indicated.

“She’s dead,” he repeated again and again.

“Where are the others?” Harland asked. A ship this size should have had a crew of at least twenty men.

“Dead, sir,” answered a sailor. “Some by the demon, and others by a sickness. It fell upon them so swiftly; no one knows what happened.”

He stiffened slightly. “A sickness?”

The sailor nodded.

“Show me.”

The sailor led him into the belly of the ship to where the papery skin of a former crewmate had been sucked clean of its blood, its meat, and all things that had once made it human or fae.

“In all our years, we’ve never seen anything like it,” the sailor said. His lips moved rapidly in a silent prayer to the All Mother while Harland knelt beside the body.

“I have,” he said gravely. He looked up at the sailor. “Was there a second woman? A fae with dark hair?”

“There was,” the sailor said. “It happened so quickly. The princess and her handmaiden arrived and were only here for a few hours. We were meant to set sail for Sulgrave. After the princess died, the lady disappeared just as the demon burrowed its way into our ship. There was so much blood and chaos, sir, it was impossible to keep track.”

Harland got to his feet. He sneered at the idea of Dwyn posing as a handmaiden. “Who saw the princess die? Only the one crewmate?”

The sailor shook his head, both concern and apology plain on his face.

“I don’t know how he could have seen it, sir.

He was down here beneath the deck with the rest of us when he began crying for her.

But he insisted it, as sure as I insist my mother’s name.

You don’t speak with conviction like that for nothing. ”

“Certainly not for nothing,” Harland said bitterly as the image of the parasitic Dwyn shot through him.

A call came from topside that the men had returned with no evidence of a body, which did nothing to assuage Harland’s simmering fury.

He didn’t understand why, but the siren must have convinced the men that Ophir had died.

Whether Ophir had created the creature to escape the sailors or the girl crafting stories of her demise, he couldn’t guess.

“Did Princess Ophir leave anything behind before she…died?” He struggled with the absurdity of the lie, particularly contrasted against how gutted he’d been only moments before at the idea of a world without Ophir.

It felt wrong to play along with Dwyn’s game, but it would be easier to return with a healthy princess later than attempt to explain Ophir’s manipulative attachment now.

“If she did, it would be in the captain’s quarters allotted her,” the sailor replied.

Harland led the way up the ladder. He waved off the fretful faces of the apologetic sailors.

They promised to continue their search in the morning, but their words glanced off Harland’s back as he turned for the cabin.

He let himself in and walked toward the center of the room, scanning for any clue as to what Ophir might have been up to.

If Ophir had escaped Aubade and had time to deploy a doppelg?nger for her wedding, then she’d had a hand in planning Aubade’s demise.

He couldn’t be sure why she’d need to make a pit stop on the Frozen Straits only to jump ship moments later.

Harland rested his hands on the table, frowning as he found no clothes, no food, no trinkets, not a single shred of evidence that she’d been on the boat at all.

As he righted himself to leave empty-handed, something caught his eye.

He glowered at the map, allowing his brows to meet in the middle as he stared at a large, dark blot.

He marched from the cabin and scanned the men.

“You were bound for Sulgrave?”

It wasn’t a question. They looked at the man in royal Farehold armor with guilty expressions.

“You wouldn’t take a new bride to a distant land under Farehold’s orders. Can I assume you’re paid on King Ceneth’s coin?”

“Sir, we—”

Harland cut the sailor off with the flick of his hand. He sucked in a breath of bitterly cold air. “Which one of you is captain?”

They slowly turned to look at the blubbering man who continued to loudly mourn the loss of his beloved monarch. Whatever had been done to his mind had gone a touch too far.

Harland sighed, his breath puffing white and glistening against the torches that dotted the deck to stave off the night. “Who’s first mate?”

“I am,” said the sailor who’d escorted him about the ship. “Navigation is my inborn talent.”

“Excellent,” Harland said. “Your name is?”

“Caleb, sir.”

“I’m commandeering this ship under Farehold banners, Caleb. Take me as far east as the ice allows.”

The men glanced at the shell of their babbling captain then exchanged uncertain looks. “Sir? We were meant to go north.”

“Not any longer,” Harland said, voice firm and steady as it drifted over the snowbanks and crystallized in the winter air. “Take me as close as you can to the Unclaimed Wilds.”