Page 42 of Beyond the Winter Kingdom (Faeted Seasons #2)

Sadie

Magic surged beneath my feet. I barely had time to curse before a wave of power swept through the cavern. The ground shuddered, then rolled as the ley line bucked, spitting us out with all the grace of a landslide.

I hit the grass hard, the softness doing nothing to cushion the blow. Air left my lungs on a tight exhale.

I pushed up onto my elbows, coughing, and then froze.

The Fold was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

Cliffs hung in the air, weightless. Waterfalls spilled from their edges in purple streams, free-falling into pools stacked one above the other. The cliffs moved slowly, deliberately drifting across the sky like islands pushed by an invisible current.

Everywhere I looked, the world was packed with color. Deep greens, sun-drenched golds, a sky so blue it felt unreal. The air was heavy with mist and magic. Warm. Alive. It smelled like crisp autumn air and felt like something older than time.

A place like this shouldn’t exist.

But it did.

And somehow, that was more terrifying than anything we’d left behind.

Behind me, something broke the spell.

I spun.

Vareck was on his knees, head bowed, hands buried in the grass as if holding on could stop him from falling apart. His shoulders trembled, slow and uneven, like each breath was a fight he wasn’t winning. His breath was harsh and uneven, like each one cost him.

Low, ragged, and damaged. Like the air had been ripped out of his lungs and replaced with nothing. It wasn’t a scream. It wasn’t a roar.

It was pain; raw and unshaped.

I crawled toward him. “Vareck?—”

“She’s gone.” His words rang hollow, a deep emptiness emanating from them.

I reached for his arm. He didn’t flinch or pull away or react in any way. It was like he wasn’t here at all. Not mentally, at least.

“What do you mean by gone?”

“I can’t feel her.” His eyes lifted to mine, and gods, I almost wished they hadn’t. The despondent look on his face was a man undone. “The bond’s gone , Sadie.”

I gripped his shoulder hard. “It’s not gone. You’re just cut off?—”

“No. This is different.” His voice was flat, but the way his fingers curled deeper into the grass told another story—one of fury barely leashed.

“Vareck . . .”

He shook his head, the movement sharp and final. “You don’t understand. It’s not distance. It’s not interference. It’s gone. ” His breath hitched, and for a second, his gaze darted past me, unfocused. “It’s like someone took a blade and cut it clean. No fray. No thread.”

The muscles in his jaw flexed so hard I worried he might crack his teeth.

“We’ll find a way to get it back,” I said, trying to keep my tone level.

His laugh was quiet and without humor. “You don’t just ‘get it back’, Sadie. A bargain with the ley lines isn’t something you can go back on ...” He trailed off, shaking his head again, slower this time, like he was still trying to convince himself it wasn’t true.

“Vareck.”

He blinked, and when his eyes came back to me, there was a spark there, explosive and unstable. The grass rippled under my knees, though there was no wind. Warm mist slid against my skin. The Fold was listening. Watching.

The air thickened, the kind of subtle shift you only notice when you’ve been in dangerous places before.

Vareck’s shoulders drew tighter, his whole body taut like a bowstring. “I can’t—” His breath came shorter now, and his hands left the grass, curling into fists. “I can’t breathe without feeling her there.” His voice cracked again, the anger and grief colliding into something volatile.

“Then you breathe for her,” I said sharply. “Until we find her.”

“And if we don’t?”

I shook my head. “Don’t talk like that. We’re going to find her. They’re on their way here. The bond may be gone for now, but Meera isn’t?—”

“You don’t know that.”

“You don’t either!” I snapped back. I was trying to be encouraging, but guilt and frustration bled into every word.

Vareck was right. I didn’t know shit when it came to bonds or ley lines.

All I knew was that I couldn’t afford to think my sister wasn’t okay.

I pushed him to drink because we had no choice, and it wasn’t fair that I got away scot-free while Vareck had to pay the ultimate price.

None of that changed the fact I refused to believe Meera was gone.

A low chuckle slid from between his lips. Uneasiness ate at me as I watched his descent.

“This is what I get for the things I’ve done.”

The darkness in his voice sent ice through my veins, and I stood there frozen. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Vareck didn’t answer immediately. He kept his eyes on the horizon, jaw still clenched so tightly it looked like it hurt. Magic rippled faintly around him, the Fold responding to emotions he wasn’t even speaking aloud.

“Vareck,” I said, more forcefully, wishing I could compel him to pay attention. That power resided with the high fae, of which I was not. “What do you mean about the things you’ve done?”

“Faerie was starving. Children were dying in the streets. I didn’t know what else to do ...”

I stayed silent, waiting for him to continue.

“My father plunged Faerie into eternal winter, and I didn’t know how to fix it, but I had to try. I had to do something ...”

Everything in me stilled.

This wasn’t just the breaking of the bond talking. In this madness there was something else. Remorse. Shame. Sorrow buried so deep it had become a part of him. It terrified me.

“What did you do?” I whispered.

“I came here once before,” he said quietly. “To the Fold.”

My brow furrowed. “And?”

“There are ley lines in every realm, but none are as powerful as this one. I needed it to destroy something for me.” His hands flexed against the grass. “A god-forged artifact. One that never should have existed.”

“Why?”

“I thought,” he choked out, taking a breath before he could go on. “I hoped that it would end the winter. I was a fool .”

“What type of artifact?”

“Amoret’s necklace. The amulet. My father gave it to Drayden so he would gift it to Maeve. No one suspected that it was cursed. No one thought he’d hurt her.” Vareck swallowed hard and shook his head. “Maeve was his favorite. She was the heir apparent.”

I felt so lost. There was a story here I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to know. “Maeve was your sister?”

“My sister. Destined to ascend.”

“Ascend?” I asked, a chill creeping down my spine. “Ascend to what?”

“Her place amongst the gods. ”

A fae becoming a goddess? Was that a thing? I knew about gods and demons, how they were basically one and the same. In all the legends and stories passed down, I’d never heard of someone ascending to godhood.

“You’re not making a lot of sense, Vareck.” I moved my hand slowly, not wanting to startle him while I checked for a fever. His skin felt normal, but nothing he was saying did. “What does your sister and father have to do with a god-made artifact you asked the ley line to destroy?”

“The necklace was the key. He used it to drain Maeve of her power and kill the furies. The winter was brought on by him—by it . I couldn’t let it remain. If the necklace gave him the power to curse Faerie, then maybe destroying the necklace would undo the curse.”

I tilted my head, taking it all in. This was really personal information, and I wondered if he was in his right mind telling me all this. “All right, I’m following. Seems logical enough. Except Faerie is still frozen over. So something didn’t go as planned?”

“It didn’t work,” he said, curling his fingers harder, piercing the compacted dirt beneath us as he dug them in. Nails cracked, and blood smeared his hands like an offering. “We brought the necklace to the Fold. We asked the ley line to do what we could not ... and it still didn’t work.”

“It wouldn’t have done that for free.”

Vareck swallowed again and lowered his eyes. “It didn’t.”

The air turned heavy. The ground beneath us hummed, a feeling of satisfaction that was not my own emanating from the ley line.

I leaned in. “What did it ask for?”

“I thought I was doing the right thing. People were starving,” Vareck started, falling back on what he was saying before. Despite the manic edge, there was an awareness in how he held himself that told me the king wasn’t completely gone. Not yet, at least.

“What did you give it?” I asked again, harder this time.

His lips parted, but no sound came out at first. Finally, he whispered, “Fate.”

I frowned in disbelief. “Fate?”

“ Take what is forged by immortal hand, and leave in kind what fate once planned. A thread for a thread, a bond for a bond—unravel the heart where souls respond. What was eternal is now gone, severed in silence, yet ever lived on. ”

It wasn’t hard to recognize the cadence. Despite the lack of emotion in his voice, the whispered words of the ley line’s demand settled over me as though I had been there with him.

“I still don’t understand . . .”

“It unmade true mates. Every bond. Every thread. Fated love. Gone.”

I stared, my brain processing the words too slowly. “You can’t be serious...”

Vareck nodded. “Fated mates vanished. No one knew why. They blamed the curse, and I let them. But it was me. I was the catalyst.”

I swallowed, trying to make sense of it. “But Meera?—”

“She was the exception,” he whispered. “I thought the Fold had missed one thread.” He shook his head again, digging his bloodied fingers into the roots near his scalp. “Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. Either way, it corrected its mistake.”

“But it wasn’t your fault,” I said, trying to reason through the madness. “You didn’t know what the ley line would take.”

His eyes met mine, dark and hollow. A slight sheen glazed over them. “I did.”

My words dried up as I stared at him. I opened and closed my mouth, searching for the right thing to say. He beat me to it.

“People were starving. Faerie can’t import enough food.

The famine was— is —a crisis. The way I justified it was that you can’t miss what you didn’t know you had.

No one is guaranteed they’ll find their true mate.

We only hope. But chosen mates happen all the time.

I thought it was better to take that bond away from the world than to let them starve.

What I didn’t bet on—what I didn’t let myself consider—was that it wouldn’t work. ”

“You were trying to save people,” I said softly.

“And I damned them.” Threads of dark brown hair tore away from his scalp. I grabbed his hands with my own, trying to force him to stop. “Do you know what it’s like to wake up knowing you took fated love from an entire world? That you stole soulmates from the very people you swore to protect?”

“I don’t.”

“No,” Vareck agreed. “You don’t. And now—now the only one I’ve ever loved is gone . That’s not chance, Sadie. That’s the Fold collecting its due.”

A horrible silence stretched between us.

“But she’s not gone,” I insisted. “The bond might be, but Meera is still alive and kicking. She’s fighting her way back to us—to you. Bond or no bond.”

“You don’t know that,” he mumbled.

“Stop it.” There was no room for arguments. “My sister was in love with you before she knew you were real, before she had a fated mate bond. Nothing has changed.”

“Everything has changed.”

“Nothing that matters ,” I said. My fingers wrapped round his, gripping them fiercely to stop him from hurting himself more. “So what if the bond is gone? So what? You said it yourself that chosen mates happen all the time. Fate or no fate, you can still choose each other.”

Vareck laughed, and I knew that was the moment I lost him. The unhinged sound coming from his chest made my own stomach twist. “In what world does she choose a man who sacrificed fated mates for nothing ?”

His laughter faded, leaving only ragged breathing and the restless hum of the Fold, as though even the ley line was waiting for my answer.

I tightened my grip on his bloodied hands. “This one,” I said fiercely. “This world. The one where Meera never once looked at you and saw a crown or a curse—only you.”

His jaw clenched, but his eyes flicked toward mine, desperate and broken.

“You think she won’t choose you?” I pressed on, heart pounding. “She already did. Long before you two had a true mate bond. You can’t undo that. Not even the Fold can undo that.”

“You’re wrong.” He shook his head, but the motion was shaky now, unconvincing.

“The Fold may have taken fate, but love by itself was never something it could claim. It can unweave a thread, but it has no power over choice. And Meera chose you.”

For a heartbeat, something flickered across Vareck’s face; something fragile and unbearably human. “You truly believe that?”

I dipped my chin. “I do.”

I’d seen Vareck furious, ruthless, cold.

I’d never seen him like this—stripped bare, raw enough that I almost felt like I was trespassing just by looking at him.

His eyes closed, lashes trembling, and when he opened them again, the devastation was still there, but so was something else.

A fracture in the grief. A space where hope could bleed through, if only he let it.

“Liessss,” a voice hissed. Out of nowhere, a golden snake appeared. “You don’t sssseriously believe that, do you, Ssssadie?”