Page 25 of Bound to the Shadow Queen (Frostbound Court #2)

Everly

Wynnie stood in a borrowed nightgown I had wrestled from the closet, working a curl cream into her damp hair.

The faint scent of chamomile and birch unfurled through the chamber, grounding me like roots in soil.

A carved bone comb glided through her coils, tugging and taming them one by one until each curl settled into place.

Despite the threat of death and ruin pressing in on every side, I tried to will myself to be comforted by the ritual.

Still, something continued to niggle at the back of my mind, a pervasive feeling of something lurking in the shadows, just out of reach. The constant waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Once she finished her hair, my sister explored the suites.

“What’s the point of these fancy rooms if you don’t have your own wine cabinet?” she called from the other room.

“You know I don’t like to drink alone,” I told her, shifting uncomfortably. My wings itched to come out now that they were used to the freedom, but it felt impossibly stupid to risk that here.

Besides, it was just another reminder that I couldn’t actually fly. I was trapped. On that note, I agreed with Wynnie about the wine.

“Thank the shards that I’m here now, then,” she said, right on cue. “Does King Frosty take requests?”

“You can feel free to knock on his door and find out,” I gestured.

She looked like she was actually considering it when a perfunctory knock sounded at the door.

Mirelda swept into the room. She was brisk as ever, a tray balanced in her arms like a general hauling spoils of war. Only the way her gaze swept over me for several heartbeats too long gave evidence that she had been concerned about my absence.

Otherwise, she was all casual efficiency, nodding to me and to Wynnie as she set down a dinner tray laden with enough food for a war council, including a small dish full of berries.

Batty let out a delighted chirp, wings flaring before she landed on the tray and practically inhaled them.

A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth before I could stop it.

“Mirelda, did you take care of her while I was gone?” My voice came out lighter than it should have, almost teasing, though hollow at the edges.

She sniffed, arranging two sets of utensils with a sharp clink. “I didn’t let the creature starve, if that’s what you’re asking. At least, until I was…reassigned. Then I suppose she hunted for berries in the courtyard.”

The moment of pretense was shattered as quickly as it had begun, though a small wry grin still tugged at my lips. There were no berries in the courtyard, unless she had left them there for Batty.

Mirelda’s features sobered as she looked me over, questions brimming in her eyes that she would never ask when her precious majesty hadn’t deemed to tell her.

Who was she to him, that he had trusted her with the secret of his Hollow wife? But not with my return?

None of it made sense. Nothing he did made sense.

That feeling of unease only grew as the night wore on. Eventually Mirelda excused herself for the evening, though not before a brief tussle with the closet.

“Lady Noerwyn, you should have some clothes now as well,” the maid called from behind the door, her tone brokering no argument.

A rustle of fabric denoted a certain amount of displeasure with that arrangement, but Mirelda pretended not to notice, just as she pretended not to notice the way my sister and I were locked inside of these rooms when she took Batty with her for an evening flight.

By the time dinner was over, I was more than ready to collapse into bed, even if sleep still felt far away.

Wynnie stoked the fire, its glow chasing the chill from the corners of the room. She shoved extra furs onto my side before slipping beneath the covers herself.

For a long while, neither of us spoke. The silence stretched taut, heavier than it should have been with the one person I trusted implicitly.

“Wynnie…” My throat scraped around the words. “You said you took Draven to find me.”

“I did.”

I swallowed and stared up at the ceiling. The auroras had painted my room in hues of green and purple light, I followed the patterns as they danced along the crystal chandelier before asking my next question.

“How did you know where to look?”

She tilted her head, like she was trying to parse out the intent behind the question. “Our father told me once, on one of his many upstanding occasions of stumbling in late smelling like a brothel.”

“And you never told me?” There it was. The feeling niggling at me, scraping at the raw wound of more secrets, like the ones I had walked into torture for the sake of unearthing.

I never expected them from her.

She sucked in a breath. The pillow shifted as she turned her head to look at me. “I wasn’t hiding it, Evy. You never wanted to talk about them, and having a way to find them when you were actively hiding from them didn’t seem relevant. I wasn’t even sure he was telling the truth.”

It made sense.

I turned over to face her, and she wrapped her hand around mine. I could feel the sincerity in her touch, in her moonlit eyes.

Something eased inside of me, and I took my first real breath in days. I nodded.

She entwined our fingers, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze.

“Ask me anything you want to know. Remember, honesty between us, always.”

The words were familiar, a promise we had whispered into the dark as children, when we were all each other had.

“Do you miss your husband?” The question slipped out before I could stop it. I wasn’t even sure why that was the one that clawed its way free.

Wynnie’s free hand stilled where it was smoothing the furs. She stared past me for a long moment, her lips parting, then closing again. I could see the debate flicker in her eyes, the reluctance, the weight of what she didn’t want to admit.

Finally, she said quietly, “No. Yorrick lost my love the day he refused to have our wedding somewhere my sister could attend.” Her mouth pressed flat, and she shook her head. “But…I’m still sad that he’s gone. No one deserved to die like that, and he did protect me in the end.”

Her gaze flicked to mine. “Do you miss your husband?”

She was always more perceptive than I wanted her to be. More relentless, too.

Did some part of me miss him? Was that why I had asked that particular question?

My jaw clenched. Somewhere underneath the fury I clung to, my mind betrayed me with flashes I hadn’t asked for: the heat of his hands steadying me in the bath, the ghost of tenderness threaded through violence, the look in his eyes when he had torn through monsters to reach me.

Moments that sat uncomfortably beside the memory of his cruelty, his ice.

“I don’t know,” I said at last. “You can’t miss what you never had.”

Wynnie sucked in a sharp breath. For a heartbeat, I thought she might argue, but she only exhaled slowly, as though choosing her words with care.

“We promised honesty always, Little Sister,” she said. Her voice was soft, but it carried like steel through the quiet. “But you can’t blame me when you lie to yourself. And the male who cradled your broken body like it might just break him too…”

She swallowed, her eyes glistening with an unspoken grief. “That was nowhere close to something you’ve never had.”

Sleep refused to come.

I lay still as long as I could bear, watching the auroras spill their light across the vaulted ceiling while my sister’s breathing rose and fell in steady cadence beside me.

Eventually, when the silence pressed in too tightly, I slipped from the bed, throwing one of the blankets around my shoulders before padding across the chamber. My bare feet whispered against the frost-kissed stone toward the large balcony doors.

They were still frozen shut with Draven’s mana, but I could see the sky more clearly from here.

Outside, the night unfurled like ribbons of color. Sapphire, emerald, and amethyst light rippled across the sky, prismatic veils bending and curling like silk caught in the wind.

I pressed my palm to the glass, watching frost bloom in delicate crystals at the edges of the pane.

My gaze drifted east, toward the Wilds and my mother.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Draven said she was alive, but how did he know? She might have been that night, but what happened after we left? Was she safe? Was anyone?

And why had she given him her necklace?

My fingers drifted up to my throat, and I traced the shape of Veyr.

Was it some twisted goodbye? A way of letting me know that she wasn’t coming? Or that she was? Was it a message? Some signal I couldn’t understand…

I thought again of the eerie pull I’d felt toward whatever was inside. The raw power that emanated from the crystal and the way it called to some dark, buried part of me.

A shiver racked my spine as I shoved those thoughts away, unwilling to focus on the strange pull any longer.

I leaned closer to the window. Beyond the frosted glass, the auroras shifted, their green glow deepening and sharpening until there was no longer light at all but eyes—his eyes.

The breath caught in my throat.

For a moment, I wasn’t looking at the night sky but staring at Draven’s reflection. Water dripped from his hands as he braced them on a basin, washing his face.

Shadows cut across his features, beneath his aurora gaze and along the sharp lines of his jaw, and the sweep of his white-blond hair falling loose over his brow.

He looked… tired. Mortal, almost, if such a thing could ever be said about the Frostgrave King. The bond between us surged like a rising tide, the tether between us snapping taut like it was trying to drag me toward him.

Then his gaze shifted from his own reflection in the mirror to something else. To me?

The jolt sent me stumbling back from the window, my heart hammering against my ribs.

Could he feel me in his subconscious? I had sure as shards never been able to feel him in mine.

I crept back into bed, curling into the warmth of my sister’s side and wondering what fresh hells the bond would unleash on us tomorrow.

If the blasted thing thought it was being helpful, or if it knew that it was only ever finding new ways for us to hurt ourselves.