Page 34 of Bound to the Shadow Queen (Frostbound Court #2)
Everly
Books were safer than people.
At least, until the bond decided to make me a spectator in the king’s latest outburst.
One moment, I was tracing ink across a page, and the next, I was pulled under and dragged into Draven’s consciousness with all the subtlety of an avalanche.
“We all miss the queen’s company. I’d be happy to lend the assistance of my personal healer. Is she convalescing here?” Lady Thessara’s voice rang sweet as poisoned honey as she laid a hand on his arm.
A spike of rage ripped through me. His? Mine? The bond blurred the line.
Draven didn’t bother pulling away. Instead, he let frost bloom across his sleeve, the ice spreading as quickly as wildfire until it crawled over her painted fingers. Lady Thessara jerked back with a hiss, as though she’d been burned.
She glared down at her fingertips, then up at my husband, before scuttling away without waiting for an answer.
Nevara stepped into view, a wry smile curving her mouth.
“Can you See when the frost-damned Archmage will be here?” Draven’s voice was low, brittle with annoyance.
“No. The Shard Mother grants him his privacy.” Her smile tilted higher, though tension threaded beneath it.
Draven scoffed. “Perhaps one day she’ll extend me the same courtesy.”
I almost laughed as the tether snapped, and I tumbled back into myself.
No, the Shard Mother hadn’t seen fit to grant either of us privacy. Which left me wondering, not for the first time, what he might have seen through my eyes.
I leaned back in my chair, stretching into the weak afternoon sun. The motion jostled Batty, who took wing in a flurry of frost, sprinkling snowflakes across my open books.
Shooing her gently toward the rafters, I tried not to think about Thessara’s boldness…or what it meant that courtiers were brave enough to corner the king they all feared.
Soren had told me already about the gossip, but if they were bold enough to approach the king they were terrified of, that spoke to a whole different level. Things couldn’t continue on as they were.
Even he had to see that.
Then again, I supposed that was why he wanted the Archmage, to fix his defective former-ish, sort-of wife. Whatever I was to him now.
I shifted uncomfortably. I didn’t want to think about that, or the mana I would probably never unlock, or all the implications therein.
So, instead, I read.
For two days, I buried myself in ink and parchment. When nightmares, or worse, visions of Draven facing down larger and more brutal monsters than I wanted to imagine, drove me from my bed, I ventured into my study, losing myself in tomes that contradicted each other at every turn.
The frostbeasts had been reduced to afterthoughts—footnotes at best, and bedtime stories at worst.
The Mirrorbane cropped up in a few places, described with all the consistency of a drunken and illiterate scribe.
Tharnoks were no better…
And then there were the Korythids.
Something tugged at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t place it.
According to one moth-eaten textbook, they were frost-spiders the size of carriages.
Another claimed they dragged their prey under frozen lakes, keeping them alive for years as they slowly drained them of blood.
A third author waved them off entirely, insisting no creature that grotesque could exist.
A shiver racked through me, and I itched for my old compendium. For the notes I’d left behind at my father’s estate the day I’d left for the palace.
Somewhere in my notes, I knew that I had read something about the shards-blasted wards. Still, I dutifully read every book the library sent me, and I didn’t throw a single one across the room. No matter how great the temptation became.
When I had worked my way through the new information, I turned back to the existing books on my shelf. What was I missing?
The book that had arrived on my first day back still sat innocuously on the top shelf, its slim, fraying spine standing out amongst the paler leather of the rest. I pulled it out curiously.
The leather felt older than the others, though I wasn’t sure why when the library stretched back millennia.
There was no title, so I flipped it open to the first page. The text was faded and difficult to read, and it took me several breaths too long to realize why my mind halted over the runes.
At first glance, they were sharper and more archaic. Each stroke was written almost hastily, and compared to the other books on the shelves, the lines slanted ever so slightly to the right.
Drakmor. The word rushed out of me in a whisper of air.
This was an Unseelie book.
And if it was using Drakmor runes… it was about dragons.
I devoured the book.
It didn’t matter that I already knew most of the information, that I’d already pieced together as much from my own collection back home.
Reading it now, in Drakmor, in the language of the Skaldwings, sharpened details I’d only half-understood before. Nuances between words, edges to meanings that translations had always dulled.
What I couldn’t understand, though, was how and why this particular tome had ended up in the Winter Palace library, then in my personal study.
Although I still hadn’t figured out who had slipped the former queen’s journal into my possession, either.
According to the book, the dragons had been true shifters, more like the Lupine Unseelie. When they mated with the fae, they had given birth to children who had stronger mana than the other Unseelie fae, but lost the ability to shift into the dragon form.
That was how the original Skaldwing clans had been formed, one from each line of dragons.
I had known that much, but one of the nuances in this volume claimed that those fae had been Seelie. Which made sense, since all of the other clans were already another kind of shifter, and shifters could only mate with their own.
But it was certainly not something we learned growing up in the Shadow Clan.
I almost snorted when I got to a descriptor of the dragon ancestors themselves.
Dragons are known to be highly territorial… instantly incinerating anyone who is not one of their own.
That sounded like someone else I knew.
Images of winter-blond hair and aurora-green eyes clouded my vision before I shoved them away.
I read the line again. …i nstantly incinerating anyone who is not one of their own.
Was that why the Dragons had abandoned us? Because no others of their kind remained, and they were poised to wipe out the clans?
All except for one… at least, if Kaelen’s whispered claim was true.
Kaelen.
My quill pressed too hard into the parchment, ink blotting the page. I tried to reconcile the kind-eyed male who had spoken to me with the cruel brother who had followed.
If he had met me that night instead of his sadistic twin brother, would he have told me this? Or would he have fed me more prophecy and riddles, caught up in whatever vision his seer had spun? The same vision Kyros had hinted at when he hovered over me, bloody dagger in his fist.
Bile rose in my throat as the memory twisted in my chest.
The Thane of Stormbreak had looked at me as if I were an answer. As if I were meant to be the savior of the Skaldwings and all Unseelie alike.
I let out a rather obnoxious scoff and my sister raised her eyebrows. “What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said, snapping the book shut. “Just wondering if I’m a joke to the seers. ‘Let’s tell everyone this half-breed with no access to her mana will be the savior of kingdoms and clans, and see how many corpses pile up while they wait.”
Wynnie shook her head, though a grin tilted her lips. “I think everything is a joke to the seers. Most of the time I think they’re doing it on purpose, but I don’t know why anyone would base their life choices off of them.”
A stab of guilt gnawed through me.
I couldn’t quite put Nevara in the same category as the other seers. I didn’t see her as a manipulator, a liar, or just another seer twisting me like a pawn. I hoped she was better than that.
But hope was dangerous.
Then again, if the book had taught me anything, it was that even dragons abandoned the realm when hope finally ran out, and mine had been in short supply enough as it was.
I shut the book on dragons at last. Some part of me had hoped that the palace had given it to me in the same way the oddly opinionated closet sometimes threw out just the outfit I needed.
I had thought perhaps the book might provide some unexpected answers about the monster getting through the wards, or my mana, or literally anything.
But I was out of books and out of options. I needed my frost-damned compendium.