Page 4 of Bound to the Shadow Queen (Frostbound Court #2)

Everly

My mother’s grip was bruising.

It always had been. Her arms were two shades darker than mine, infinitely warm, peppered with battle scars, and strong enough to hold me together when the rest of the world was falling apart.

A warrior’s arms. That’s what she was: my uncle’s second-in-command. His stellari . Or she had been, but I still couldn’t figure out what in the shards-damned hells she was doing here now.

Muttered conversation passed over my head, so rapid I could hardly make it out past the thunderous beating of my heart.

“—supposed to wait for me.”

“—believed you dead.”

The arms around me stiffened. “Can you blame her?”

“Careful, Mirevyn.” My uncle’s tone was a warning at his twin’s impertinence, the same growl I had heard him use with countless members of the clan…but never with his sister.

I felt the rise and fall of my mother’s chest where my cheek was pressed against the cool surface of her flying leathers and the necklace she had worn for as long as I could remember.

My fingers found the pendant, its surface worn smooth from years of touch, and traced the familiar lines of the Drakmor rune.

Veyr.

The word left me in a whisper as I followed the carved ridges, wings arched like a dragon poised for flight in the amethyst’s dark gleam.

To rise.

She eased away from me, peering down at me with emerald eyes that were widened in concern, the rest of her graceful features as fierce and unreadable as ever.

Her gaze swept over me like she was drinking in the sight of me, cataloguing every injury and marking every change from the broken adolescent she had last beheld. I surveyed her in return, the intricate obsidian warrior’s braid that was so familiar. The scars along her skin that weren’t.

How many battles had she seen since I left?

“How are you here?” I rasped out, still only half believing she was real.

She pursed her full lips, eyes darting for the barest fraction of a moment toward my uncle.

“Where else would I be?” she countered evenly.

I had the sense that I had been thrown in the middle of a game I couldn’t quite name, where the rules were always changing and the stakes were always death.

Still, my mother was here.

My mother was alive . And still working with my uncle.

My fingers slipped from the pendant, falling back to my side as the warmth of nostalgia and relief soured into something harder.

Had she been at his side all this time—ten long years with her abomination of a daughter out of the way—serving as his stellari ?

I thought of her rage when I was taken, her panic when she set me free. The warring perceptions of her didn’t quite fit, but then again, nothing about this situation did.

“Why did you bring me here now?” I demanded quietly.

Why not before if it was possible? Why ever, if it wasn’t?

A line furrowed in her brow. “Because you were in danger,” she said like it was obvious.

Had she kept an eye on me since I went to my father’s? Enough to know that I had been safe there? Enough to know that I wasn’t, once I was married? Did she weigh the danger of my husband against my uncle and make a choice, or did the Thane discover where I was and remove that choice?

And why wouldn’t she have at least let me know she was alive?

Those were questions I wasn’t willing to ask in front of my uncle.

“And I’m not in danger here?” I clarified.

“Things are different now.” She wrapped her hand around mine, squeezing gently. A reassurance? A warning? I wasn’t sure. “What matters now is that you’re back where you belong, and we can finally put everything else behind us.”

I blinked, not ready to address the second part of her statement. Or the first part, for that matter.

I wanted to bask in the relief that she was alive, the comfort that she was real and in front of me, but there were so many missing pieces that didn’t yet make sense.

“Is this the mutually beneficial arrangement you were referring to, then?” I asked the Thane, gesturing to my mother.

But what did he get in return?

“It is to all of our benefit that you retain your rightful place as heir,” he said vaguely.

I narrowed my eyes at his non-answer. My identity was hardly a secret anymore, let alone my lineage. How could it benefit him to have a bastard half-Seelie abomination as his heir?

“Would you rather I had left you there to die at the hands of the Frostgrave King?” the Thane demanded.

He might have sounded genuinely curious, if I hadn’t caught the deadly undertone.

I pictured Draven’s furious features when he saw my wings. A body shattering on the ground at his feet. His deep voice promising that he never let anyone hurt what belonged to him.

It was impossible to say which version of my husband would have emerged in the end, so I didn’t bother to deny it. I didn’t say anything at all.

My uncle nodded like that was answer enough. “I won’t pretend I didn’t consider it, but your mother reminded me how valuable family is.”

She looked at him, a muscle in her jaw just barely tensing. “Yes, well, you always see reason in the end. I know you never would have left her to that fate, just as I never could have.”

There was an undertone of steel in her words, a warning of her own. More pieces in a puzzle I couldn’t quite put together.

Tension crackled through the vast room, the silence suffocating all at once.

“Yes,” my uncle finally said. “It was fortunate that our aims were aligned, and now the clan will see the benefit.”

I shook my head, a sound just short of a scoff escaping me. While my uncle had been holding meetings in his longhouse, he must have missed the cheerful reception that greeted me every time I walked into a room.

“The Skaldwings will never?—“

“The Shadow Clan will do as I command,” my uncle cut me off, casually ignoring the fact that there were far more skaldwings than just our clan.

His tone was every bit as unyielding as it had been when he said those same words to me as shackles clamped around my wrists.

When I had begged him to let me go.

You are my heir and a member of the Shadow Clan. You will do as I command.

“All of the Skaldwings are survivors at heart,” my mother clarified, her voice so delicate I might have believed she knew exactly what memory I was stuck in.

“But the Shadow Clan in particular. They will come around when they see it is in everyone’s best interest. I will not tolerate your life in danger. Not again.”

Her hand squeezed mine once more, her voice dropping low in earnestness.

I gasped for breath, drowning in the airy, sunlit room as surely as if I had been chained to the bottom of a lake. This was too much, too fast.

I should have been happy, or at least relieved, right? Wasn’t this everything I had ever wanted?

My mother back. A rightful place among my clan. A normal life where I didn’t have to live in fear.

And Alaric was checking on Wynnie. Would he bring her here? Would that be safer for her?

It was so close to perfect. If only the pieces had fit, or if my uncle hadn’t been one of them. Instead, every part of me rebelled instinctually at what she was saying, a wrongness that echoed down to my soul.

Then I reminded myself it didn’t matter. My life had already been claimed by the Frostgrave King, my very being tethered to his for eternity.

“You don’t understand,” I told my mother quietly, squeezing my eyes shut. “Draven will never let this stand. He will come for me.”

For better or worse .

My mother ran her thumb across my knuckles, a comforting gesture that stopped as she brushed along the ring that was seared into my skin. A muscle feathered in her jaw, her features morphing to unrelenting stone.

“And we will be ready for him if he does.” She blinked away her fury, meeting my eyes earnestly. “Everly, whatever happened to you there, you don’t have to go back to him ever again. You’re home now. You’re safe now.”

The room spun around me, and I clenched my fists, my talons digging into my skin.

Whatever happened to you there.

How did I explain that I still wasn’t sure myself what had happened in the Winter Court?

The father who wouldn’t look at me was so at odds with the sister who became my everything.

Nevara’s insistence that we couldn’t be friends lived at war with the starlit tears that streamed down her cheeks.

There were monsters with gaping jaws in one moment, and a warm chest sheltering me in the next.

Then there was the small venomous creature that had made itself mine.

And now I was here, with my mother’s strong arms and my uncle’s calculating gaze, and I was drowning in the endless contradictions that had dictated every moment of my life.

I dug the talons in harder, feeling the familiar sting, reopening the wounds on my palms.

Home. Safe. I wasn’t sure I knew what either of those words meant anymore. Maybe I never really had.

But I knew that they didn’t quite ring true for whatever the hells was going on here.