Page 6 of Bound to the Shadow Queen (Frostbound Court #2)

Everly

My mother and I were never alone.

After breakfast, she took me to the arena to train. Tavrik joined us. We went for a fly, and my uncle wanted to check on my form. We headed to the baths, and Zerina had an urgent need to soak her already-healed injury.

If my mother noticed the intentionality, she didn’t let on. Neither was anyone brave enough to sneer at me when she was in earshot, so at least the whispers of traitor and monster and abomination had abated.

It was unreasonably frustrating, having her close enough to finally ask all of the things I wanted to know, with no opportunity to let the questions out.

Had she been the one to bind my mana? I was almost certain of it.

She was insanely powerful, and I couldn’t think of anyone she would have trusted with her secret.

I had early dreams, or memories, I had dismissed for years, of mana bursting out of me years before most children saw the beginning of theirs.

Had she hidden it because it was edged with frost?

But why hadn’t she unbound it once I was safely at my father’s estate?

For that matter, why hadn’t she come with me when she freed me? All this time I had assumed she had stayed behind to fight off the other skaldwings, but now she was here.

And where was the seer who had led them to me?

I couldn’t ask her any of it, though.

The closest we came to any illusion of privacy was when she took me to the Valbough tree to light a petal for the dead.

I didn’t object as she led me up the mountainside, even as my wings cried out in protest. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to distract me from my panic and my questions by keeping me busy, a familiar tactic from my childhood, or if she was desperate to cram as much of the past decade into the day as we could.

So I followed her through the shadows of the setting sun until we arrived at the sacred forest. The trees glowed with pale shades of lavender and gold and white, the honeyed scent of the wisteria beckoning us closer.

We landed just outside the treeline before trekking into the middle of the forest. I followed my mother beneath the canopy, walking a familiar path. Roots coiled like ancient veins through the soil, branches arched overhead in latticed cathedrals, and a hush seemed to settle over everything.

Not silence, exactly, but something more ancient. Calm, and protective. Something that promised to keep the shadows and the monsters at bay. If such a thing were even possible.

Curtains of blossoming flowers swayed overhead, shedding tiny motes of pale luminescence that drifted through the air like falling stars.

A strange sense of peace settled over me as I watched them dance in the light, something I hadn’t felt in years.

At the forest’s heart stood the massive Valbough tree.

The sacred tree.

Resting near its trunk was a stone altar, a low, wide slab etched with Drakmor runes fed by flames that never died.

Other Skaldwings were already there, scattered throughout the clearing. They kneeled with their eyes pinched tight as they remembered all those they had lost.

The firelight gilded their faces, turning their grief into something unshakable and reverent.

Though Tavrik had followed to honor his own dead, coincidentally, even he wouldn’t disrupt the sacrosanct ritual by staying too close.

I took a breath, the sweet, floral scent of the flowers wrapped around and through me until my chest loosened, like the forest was exhaling against my skin.

It was the first time I could breathe, going through the familiar motions of filling a small, bone-carved bowl with dried wisteria, taking a twig from a pile gathered by the children, passing it through the flames of the altar until it lit as well.

I dropped the stick into my bowl, sinking to my knees in front of the tree. My mother sank down next to me with her own gently smoking bowl. The scent of dried heather filled the air, curling around us with a gentle breeze.

I took another deep breath. Until the heather burned, we would stay like this, remembering our dead or telling stories about them. Feeling their loss.

Only it wasn’t the face of my slain family members who filled my mind. At least, not only them.

“The soldiers say you saved him,” my mother said quietly.

She had always had an uncanny knack for knowing what I was thinking, like the Visionary, only my mother’s skills were honed from years of reading a battlefield rather than the visions from the Shard Mother herself.

“I had no choice,” I responded.

She looked at me sharply. “Because of the marriage bond?”

I stared resolutely at the burning petals in my bowl. I didn’t know how to tell her that I wasn’t sure I was capable of watching him die, the male who had slaughtered half of our clan. The king who had taken my own family from me.

Even now, the bond pulled at me a little more each hour, so much so that I had started to imagine I could see him in my waking hours, too.

I saw flashes of his hand clenched around his ring, or the sparkling, icy remains of the monsters he shattered.

I even saw Wynnie, blonde curls unusually lifeless, pale blue eyes even more exhausted than the last night I had spent at her side.

“I needed to leave,” I finally said, not quite a lie. “Wynnie was in the house.”

“Your half-sister?”

“My sister,” I corrected quietly.

I felt her sharp inhale as much as I heard it.

“I had no choice,” I said again, wondering if she heard everything I wasn’t saying.

I had no choice but to make a new life. To find a new family. To live without you.

For several heartbeats, the only sound in the clearing was the unsteady crackle of the burning wisteria. Even Tavrik was unnaturally still, standing far enough away that it was impossible to know how much he was listening to.

“I know that.” My mother’s voice was as even as ever, her shoulders squared as she stared into the flames of the altar. “Neither did I.”

Though I hadn’t asked my questions, she had found a way to answer me in part. She hadn’t wanted to stay away. She hadn’t wanted to leave me.

It eased something inside me, a balm over wounds that still refused to heal.

“Did you light the petals for me?” The words were a low whisper, swallowed by the wind the moment they left my lips.

Still she swallowed, turning slowly until her gaze met mine.

“All the time. To remember what I had lost.”

She didn’t say the rest, but I heard it anyway. She was still lighting that bowl for me. For the years we would never get back.

For the people we would never be again.

The days continued in a strange holding pattern of flying and sparring and sharing my meals with a male who made every inch of my skin crawl. I was still never alone with my mother.

I still had no answers.

And Draven still hadn’t come for me, though the daytime visions had gotten nearly as visceral as the dreams. They were short, sharp blasts of feelings and images, mostly monsters and endless landscapes of snow.

So I knew that he was alive, that he was traveling, and that he was unendingly furious.

I tumbled to the ground for roughly the seventy-fourth time that hour, taken down by Zerina’s easy block of my dagger while I was even more distracted than usual.

“Your thrusts are still too weak,” Tavrik’s droll voice echoed across the training grounds.

He had barely looked up from his own sparring to offer yet another critique of mine with Zerina. My mother was with my uncle, where she was every afternoon in the few hours she let me out of her sight.

She always looked troubled when she returned, but she brushed off every question with a pointed glance toward the listening ears.

“Don’t worry,” Zerina crooned as she yanked me to my feet. “He only notices because his own thrusts are notoriously weak.”

A wicked smirk graced her lips. She wasn’t precisely friendly now, but her open hostility had died down somewhat, as her mate had predicted.

“Should I tell Alaric you noticed then?” Tavrik’s sparring partner chimed in.

Her lips twisted in disgust. “Not in my drunkest hour, single or taken, but the bath house hears all.”

Tavrik raised an eyebrow. “Did it hear you shrieking like you had caught fire the night before he left?”

Zerina chuckled as she took her fighting stance. “Is a female’s pleasure a sound you’re unfamiliar with?”

The other warrior sighed. “I want to defend you, Tav, but you walked right into that one.”

Tavrik ended their duel with a resounding blow, and Zerina laughed again.

“Guess he had to get all that pent-up frustration out somehow. Let’s switch to bow.”

“Tell the fetchers to run for cover,” Tavrik murmured.

I scowled, though I couldn’t precisely argue. Every day, Zerina or my mother trained me on daggers and bows and arrows. Though I was passable with my dagger, years away from training had left my arms weak, my ability to work around my wings clumsy.

Sure enough, I drew my elbow back, only to knock it with my wing when I inadvertently clenched those muscles too.

Zerina shot me a sideways glance. “Did you truly not train at all in the decade you were there? Weren’t you worried at all about being in enemy territory with no way to defend yourself?”

My breath stalled in my lungs, her comment touching too close to everything I tried not to think about now, like the constant fear that had loomed over every part of my life, or the brief illusion of safety in the male who had ordered his kingdom to kill my people on sight.

I pictured his face, perfectly chiseled and deadly cold. I squeezed my eyes shut against the image, only to see his fists instead, clenched into pure, unrelenting ice.

He had been ruthless before, but he was beyond that now. It made no sense the way the bond still cried out for him, like it didn’t realize that he was the danger.

I met her eyes solidly. “Everywhere is enemy territory for me, and my skills with a dagger were hardly enough to protect me when I needed them.”

Not against my uncle, and not against my husband if he decided to kill me after all, Nevara’s visions be damned.

Zerina averted her gaze, shaking her head slightly. “The Thane was trying to help you.”

I scoffed, turning back to the targets. “Well, I suppose you can pray to the Shard Mother you never find yourself in need of his assistance .”

We didn’t talk after that, just as I had known we wouldn’t. Conversation always came to a halt where my mana, or lack thereof, was concerned. For all the words hurled in my direction these past days, Hollow was never one of them.

Yet every time I tried to bring it up to my mother or uncle, I was met with warning glares and stony silences.

Each night, it frayed a little more at my raw nerves.

I had lived my entire life kept in the dark. My mother had dyed my hair under the pretense of braiding it, had bound my mana before I could remember, and had never once mentioned that I was half Winter until the day she had thrust a blade in my hand and told me to run.

Shards only knew what secrets Draven had kept. And Nevara…

Nevara had known the most of all. Over and over, I turned her words around in my head.

This was the only way I could see.

She must have known that I would come here. She was bound to the Winter Court, and she had never said that I couldn’t die, only that Draven couldn’t kill me. Had she let me be taken to get me out of Draven’s way, to pave the way for a new bride?

Bile rose in my throat, and I swallowed it down.

There was, of course, another possibility. If Winter still needed my mana…maybe there was a way for me to get it back.

One way or another, the secrecy had stretched on long enough. I intended to get answers tonight.