Page 6

Everly

H is departure didn’t fill me with the relief it should have.

It didn’t make sense, and I didn’t like the feeling that I was missing something, especially not when my life was on the line.

He had ordered every female in the kingdom to his palace on exactly no notice. He needed a queen, urgently, and the only notable duty of the queen was to secure an heir.

Was I even officially Queen if we hadn’t consummated our marriage?

Tendrils of dread crept along my spine. Was that why he had left? Because he knew, or sensed the truth?

Shards .

I needed to find a way out. And I needed to get my dagger back.

The furs beneath my feet muffled my steps as I crossed the room, circling along the edges like a wildcat testing the boundaries of a cage.

There was a smaller door that led to a deceptively large closet, and an archway set into the far side of the room.

Not hidden, exactly. Just cloaked in shadows, easy to overlook when you were too busy worrying about being claimed against your will.

It opened to a broad hallway. I followed it, trying both doors along the way. I found a lavatory and a study with empty bookshelves before I wound up in the room I had already suspected I would find. The room I had gotten dressed in.

So that wasn’t his bedroom, it was mine. These were the queen’s chambers. More like a house unto itself than a mere set of rooms, large enough that I would never have to leave.

If I were a dutiful kept queen, that was, not a Hollow who needed to find a way the shards-damned-hells out of here.

I raced over to the dressing screen, sinking to my knees to look for my dagger hidden at the back of the small cabinet. When its familiar weight was back in my hand, I breathed a sigh of relief. I whipped the small holster over my thigh and resheathed the blade.

My ring scraped against the metal, an off-putting reminder of its presence. I moved to tug it off…but it wouldn’t come off. As hard as I pulled, I couldn’t get it to so much as wiggle from its place securely at the base of my finger.

Staving down another swell of panic, I tried another tactic, twisting it to loosen its hold.

It didn’t budge. I couldn’t get so much as the edge of my nail underneath the band that was all but branded into my skin.

Frost damn it all.

Did he have to give me permission to take it off? Or…no, I wouldn’t consider the idea that it could never be removed or I would go insane. One thing at a time.

My heartbeat thundered in my ears as I crept toward the main door, opening it only to find two guards standing sentry on either side. They both glanced warily in my direction, but didn’t speak. I closed the door without explanation, heading back to the door the king had led me through.

I pulled it open, then immediately slammed it shut.

There were no guards there—at least, no fae guards. But five enormous wolves had turned their luminous gazes to me in the stilted heartbeat before I shut the door.

No secret who those rooms belong to.

The only other exit in the cursed suites spilled out onto a balcony, which was both treacherously windy and several stories off the ground.

Finally, I admitted to myself what I already knew, what I had known from the time I told my sister as much this evening.

There was no escape.

Even if there had been a door, somewhere tucked behind a tapestry or buried beneath stone, I wouldn’t have made it far in the most guarded place in the entire kingdom with a single dagger, even if it was inlaid with crystals that could cut through mana.

I glared at the bed waiting for me like the gaping mouth of a frostbeast. Its pale furs and silver trim gleamed like rows of uneven teeth waiting to devour me.

I didn’t go near it. Lying there felt like tempting fate. Or worse, accepting it.

So I pulled the furs off the bed and returned to the sitting room to curl up in the oversized chair by the tiny fire, trying not to drown in the unrelenting bleakness of the space. My new life.

I swallowed back an unexpected wave of emotion at the foreign nature of everything here. Earlier, I hadn’t been worried about spending much time in this space since I had been fairly certain I wouldn’t survive my wedding night, but somehow, I was still alive.

Still at the palace.

And still surrounded by the endless white and gray walls of my new prison.

My bedroom at home was stuffed with nearly as many books as the estate library, mahogany shelves laden down with tomes of every size and color, stacked haphazardly and in no particular order.

My bed was average-sized but overflowing with an assortment of brightly colored pillows and throws I had dredged up from forgotten closets.

There were warm velvet curtains and plants hanging in every window…though admittedly, several of them had suffered from a failure to thrive upon my sister’s departure.

There was life, though, or at least the attempt at it. Here my choices were actual death, or these rooms that felt close to it.

I tucked my legs beneath me, furs still wrapped around my shoulders like a shield, and tried in vain to think my way out of this mess.

Solutions never came to me, but neither did the king, so I considered it a partial win.

Sleep, too, had been hard to find. All night, I imagined phantom footsteps, heard the click of a door, saw any number of ways that the king or his soldiers might come for me.

More than once, something had scratched eerie claws across the frosted window at the balcony.

My stomach twisted. I had been so focused on the monster inside the palace that I hadn’t considered the ones that roamed at night. The frostbeasts that were bound to the darkness who wanted to hunt and haunt and destroy.

I had grown used to seeing them around Eisbarrow and Briarhollow, my father’s village and a neighboring one.

But we only really ever dealt with smaller ones.

Not the terrifying ones I had read about from the north mountains— the Wretches who could mimic the sounds of your screams as they devoured you, or the Mirrorbanes who could change their appearances at will to blend into the environment so you never saw them coming.

A shiver raced through my spine as I stared at the window. I was too high up in the tower to worry about them. Right?

And there were guards all around the palace, well-trained to cast their mana into the sky. It wouldn’t be possible for frostbeasts to come so close…so it was probably just the palace phoenixes. Maybe they were given to pranks, or clumsiness.

Every time the scratching sounded again, I repeated the logic, willing myself to believe it.

When I finally did drift off, there were nightmares.

Some were familiar, crystals that refused to glow, searing pain along my skin while my mother’s unearthly scream rent through the air. But some were new.

I saw a glacial battlefield, a sparkling crown coated in blood and half-buried in the snow. Children were frozen solid, fear contorting their small features. Winter soldiers trapped forever in the shock of being overtaken by their own king.

And the Unseelie Clans, united in an endless army of rage, blood still coating their jagged weapons or wings or fur underneath the icy shield that would serve as their tomb.

Once, I saw the Nivhallow heiress shatter, only this time, she wore my face. Then, over and over, I heard the Visionary.

Three.

Three.

Three.

Endless tolls of my own death knell.

Strangest of all, I saw myself, shivering in the queen’s suites while a deadly voice assured me that I should be afraid of him.

I was almost grateful when a perfunctory knock woke me from my halfway slumber, before I remembered that I needed to be on my guard. I bolted upright, ignoring the crick in my neck.

I doubted the King would bother to knock, let alone lightly, but everyone here was an enemy, in their way.

There wasn’t time to speculate further before the door eased open to admit the same maid from the day before, breakfast tray in hand. She headed toward the hall to the bedroom, stopping in her tracks when she spotted me in the chair.

“Was the bed not to your liking, Your Majesty?”

How she managed to inject so much disapproval into a solicitous question was a mystery for the ages.

I couldn’t very well tell her that the bedroom was too cold when my mana should have been enough to stave that off, let alone that the idea of fulfilling my queenly duties was enough to bring bile to my throat for so many reasons.

Besides, I was still reeling a bit from the fact that she was here with breakfast instead of someone summoning me to the throne room for death, so I settled on an awkward, noncommittal sound.

She pursed her lips, but didn’t comment.

Breakfast was far healthier than I would have preferred, especially if it was to be one of my final meals, but somehow I thought a plea for dessert would fall on deaf ears with this particular fae.

So I choked down my boiled quail eggs and unsweetened porridge, thanking her despite her sideways glances.

As soon as I had swallowed the final bite, she tried to usher me into the lavatory.

I narrowed my eyes. “For what?”

“A bath,” she said, like she didn’t know damned good and well I had been asking what she was preparing me for. “Unless you’d like to dress…as you are, of course.”

She curled her lip, gaze flitting to my hair, which was wildly askew with pins still stuck in it from last night’s updo. I’d managed to remove the crown, but that was as far as I got before giving up and sleeping in my stupid constricting wedding gown.

“Dress for what?” I clarified flatly, not bothering to respond to her censure.

The estate servants had been full of disdain for their master’s bastard, so I was well accustomed to ignoring the slights.

“For your duties as Queen.” Was she being vague on purpose?

Or delicate?

Shards.

Hadn’t I just been thinking that it made no sense for the king not to consummate?

“My queenly duties that consist of…?” I echoed in an effort to make her expound.