Page 16 of Fractured (Royal Sins #3)

eleven

“Stop.”

My voice was identical to the one this creature spoke in.

I said stop and it did.

Too messed up. This whole thing was too fucking senseless, so I didn’t even try to figure anything out. Right now my goal was to survive, to run away, get out there where I could find Rune. Not get eaten by a creature who looked like a mythological animal and who spoke— with my own voice.

But it stopped.

When it was still ten feet away from me, it sat on its hind legs, thick fluffy tail at its side. It watched me with a curious expression, an intelligent expression—like it was a person, not an animal. So far away from the dogs in that cave, though I’d thought they were intelligent creatures, too.

This was different.

I waited with my heart in my throat for it to speak again, and it wouldn’t. It just sat there now, as if to prove to me that I had indeed made the whole thing up, and it watched me, blinking once for every ten times I did .

Noise in my head.

“What are you going to do to me?”

Yes, I was aware that I was speaking to what looked like an animal here, and I’d spoken to Maera when I thought she was a dog, too, but this was a whole other level. Damn it, I’d heard this creature speaking with my own ears!

“Depends.”

A word. Depends.

Its jaws moved and it spoke with my own voice, though I sounded a bit breathless just then. When I spoke through its jaws.

God, what the hell is happening to me?!

“On what?”

“On who you are. On what you’re going to do to you,” it said because it was impossible for a single person or thing or creature in this fucking place to give me one straight answer for once in my life.

Fuck, I was fuming from the ears—but it served me, the anger. I was no longer as afraid as I sat up straighter against the wall.

“Where are we?” And I really didn’t expect an answer to that, either, but…

“In the Ice Palace.”

Goose bumps all over my arms. “And where is the Ice Palace?” I asked, even though something told me I already knew the answer.

“In the Frozen Court of Verenthia.”

Bingo.

Trying not to panic and start bawling like a damn baby right now was difficult, but I managed.

“Okay,” I breathed, and I sounded like a fucking joke to my own ears. “Okay, okay, cool. We’re in the Frozen Court. Right. ”

My train of thoughts crashed about two hundred times within a minute.

“Um…you wouldn’t happen to know why I’m in the Frozen Court of Verenthia?” I finally said.

A second of silence.

The creature finally lowered its head a little, took those icy eyes off me.

“That, I do not know yet.”

“But you brought me here.” I remembered how he’d dragged me by the ankle—I remembered it.

“I did.”

“So why did you?”

The creature raised its head again, looked me straight in the eye. “Because this is where you have to be.”

Somehow, I didn’t laugh at the sheer absurdity of this whole thing. Instead, I made it to my feet, and I didn’t even need to use the wall for support.

“ Why, though? Why is this where I have to be? You don’t even know me. What the hell—you’re talking in my voice—care to explain that little part to me? Or do you conveniently not know that, either? Who are you?!”

Not my proudest moment to be screaming at a creature who might very well not be real at all, I’ll admit, but I was this close to losing it and exploding in hysterics, so I cut myself some slack.

“I am Vair.”

A name. It had a name .

“I talk in your voice because that’s the only voice I have.” Fuck me. “The parts of you I don’t know are the parts of me I don’t know, and one of them is the reason why.”

My mouth opened and closed several times before I could give voice to my one hilariously absurd question: “Meaning? ”

“Meaning I’ll know the reason why when you know the reason why.”

I shook my head over and over again.

“ What are you?” Because Vair didn’t seem like the proper answer.

“I am a snow lynx.” Except he looked different from the lynxes back home, didn’t he? Though when I thought about it now, a lynx was definitely the closest animal that resembled him.

“A lynx.”

“I used to be a gift.” Again, he lowered his head.

“Are you…are you a girl or a boy?” What a weird fucking question to ask but I was stuck thinking of it as him even though he spoke with my voice.

“I am neither, but the name given to me is male.”

“By whom?”

Another second of loaded silence. “I don’t remember.”

How awfully convenient.

I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, called for order in my head the way a judge would in a courtroom. Unfortunately, my thoughts didn’t give a shit how hard I slammed that hammer against the metaphorical table in the middle of my mind.

“Nothing ever makes sense in this place— nothing .” Yet I was still here, still expected to figure it all out anyway. And I was still without Rune.

“Sense is found only when one opens their minds,” the lynx said, and I almost laughed.

“Oh, you know that answer to that one. Really, very convenient,” I muttered.

“You have lost energy. You have used frostfire. I suggest?—”

“Wait, wait, hold on a minute,” I said, raising my hands. “I didn’t use frostfire.” I wouldn’t know what the hell frostfire was if it smacked me in the face.

“You did. It is how I heard you. How I found you.”

There I went again, playing a fish out of water while my vocal cords rearranged themselves from the beginning.

“That was…it was…that’s just cold ,” I ended up saying. “That was…it was magic. It was just cold.”

“Frostfire is not cold. It’s merely sharp,” the lynx said.

“No, no—I know what I felt. It was cold and then it burst out of me because I thought we were going to die. I thought it would kill me first when it exploded—it’s just cold. ”

Just cold, just cold, just cold, I said for another hundred times as I paced around in a circle in front of those locked doors, and the lynx let me. He only watched me until I stopped moving.

Then, he said, “Frostfire doesn’t kill. It purifies.” I looked at him. “The whisper of a memory says so.”

This time I did laugh. It was bitter and it scratched my throat on the way out, but how could I not?

“Wow! Really, bravo!” And I clapped my hands. “Whoever put you up to this, or whoever is orchestrating this illusion, bra-fucking-vo!”

I shouted so loudly my voice echoed in the tall ceiling a million times, so powerful that it scared me a little.

But who was I kidding— everything scared me right now. My own self the most.

Frostfire. I’d heard that word before. The magic of the Ice fae, the same frostfire that that sorcerer chained to the altar in Mysthaven said he felt in me.

“Sleep, Nilah Dune. Rest. Your mind needs it.”

This from the lynx. The silvery white lynx who looked very different from the lynxes back home, and who spoke in my voice, and who’d somehow dragged me all the way to the Frozen Court by the ankle.

The lynx.

And the sad part? I knew he was right. Whether this was real or an illusion, I knew that I wasn’t going to figure anything out if I kept screaming and laughing hysterically while tears streamed down my face.

That’s why I found myself walking up to one of those blue velvet couches covered in dust, as if possessed by another being.

That’s how I lay down on the round pillow that had turned grey, closed my eyes and pretended that I wasn’t shaking, wasn’t crying, wasn’t dying on the inside while I breathed.

That’s how I fell asleep with the lynx still sitting there by the table.

Even though he said nothing, I felt those icy blue eyes on me all the same, and they followed me deep into the nightmares that haunted me for however long I slept.

When I woke up, they were right in front of me.

I was trying to keep it together. Really trying, even if trying looked like me sitting at the edge of a dusty sofa with my hands in front of my face, chanting to myself, not real, not real, not real, with my eyes squeezed shut tightly.

I was still trying to find a way to accept that I was trapped in this room made of stone with a silvery white lynx who used my voice to speak like it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do.

This time, though, I’d actually slept. Not sure for how long—there were no clocks here that I could see, just an hourglass with white sand inside it that had long since fallen to the bottom—but it had worked.

My head was indeed clearer and when I ordered my thoughts to calm down, they did.

When I told myself to take in a deep breath, to stop whispering, to look and see if the creature was still there, I did.

I put my hands down and I opened my eyes and I saw the lynx sitting there on his hind legs, licking his paw in silence.

Vair. His name was Vair, and he had dragged me all the way to the Frozen Court, if I could even trust myself enough to believe what he said.

Fuck, I wished he’d speak. I wished he’d tell me everything he knew. I wished he’d stopped talking in riddles and get to the fucking point?—

“Did you rest?”

He put his paw down and raised his head, licking his lips as he watched me with those wide blue eyes.

His voice was still mine.

“Yes.”

“Are you ready to know more?”

God, yes. “I am.” My heart jumped and I put my legs down, dragged myself closer to the edge of the sofa. “I am ready to know everything.”

“I do not know everything, I’m afraid,” the lynx said, stretching his neck to the side exactly like a cat would do.

I was wrong, he was smaller than Maera had been.

It was just his fur that was fluffy and made him look bigger than he actually was—which begged the question, how could he have dragged me here all the way from the Mercove by the ankle?

Because there was no sign of his teeth anywhere on my skin—not even a little redness. So how?!

But as incredulous as it sounds, that question was not important right now.