Page 19 of Fractured (Royal Sins #3)

The book stopped vibrating, and the shimmer on it faded away right in front of my eyes. By the time I grabbed it and pulled it from the shelf, it looked like every other book in this place.

Until I opened it.

Thick yellowish pages were full of symbols I didn’t understand, written in black ink. They were big and they were unlike anything I’d seen before, but…

“It isn’t empty.” This fucking book wasn’t empty.

“Sit,” Vair said, and I did. Without thinking, I pulled back the chair near the table and I sat on the dust-covered cushion, the book in front of me, my eyes on those symbols.

“What is this language?” I whispered, and the lynx jumped right over the table. It didn’t scare me at all—I was too focused.

“Old Veren,” he said, and I could have guessed it myself. The first language of Verenthians.

I looked up at Vair who’d sat near my left side as he looked at the next page I turned—full of the same symbols in the same handwriting. “Can you read it?”

“No,” he said, and I flinched.

“So, what now? Do we have like a dictionary or something here? English to Old Veren, and vice versa, or something like that?” I looked behind at the shelf. “Do we?”

Yes, I was asking the room that.

Nothing moved. Nothing vibrated. No book shimmered that we could see, and we waited a good moment, too.

“Guess not,” I muttered and turned back to the symbols. “All right, maybe I can decipher this. These kind of look like H s…”

I picked up an old pencil I found discarded at the edge of the table, the lead tip rounded, well used, and I unrolled a scroll.

They were all empty, and I doubted anybody would mind if I wrote on them.

Vair said nothing as he watched me, and so I began to try to identify the symbols that looked close enough to the alphabet I knew.

My mind worked, and I actually believed that I could decipher whatever was written in these pages like this, that I could pick apart the letters I thought I understood, then guess the words they were trying to make accurately.

Of course, I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, and how relieved I was to have something concrete to do for once, I couldn’t just pick letters and try to make up words from scratch. It didn’t work that way.

That’s why I ended up throwing the pencil across the room in frustration, my tongue between my teeth so I wouldn’t scream.

The lynx didn’t make a single sound, only sat there and watched me torturing myself, cursing under my breath, trying to calm myself down.

“What the hell—what the hell—what do you want from me ?!” I spit—at the book, at the lynx, at the whole damn room .

Why was I there? What the hell did these… things want from me?!

Nobody said a single thing. Nothing made a sound. The starlight-colored flames burned around the torches, and I was left staring at that book without a clue what to make of any of this.

More. There had to be more books in this room that weren’t empty. There had to be one that could tell me what the hell this room wanted me to know.

“What else? What more do you have here? Why are you keeping me here—what do you want me to know?!”

Again, well aware that I was trying to argue with a damn room here, but things were as they were, and nobody bothered to answer me. Even the lynx had decided to stand perfectly still now as he watched me, like he wasn’t alive at all.

Cursing under my breath, I slammed both hands on the table with all my strength, hoping to release some tension.

But my right hand fell right in the middle of those thick yellow pages full of symbols, and a split second before I pulled it up again, I saw the movement.

It was small, and it was very possible that I just made it up, but the ink had moved. The ink of those damn symbols moved when my hand was on that paper, and now my heart took a long pause, and I didn’t breathe at all.

Vair leaned closer, sniffing the edges of the book, which made me think he’d seen it, too.

My hand vibrated as I put it down on the page again just like the book had done on the shelf, my mind blank, all the anger faded away.

The ink began to shift again.

It was another one of those things that I’d have never believed had it not happened right in front of my eyes.

My fingers were outstretched over both pages of the book, and the ink that had made those symbols was moving, fading and blurring and rearranging itself—into Latin letters.

Forming words in English, slowly, like the book was still deciding whether to go through with it.

Whether to show me what those symbols meant.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered, pushing my hand down harder so I didn’t disrupt whatever the hell kind of magic seemed to be in this book.

Within the minute, the whole passage had been translated for me.

“The stars named her ending, foresaw a quiet death, a still crown. But frost does not yield—it splits, and through the cracks she slipped; wounded—not the flesh, but time itself. The breath she took after the last breath unraveled more than her own thread. The magic remembers. The realm remembers.”

The words left my lips in a whisper—or maybe it was Vair who spoke them? It didn’t matter because we both heard it.

I read the whole passage over and over again, the letters big, impossible to miss or read wrong.

“Is it…is this talking about the Ice Queen?” I asked after the fifth time—and I still wasn’t close to understanding it.

“It is,” Vair said. “Is there more?”

My heart jumped. I turned the page, careful to keep my hand on it at all times, and it seemed all the symbols in the book had shifted, too, and they were all in English now, but…

“It’s the same paragraph. The same words,” I whispered, turning page after page until I reached the end of the book. All of it was filled with the same passage.

Vair sat down on the edge of the table again. “Read it out loud one more time, please.”

The way he said it—like he might be on the brink of tears. At least that’s what I sounded like when I was about to start crying.

But Vair didn’t shed a tear, and I read the passage again out loud, but the words didn’t make any more sense than they did the first time.

A goddamn riddle given to me by a fucking room that had locked me inside itself.

“Is there anything else? Do you have more to show me?” I asked after a while, but I got no answer. The room didn’t give a shit—this was all I was going to get.

And I swore I wouldn’t rest until I understood what this passage meant even if it took me the whole day.

Not sure how much time passed, but must have been more than a few hours, judging by how numb my ass was.

Still sitting at that table, still with my hand over the edges of the book, still reading the passage that I’d memorized completely by now. “Anything?” I asked Vair, who had jumped off the table and was pacing around the room as he thought.

He, too, had memorized the entire thing.

“Nothing,” he told me, just like the last six times I asked.

Which wasn’t surprising because these words didn’t make a lot of sense.

“The stars named her ending—that’s the prophecy, right?” I said .

“Correct,” said the lynx, coming closer to the table.

“The prophecy that foresaw her death. And then frost does not yield —does that mean frostfire?” The magic that Vair claimed I’d unleashed when I thought I was going to die in the forest. The magic I hadn’t allowed myself to think about at all, not yet.

“Could be. Through it, she slipped and wounded time,” the lynx said.

“How does one do that?” Because it sounded pretty impossible to me. “How does one wound time ?”

“I don’t know.”

Those three fucking words.

My eyes closed, I breathed deeply, and I recited the words in my mind again. “ The breath she took after the last breath unraveled more than her own thread —that makes absolutely no sense. One doesn’t take more breaths after the last one. You don’t breathe when you’re fucking dead. You don’t?—”

A ringing in my ears just then, and it wasn’t even the lynx talking this time. It was my voice in my own head that demanded I stop.

“You don’t breathe when you’re dead. You don’t take another breath after the last.” I read the sentence again, twice, just to make sure I’d read it right. I had.

“No, you do not,” Vair said, and he was already by the table, looking up at me, waiting.

“What if…what if she was alive?” I wondered. “What if she…I don’t know, survived, like you said, but in the literal sense or something? Is that possible?”

“Her body was buried. All the land saw it,” said Vair.

“I saw a dead body once. It wasn’t real at all.” And the image of Lyall with that knife sticking out of his chest was right there in the center of my mind. “ I was a dying body once, to everyone watching.” Yet I had never died. I’d never bled. I’d never been stabbed through the heart by Rune.

“Illusion?” Vair said in wonder.

“Possible. The prophecy foresaw her death, but you said it yourself that she planned to survive it.”

“Yes—but I don’t remember how.”

I nodded, read the passage again. “It’s very clear here that she was still alive after she took her last breath, however the fuck that works, but she was alive to breathe one more time. She was supposed to die, but maybe she didn’t.”

Silence in the room. Vair was as motionless as the table in front of me. I couldn’t bring myself to move at all for a good moment, either, my mind working, my eyes closed.

Then he said, “You cannot stop a prophecy. It has to be fulfilled. The prophecy foresaw her death.”

“But she didn’t die if she took another breath after the fact—that’s not how death works.”

“The prophecy?—”

“Yes, I know the prophecy said she had to die, but she didn’t, according to this.” That’s the only way I could understand it, the only way this passage made even a little bit of sense.

“It was her fate,” the lynx said, his voice— my voice—breathless. “ That was her fate.”

“Yeah, well, according to this book, she didn’t give a damn about it.” I shook my head with a sigh. “If that was her fate, she must’ve… I don’t know, cheated it somehow.”

Something inside me clicked—something cold. Something so familiar now that it scared me simply because I recognized it.

I looked up at the room, at the fire burning on those torches, the ceiling, the windows on the edges that still refused to show me whether it was day or night outside…

“Is that why I’m here then, Vair? Because the Ice Queen cheated her fate?”

My voice echoed a dozen times, like the room was saying the same thing back to me.

And with the last echo came a groan from the very walls, then a click.

Before my eyes, the doors on the walls across from me pushed themselves open.