Page 23 of Fractured (Royal Sins #3)

fifteen

The day ended, and night came.

The starlight-colored flames atop the torches danced tirelessly, sometimes slower, sometimes faster while I talked to myself, and sometimes to Vair, too.

About the absurdity of this entire situation, about the fact that I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone who actually knew anything about this place or the queen, but mostly about how the queen could have cheated her fate.

Sleep took me, and this time I sat at the corner of the bed, so when I woke in the morning to a bit of snow falling from the sky, I was lying at the very edge of it.

Not entirely sure why I hadn’t just lied down properly.

The sheets were clean and soft, silky, and they smelled faintly of roses, and the bed looked really comfortable, yet I hadn’t dared to even pull the cover down.

It wasn’t cold in the room, though. Even if the walls sometimes looked like they were made of ice and frost, they weren’t.

The stone was warm against my skin anytime I touched it.

Moonstone, Vair called it. It was stone that could only be found in the Frozen Court soil, and it was infused with moon magic as well.

Of course, I asked how, but he didn’t know.

Just like most important things, Vair had no clue how to answer my questions, which sometimes made me wonder if his memory was purposely erased.

By someone else, someone who knew that he knew too much.

Someone who was cruel enough to pull it off—like the Midnight King, or even Lyall, if he’d had reason.

Yeah, all fae seemed to have a knack for doing evil shit. Maera had been right all along when she told me to watch out for them.

But the day started and I continued to search every book and every crack on the walls, under the bed and in the bathroom.

The palace let me go back to the room I’d woken up in, too.

I searched all the books in there again all day, hoping to catch a break.

A glimpse of something that might help me piece this together, but there was nothing there.

I grew angrier by the hour. I saw the world outside those windows, and I slammed my fists against the glass a few times, hoping to break it, but it wouldn’t budge.

Life went on out there. Time continued, except within these moonstone walls.

It was stuck here, I believed, even though the white sand in the hourglass I found in the first room moved each time I turned it.

When night fell, I sat in the middle of the bed, hugged my knees to my chest, and I thought of Rune as I looked up at the sky. As I cried in silence.

Vair asked, just like he had the night before: “Are you ready to learn magic now, Nilah?”

I’d said no last night, simply because the magic I did have was borrowed.

It wasn’t mine and I was not meant to know how to use it.

I was a human being, for fuck’s sake! Whatever the hell this was, it was all a mistake, a misunderstanding, and soon this fucking palace would realize it and let me leave.

But tonight I wasn’t going anywhere, and I didn’t even have it in me to tell Vair no . I just cried my tears in silence until my mind shut down.

The nightmares that had become so intense so suddenly woke me just as the sun began to rise beyond the horizon.

It was quiet in the bedroom, like always.

I found I’d climbed all the way to the pillows while I slept.

I hadn’t pulled down the covers, but I’d slept in the middle of the bed, my head over a pillow where the head of a queen—now dead—had rested, long ago.

Vair barely looked up when he heard me jumping off the bed to go to the bathroom. And when I came back, I didn’t ask the palace for breakfast. I wasn’t hungry—I was just angry. So damn angry my eyes were constantly filled with tears I refused to let out.

Slamming my fists against the windowsill did me no good.

The pain was welcome, though. It was physical, so much better than everything I felt, all the uncertainty, all the time that was being wasted here.

Time I could have spent by Rune’s side, figuring out a way out of this fucking realm.

Going back home to Earth where we wouldn’t have to worry about curses and prophecy and magic.

And it hadn’t escaped my attention how that cold that always came over me since that day Maera scratched me was never threatening to spill out of me uncontrollably anymore.

Since the moment I’d woken up in this place it was tame, like something was constantly pushing it back.

It was there, under my skin, only silent. Calm.

Convenient . Everything was so fucking convenient for everyone but me.

I continued to slam my fists against furniture, and I even picked up one of the empty vases and threw it at the floor, thinking it would break.

It didn’t, like it wasn’t made of glass at all.

It just rolled and basically hid underneath the coffee table of the first set of furniture, the one nearest the vanity table without a mirror on it.

A mirror that had been part of it once had extended from the white wood—I could see where it had been broken off, probably by the queen herself.

Now only cracked wood and empty drawers remained.

The moonstone wall constantly pulsated with veins of silver here and there like it wanted me to believe it was alive.

The stone, as well as the palace. All those little designs on it, most of roses, that had looked beautiful to me once.

Now everything had lost its shine, even though the sun was high up in the sky and the clouds that had spewed snow at the ground in the morning had moved to the sides to leave way for a few sun rays here and there.

“Are you ready to learn frostfire now, Nilah?”

Vair spoke and redirected my attention to his face. He sat on his back legs near the table, just like always, and watched me curiously, not sad now. He was never sad when he wasn’t thinking. When he wasn’t trying to remember. When he was focused on me instead.

“Sure thing, Vair,” I said, slamming my hands on my thighs.

“Sure thing—because I’m being held hostage by a fucking building!

How much worse could this really get for me, huh?

Not much, I bet ya. Not much, so why don’t you tell me how a human being can learn to do magic that doesn’t even belong to her, and she might not even really have! ”

That last part was bullshit—I did have the cold. That was magic, there was no doubt about it, and I felt it under my skin clearly. I just didn’t want to have to try it. I didn’t want to be part of whatever the hell this was.

“Good,” the lynx said—and he knew exactly how I felt, could see it in my face, could hear it in my shaking voice, but he pretended he didn’t.

He pretended everything was fine when he stood up and walked down the stairs, stopped a few feet away from me, and said, “Sit.”

That was certainly not what I expected. “Sit?”

“Yes. Sit. Right there, on the moonstone.”

Fuck, it was so hard to keep my calm. So damn hard not to resort to screaming and shouting and slamming my fists onto everything in this room until I bled all over.

So hard to choose to simply sit down, but I did. I’d been in the fae realm long enough now to know that I couldn’t force my way out of this, not now.

“Here I go, sitting down like a good little pup,” I said with fake sweetness, sitting cross-legged at the side of the room with the windows at my back.

“Now, speak,” Vair said, ignoring me completely.

“Speak what ?”

“Your truth, Nilah Dune. Your truth about the magic that is inside you.”

I flinched. “I really would rather you did the talking. You use my voice anyway.”

But Vair wouldn’t have it. “Speak, Nilah. From the beginning, tell us of your magic. The truth.”

The way he said it— the truth. It pissed me off and I didn’t even know why. But I told him the truth .

The damn truth about how Lyall had transferred his magic to me when he healed me, and how I’d been able to make things float in the air since.

As I spoke, I was reminded of the many times I punished myself for it, the many times I chose not to believe in my own eyes because of how the people around me treated me, how I always— always blamed myself, thought there was something wrong with me.

The many times I wished I’d been anybody else in the world.

Fuck, if I’d heard of anybody doing this to another person, I’d have labeled them cruel.

I had been cruel to my own self most of my life.

I cried as I spoke, even when I got to the part where Maera scratched me and I began to feel the cold. I cried when I gave the talking lynx and the sentient fucking palace my whole truth, all the way to the part where I’d exploded in that forest before Vair found me.

I told them everything, and when I was done, I felt so damn empty. Like something had been pulled out of me, and I thought Vair would be sad with me. I thought he’d tell me he was sorry for the shit I’d gone through, at the very least, but he didn’t.

Instead, he nodded his head and licked his lips and said, “Mortals cannot possess magic in any but one form—when they have been shaped into vessels by other magic first.”

“I—wait, what?” What the hell? “What about I’m sorry about everything you had to go through, Nilah? What about that part?”

He didn’t give a shit.

“So, it helps to understand that first,” he simply continued.

“Understand what, you insensible little… lynx ? That I’m a vessel ?! ”

A nod—how strange was it to see an animal nod, by the way. “Correct.”

I could only shake my head for a good moment. “Wow. You’re an asshole.”

“I am right.” He came and sat closer to me. “You are a vessel, and that is why the fae magic of the life-bond didn’t kill you, and that is why the moon magic of werewolves didn’t kill you, either. It activated you instead.”

“Activated you —you’re talking to me like I’m a damn robot.” Like I had a fucking button to be activated by.

“I don’t know what that is, only what you are.”

“Vair, I swear to God?—”

“Now I speak, Nilah. I tell you the truth of the magic that lingers underneath your skin. The same magic that only a few of the Ice fae possess. The magic that the Ice Queen had in abundance.”

There went my anger, turning into terror little by little.

“You don’t know that,” I whispered. “You don’t know that it’s the same thing. I’m not Ice fae—you said it yourself. I’m a…a vessel. ” And I’d rather be that than try to come to terms with the idea that I was somehow fae.

How absurd. How fucking ridiculous— how in the fuck did I get here again?

Oh, right. A little boy saved my life when I was five years old.

But Vair had apparently decided that whatever I said during this conversation was going to be ignored by him entirely, so he simply continued.

“Frostfire is not like other kinds of magic. It is one of the ancient magics that was born from the union of opposites. History tells us that it was first wielded by the fae who united ice and fire, and it has evolved since then. It does not destroy for destruction’s sake—it strips falsehoods and strips everything it touches down to its essence.

Frees it from corruption—when it is wielded right,” he said, and now you couldn’t pay me to interrupt him.

I wanted to hear everything he was going to say to me because I was finally getting a straightforward answer on one thing in this fucking realm.

“Frostfire responds best to truth seekers. It does not obey rage and it does not accept control—it demands respect,” Vair said. “Where most magic bends the world to the user’s will, frostfire does the opposite: it bends its user until they are true enough to use it.”

Words I’d heard before came back to me slowly. “The final stage of magic . ” That’s what Maera had called it.

“In a way,” Vair said.

“But what does it actually do? Like what…what does it do?!” I didn’t even know how to ask properly—that’s how ill-equipped to even have this conversation I was.

“Everything all magic does—and it also strips spells and illusions down. It burns through magical lies and cleanses corruption. Curse magic, spell rot, magic residue—it can all be cleansed by frostfire from a truthful wielder.”

I nodded—this I actually understood. “And what did it do to that forest then? If you’re so sure that was frostfire, why did it make that forest like that? So…silent.”

“That was unguided frostfire,” Vair said without hesitation. “It merely showed what the land was before—part of the Mercove sea. Underwater.”

“Holy shit, Vair…” How in the world did that make sense?

The color that had clung to everything, like some strange kind of hail or snow—or drops of water .

The way the leaves had moved like they were waving—or like they were underwater.

The way the entire forest had been so still—no birds and no animals and no insects .

“Magic shifts with time, and so does Verenthia. Centuries ago, all of the Mercove was underwater. Your magic merely took that piece of land back in time, for a while,” the lynx said, and I kept shaking my head at myself. No way. Just no way.

“And the people that were there will be all right, right? You said so—you said?—”

“Yes.” My mouth clamped shut. “Your frostfire didn’t hurt them.”

He was so certain when he said this, like he truly believed it.

All my insides twisted. “Help me, Vair,” I suddenly said, taking even myself by surprise. “Please, just help me get out of here—I have to find Rune.”

“I am,” the lynx said. “I’m helping you. Close your eyes and breathe and find the magic. Tell me what it feels like.”

That’s it—that’s all he said. No emotions going through his eyes now, no sadness—he just gave orders and I obeyed.

A tear or two slipped down my cheeks, but I did as he asked, and I spoke when he told me to—the truth. I told him nothing but the truth.

For the next few hours, all I managed to do was exhaust myself and burn through every ounce of energy in my body with pure, raw anger.