Page 32 of Shadow Throne King

No wonder my mother had said the north didn’t cry when the last ice dragon died. No wonder she had gifted me the last egg, hoping to unleash such a cold enemy on the Southern Imperium.

“Treat it like a friend. A friend you have made here, one you must always keep your eye on for fear that it will stab you in the back.” Her eyes drew me in, and when she reached out, I opened my hand to accept her small palm. It was frozen cold, and I wrapped my fingers around hers. She glared at me. “Take it.”

I found myself holding a small nugget of ice, prismatic and glistening, and completely unmelting in my hand. When I closed my hands around it, I could hear a thrum, a vibration, and I gasped. It was the same feeling I got when I could hear electro magic or when I had witnessed Miksha using her blood magic.

Those were not real voices, not separate beings, but the echo of their users’ intentions, the magic the tool they were using, as a leatherworker chose the right needle, the right awl for the pelt she was given.

“But it’s not… it’s not real,” I said, suddenly understanding. “It’s not a person. It’s me.”

“Yes,” Naî said, delighted. “Yes! It’s you, an extension of you, an unused third arm, but one you must be careful of because it is dangerous.”

An iceberg was so large, so lethal, and so beautiful, that I realized why the great northern bear’s son might have fallen in love with it. After all, I had fallen in love with Tallu.

If the ice magic was an extension of me, then it was mydesire, mybeliefthat was the driving force. All the techniques in the world were useless if I didn’t actuallywantanything, if I didn’t have the conviction to know that the magic would work for me.

And I knew what I wanted, just as clearly as Miksha had wanted to heal Velethuil, just as passionately as Commander Fimo had intended to kill me. I breathed out a long stream of air, then let myself truly reach for the ice. I tried to think of it like pulling on my leather armor, like grabbing hold of an unfamiliar wolf’s claw.

Wake him up. I felt my desire echo through the magic, and it was worse and better than I had assumed. The magic didn’t simply echo my desires, it amplified them, like sunlight reflected off of mirrors and refracted through a prism.

Wake him up.

The threads of frost glimmered in the air, catching everything around us like a spiderweb. Everything else was frozen in time, except for Naî and me.

The threads around Tallu began to shake, fracturing one at a time until Tallu’s eyes snapped open.

He gasped a deep breath, sitting up and coughing. When his russet eyes met mine, both of his eyebrows went up.

“Airón?” He said my name as though that was the entirety of the question.

“Tallu.” I let myself smile, the feeling of it tremulous and hesitant but true. “I woke you up.”

Tallu frowned, looking around. He took in the lamp in the corner, its flickering light frozen, the tent flap halfway openfrom a chilly breeze, hanging in midair awkwardly. “I was not dreaming.”

I shook my head, feeling strangely guilty, the pang of it eating up my stomach. “No. But there was no way to tell you, not with every ear listening to our intimate conversations.”

His eyes finally landed on Naî, arms wrapped around her knees, holding them tight to her chest. She looked up at him through her pale eyelashes.

“Who is this?” But he was already searching the room, and from the way his eyes jerked back to her, he had realized that the dragon was missing. “Ice dragon.”

“At least you’re faster at it than I was. She dragged me through the forest before I figured out who she was. I’m beginning to think I’m the slower of the two of us.” But I couldn’t help the grin on my face.

I had saved him. I’d protected him when he was helpless. Moreover, now we had a way to speak with something close to the privacy we’d once used to be ourselves.

After all these days on the road, I had felt so stifled. There had been no way to share anything honestly; I couldn’t risk the wrong person hearing it. I had experienced a fraction of what Tallu had spent his entire life going through, and it made his strength of purpose all the more wondrous to me.

“But you woke me up.” Tallu frowned, rubbing his forehead, biting his lip as he considered the implications. He narrowed his eyes at the walls of the tent, at the frost hanging in the air. “What magic is this?”

“I’m learning ice magic,” I admitted. “Badly. Then again, who could correctly perform in less than a week a kind of magic no human has ever attempted?”

“How?” Tallu looked between me and Naî. When he turned back, he was frowning. “I thought you lost all of your magic when Commander Fimo stole it from you.”

“Well, apparently, when he tried to dig out my brain like a patch of mint growing in the garden, he left room for something else to bloom.” My lips stretched. Ihadheard Terror earlier. I would hold on to that fact; if I could learn ice magic, I could relearn animal speak.

“Your brain—your magic—is more to me than a patch of weeds in the garden.” Tallu reached out, and his fingertips were cold, as though they still retained some hint of the freeze I had freed him from. “Youarethe garden, you are all the flowers I would ever want to see, and all the fruit I would ever want to consume.”

“Talk to me like that and you’ll find out exactly what else we can do in this frozen bubble of time,” I teased.

“We must get on with the lesson,” Naî said.