Page 14

Chapter 14

Frost

It was unbelievable. I’d said it, out loud, the thing I’d been half thinking since my teen years: that part of me, maybe a big part of me, hated my mother.

I’d not only said it aloud, but in front of three people, and not one of them had even flinched at me.

Anyone who knows her hates her , Vex said. Look who’s in the car with you. Three of the people in the world who know her best .

Rain doesn’t hate her , I pointed out.

Vex scoffed at that. Rain’s incapable of hate. He didn’t even hate Huxley Dawnchaser. Even you hate that asshole, and you’re not properly sure you hate Delta like she deserves .

It was hard to deny that. Not the part about what Mother deserved, but about Huxley. Anyone who could even be a little mean to Fawn Dawnchaser was unquestionably a monster and a rightful target of any hate directed at them.

Rain didn’t see what Huxley did to Fawn and Florian .

Vex humphed at that, but he didn’t have an answer for it.

But also, he didn’t need to have an answer for it; his original point was reasonable and well-made. Rain was not someone who hated easily, and as Ember and Kit had pointed out, his personality was much better suited to getting along with Mother than anyone else.

Except . . .

“Was Mother really angry about me getting a better GPA than her?”

I’d always been rather proud of it. It had been the most impressive thing I’d accomplished in my entire life, which was frankly a little sad. A GPA didn’t change the world. It didn’t solve equations or cure diseases. It just said you were good at learning things, which I was.

It was perhaps the only thing I was truly good at.

“She was sick about it,” Ember said, sighing. “It was fucking bizarre, watching her try to deal. All our lives, she pushed us about getting better grades. About doing our very best, no matter what, because we didn’t want to let people down. Then you did better than her, and she fucking choked on it. Because she couldn’t be mad at you about it when you were just doing exactly what she’d ordered. So instead she started complaining about how school was easier than when she’d gone, and they needed to ‘strengthen their curriculum.’ The dean was not fucking impressed.”

“I remember that,” I agreed.

That conversation had been at a dinner the night of my graduation, ostensibly a dinner in my honor. Not that I did well at any social occasion, let alone ones that were supposed to be all about me, but this dinner had been one of the worst ever. Everyone had been awkward and angry and unpleasant. I’d ended up leaving early, which Mother had later berated me for, for not “acting like a normal person and being happy for once.”

“I can’t imagine you’d be able to forget it,” Ember said, rolling her eyes. “Worst party ever. She was such a petulant brat, and the dean wasn’t fucking having it. Only time I ever liked the guy.”

“He told her that I’d actually taken a more difficult course load than she had, and she should be proud of me instead of angry. She told him he was being ridiculous, and of course she was proud. But he was right, and she seemed so angry. She was angry with . . . me?”

Tellingly, my siblings went silent.

“It’s probably more that she was angry with the situation rather than you,” Caspian hedged. “It sounds like she’s, um, maybe a bit controlling? So she wouldn’t like when a situation is out of her control.”

Ember laid her head against the headrest, shaking it emphatically. “Nope. You’re sweet, Cas, but it was straight out of fucking Snow White. She was the wicked stepmother asking the dean to be her magic mirror and tell her she was still the smartest princess in all the land. But that crusty old bastard wasn’t having it. Nope, Prince Frosty is the smartest now, you old crow. And she almost had a fucking aneurysm.”

I found myself looking back on my life with a different lens.

It had been after that night that Mother had changed, hadn’t it? Suddenly, nothing I’d done had ever been enough. Everything I got wrong was important, and my accomplishments were minimized. She’d kept trying to press me into learning more about subjects I didn’t excel at, like psychology and sociology. Reminding me that I was only young once, and I should go to parties and nightclubs.

I’d always thought she was trying to get me to stretch myself, better myself by improving my weak points, but . . .

It hadn’t been that at all.

“Do you remember the Peerinal Conjecture?” I asked the car at large.

“The who now?” Ember asked.

Caspian just shook his head.

Kit, though. Kit instantly knew. He turned and met my eye. “You’re fucking joking.”

I shook my head. It was strange. I wasn’t sure why, but my eyes were watering. “I solved it. When I was eleven. I was in her office. She was having a meeting with my tutor because he was unhappy with my work in social studies, and I got bored while they were talking about lesson plans and all that. So I went over to where she had it on her whiteboard, and I just . . . I assumed if it was something she had on her board, it was just another math problem. So I solved it.”

“Was it, like, important?” Ember asked, this time downright confused.

“It was one of the problems posed by the Moonstriker Mathematics Institute. Five previously unsolved problems that they challenged people to solve. Like the mathematician version of discovering a new planet or curing a disease. Mother took credit for solving it. Seventeen years ago.”

Again, the car went silent.

Kit looked back at me again. “You never said anything.”

“I forgot about it for a long time. At first I didn’t even know what happened. When I saw it on the news, I asked her, and she told me that I was too young to be taking credit for things like that. That the journalists would have all wanted to talk to me, and was that what I wanted? All that attention?”

It had been one of the worst moments of my life, imagining it. She’d painted such a vivid picture about how journalists would have harassed me, dug up every unwise thing I’d ever done in my life to put it on the news. Made me look ridiculous.

I hadn’t even considered looking at the other four problems or trying to solve them after that.

Now, looking back, it was nonsense. I’d been eleven. No one would have cared about the time I’d called a schoolteacher “Mother” or the way I refused to wear shirts with collars too close to my neck.

They’d have been impressed that an eleven-year-old had done math. Had even cared to do math.

“That’s incredibly fucked up,” Caspian said when the car had been silent for a full minute. “I honestly can’t imagine what a person would have to be thinking to do that to anyone, let alone their own kid.”

“That’s Delta,” Kit said, but his tone said that he agreed entirely. “You should go back and look at the others, Frost. See if you can solve them too. Just blow her out of the fucking water.”

Ember scowled, crossing her arms over her chest, but looking like she wanted to throw herself out of the car to go looking for Mother right that moment. “And then tell the press the truth when they ask if she inspired him by solving the first one?”

Kit shook his head, smiling. “Nope. That’s not Frost’s style. He doesn’t need credit for things. But he can take credit for the other four, and then when someone asks if she inspired him, he can ask, ‘Oh, did she solve one?’ And just let her stew in her own fucking juices over it.”

“I knew you were the scariest motherfucker I ever met,” Caspian told Kit, laughing. But then he turned to me, squeezing my hand, still wrapped in his own. “Seriously, though, you should do that. She kind of sounds like a nightmare. You’re better than that. Better than her. Everyone should know about it.”

And for the first time in my entire life, I kind of wanted to do something and take credit for it. Sure, math problems, whatever. Those were the easy part.

But somehow, Caspian Sunrunner was making the hard part—people—easy as well. Because he himself was just so very easy. No confusing twists of language meant to leave me uncertain about what he’d meant. No cruel satisfaction over people not understanding him or his very impressive education and vocabulary.

Caspian was like no one else I’d ever met, other than maybe my siblings. But unlike them, he had no reason to care about me and did anyway. No one gave him anything to be nice to me. It wasn’t required by bonds of blood or familiarity. He was just that, just precisely what he appeared to be.

See? Vex demanded. Kit was right, as always. You’re going to collect this one .

“Wow,” Ember whispered.

For a moment, I thought maybe she was having the same revelation I was, that Caspian Sunrunner wasn’t just something special, but something altogether unique and spectacular. When I turned to look at her, though, all I could see was the city of Verisa laid out before us.

With most cities, there wouldn’t have been all that much to see in the middle of the night like this. Lights, sure, but city lights, while an impressive engineering feat, were not inherently beautiful or interesting.

These city lights . . .

I couldn’t even lay a finger on what made it different. Maybe it was the way that Verisa lay on the coast beneath two mountains, requiring one to drive down into the city, thereby first seeing the city in its entirety laid out in front of them. Maybe it was the dry desert air, and the way it made the lights twinkle in a way that looked almost like the stars. Maybe it was the fact that the people of Verisa hadn’t accepted yellow or white lights as standard, so the city was a rainbow of different colors.

Whatever it was, it was absolutely magical.

“They call it the most beautiful city in the world for a reason,” Caspian said, his voice almost shy as he spoke. “I like to think the residents don’t just say that because they’re high all the time. I’m not sure if they’re right, but I always think it’s pretty stunning. I’ve only seen a few cities, though.”

“They’re right,” Kit said, matter of fact. “I’ve been to Verisa before, so I’ve seen it in the daytime too. I’ve seen all the major cities in the Summerlands, and quite a few foreign ones as well. Verisa is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Frankly, considering how many of your people are high all the time, it’s a fucking wonder of the universe that you can keep it like this.”

Instead of Caspian, Ember looked to Kit. “How do they?”

Kit cleared his throat and ducked his head a little. “The extent to which the locals do drugs might be the tiniest bit exaggerated. Mostly because some of the drugs they do are illegal in the other families’ lands, so we look down on them for not following suit and making them all illegal.”

Caspian snorted. “You’ll note he doesn’t say people don’t do them there. Just that they’re illegal. My understanding is that there’s a very strong pipeline to Moonstriker lands for uppers. You mathy types want to stay up all night doing equations.”

He was right. I remembered very well the number of my classmates in college who had used illegal drugs to get through exam season. I’d seen it, and never said anything, because it had felt like it wasn’t my business. Besides, it had been all too easy to imagine falling into that trap myself if I hadn’t been so good at school. The notion of disappointing Mother had always terrified me, and nothing disappointed her more, more regularly, than Ember and Kit getting mediocre grades.

Except, I supposed in retrospect, me outdoing her.

Apparently that had been the biggest disappointment of all.

Somehow, that thought refused to linger in my mind, jamming up my emotions like a ball of barbed wire inside my brain, when I was looking down at Verisa.

The city, one of those places my childhood had taught me to fear, was perhaps the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my entire life.

And for some reason, that was freeing.

Once again, Mother and her teachings were wrong about something so important, so immense, that it couldn’t be overlooked any longer.

Mother was not just imperfect. She was downright wrong about a great many things.

And for the first time in my life, I was free.

Untethered by her demands and expectations.

How exhilarating.

How terrifying.

The night, the city lights, and the future were all laid out before me, full of possibilities I’d never even imagined before.