Page 9 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

I would never make it in time. The entire courtyard separated us, thick with snow and overgrown brambles crusted in ice. If she went through those doors, that was it. There was no going back. She’d be obligated to pass through the Mercy Gate. She would die.

All things being equal, I could outpace her easily. She’d learned to compensate for her limb difference, but she was also underfed and must have traveled for weeks to get to Canmar. But all things were not equal. She had a head start on me.

She was only a few heartbeats from reaching the door—and that brute of a man held it open for her. My mind did not have time to contemplate why a man like that, armed with weapons and reeking of brutality, would perform such a simple act of kindness as holding open a door for a young woman.

I ran.

But even as I did, I threw out my arms. Frost shot from my fingertips, coating the ground and turning to ice, racing atop the snow toward her. Faster, I urged the power in my veins. I ran harder, my body crashing forward over the ice.

The hulking beast in the doorway offered a hand to pull her in, but my ice was already there, rising up in spikes between them and shoving her to the ground.

I urged my feet faster, cursing the frosted ice that both helped and hindered, keeping her from the door but slipping traitorously beneath my feet.

I slammed into her, ice shattering and shards flying. Pain seared across my cheek, but all of my focus went to the slim body beneath me. I pinned her with my superior weight, making out her limbs and core. She was fully trapped. I exhaled a long, shaking breath.

But that was all the reprieve I got. She was already thrashing beneath me, trying to get free. She managed to roll, getting her back to the ground and bracing her hands on my shoulders so she could shove me away.

Her narrow fingers dug into my shoulders. “What the— you ,” she hissed through her teeth. I was too close to get a good look at her face, but I could feel her rage. Fine, rage all you want. At least you will be alive.

“Yes. Me.” I plunged one hand into the snow, levering my body off of hers but maneuvering so that I was between her and the doors to the temple. The doors—where the man from the tavern stood, watching the entire spectacle.

I gritted my teeth, waiting for him to say something. There was warmth at my back. He was still standing there. Anger swirled in my stomach; we hardly needed an audience, and I was about to tell him so—no matter how fucking handsome and huge he was.

I clambered to my feet, slipping on the ice, resisting the natural urge to reach out to steady myself because he was the only thing I could have used to do it.

The reprimand died on my lips. I was too close to him.

Standing had brought us chest to stomach, because of our height discrepancy.

But I could see his face just fine, and the confusion he wore there as well.

His turquoise eyes moved from me to the other woman and then back again.

Whatever he saw, the quizzical angle of his brow softened.

Behind me, the young woman cursed. As I turned back to her, the doors of the temple clicked closed, the warm presence disappearing. Our value as entertainment had apparently run out.

The young woman in front of me had also gained her feet, and that was murder shining out of her honey-brown eyes as she stared me down.

“What…in the Dark God’s hell…” I panted, shoving out the words between breaths, “…are you doing in Canmar?”

Her anger didn’t disappear, but it softened slightly. For several beats, I thought she would not answer. But she finally opened her stubbornly familiar mouth to say, “My father is ill.”

“I don’t care,” I snapped back.

Her father had been a drain on her for years. His obsession with that fishing village had kept her in Velora even when they could barely bring in enough to feed themselves, let alone sell to anyone else.

Her cheeks had hollowed out in the last few months, making her high cheekbones even more prominent. Discomfort settled in my chest. She looked so much like my sister, especially when she glared at me like that.

I could avoid thinking of her name, refuse to acknowledge what she was to me. But the ache spreading into my shoulders and stomach did not care what my mind pretended.

Kyrelle was the last. Every other one of my sister’s descendants had left Velora at some point over the last four hundred years. All except for Kyrelle, Rylynn’s thirteen times great-granddaughter. She was just as fucking stubborn as my sister ever was.

She did not argue with me. Kyrelle knew exactly what I thought of her father.

She tried to shove past me, reaching for the door.

But I shouldered her back. She may have a few inches on me, but I was wider and stronger.

I was a fucking immortal, and she was a starving human.

There was no way I would let her enter that temple.

I rolled my shoulders, positioning myself between the double doors, covering the handles. “I gave you a spell.”

“And it wore off.”

Of course it did. It had been the first I cast after I was ousted from my coven.

Honestly, I was surprised it had lasted this long.

Ever since her mother had fallen for her useless father and settled in that fishing village, I’d traveled to the coast every few years to cast another spell that would fill their nets.

Then her mother died. I was cast out from my coven, and even the spells weren’t enough.

I’d spent three hundred and seventy-seven years keeping my sister’s line alive in one way or another, only for Kyrelle to try something as reckless as attempting the Seven Gates.

There was no way in the Dark God’s eternal, frozen hell that I would let her through those doors. Anger started to replace the ache. Good. Anger was more comfortable than longing.

“I did not save you for this,” I seethed.

“I never asked for your help. I do not want it,” she countered.

She tried for the doors again. Again, I pushed her back. “How will this help your father?”

“If there is magic in Velora, we will not need your spells to fill our nets. We will be able to afford a healer. The fae will come back, and with them, their healing magic.”

I shouldn’t have laughed in her face, but I could not stop the cold, acerbic sound.

“And will your father still be alive in the time it will take you to pass through all the gates? To save up enough coin for a healer, to summon those mythical fae? The fae have taken everything—and if you are rash enough to seek them out, they will take you, as well. Not that it would matter.” Because the gates would kill her well before that.

Kyrelle’s face twisted, her beautiful features sharpening with something deeper than rage. “You think I am weak.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. And I meant it. I could not fathom what it felt like to be a human in Velora in the four hundredth year of the curse.

What kind of strength it must take to wake up every damn day, knowing that your body was failing because the land itself was dying, minute by minute, day by day.

My power would die eventually, and my body with it. But at least I had a chance; options, meager as they were. Kyrelle was only alive by the grace of the gifts given to me by the Dark God. And the choices I’d made.

I did not lose everything so that she could die for nothing .

“If you enter that temple, you will die. Then your father will die. Alone, without ever knowing what happened to you. They don’t send word back to the families of those who die at the gates.

They stopped doing that a long time ago.

” There simply weren’t reliable mail routes anymore.

The population of Velora had dwindled too low to facilitate them. Or need them.

I waited, watching for the surrender on her face. Kyrelle was stubborn, but she was not stupid. She’d let me come year after year to cast my spell, even though she hated the sight of me.

But she did not yield. So I used the wound my words had already created to push deeper.

“Your father will waste away, too weak to pull in the fishing nets. He will sit at that window by the road, watching and waiting for a daughter who will never come. He will waste away to nothing, and the entire world will forget that he even existed.”

Kyrelle entire face flushed red. She pulled a dagger from her belt, springing forward and driving it toward my chest. She was faster than I’d expected, but the tip hit my shoulder, encountered the padded leather and ricocheted off, disappearing into the snow at our feet.

There wasn’t put enough force behind her blow.

That was just inexperience. I could see in her face that if she could have killed me, she would have.

How fucking ironic. One family had ousted me. The other wanted to kill me. It seemed that neither bonds of power nor blood were enough to keep someone with me. On my side.

“I don’t need you to like me,” I said, knowing the words were mostly for myself. “I just need you to stay alive.”

Kyrelle’s chest heaved up and down, the exertion of crossing through the snow, tumbling with me on the ground, and trying to stab me too much for her weakened body.

I reached for my belt. Kyrelle flinched back. My stomach clenched. I would never harm her—I had done everything, even pushing the bounds of my own coven, to protect her. But still she flinched.

I unhooked the purse of money and shoved it inside the folds of her cloak, out of sight. “Split it into multiple pouches and hide it against your body. Get on a ship and get out of Velora.”

It wasn’t enough, not for two people. Not even for one. But now that he was ill, maybe her father would finally do the right thing. Maybe he would sell off the remainder of their possessions and make her go.

Kyrelle caught the bag, bending her arm to keep the purse secreted within the folds of her cloak. She stared at the ground between us. When she lifted her head to meet my eyes, relief flooded my senses.

Until she shook her head.

“No. It is not just his body that is giving up, it is his heart. He won’t survive a trip across the sea. I have to go through the gates and lift the curse. It is the only way.”

She said it with such conviction, such belief and love brimming from every word. She loved her father and would do anything for him, including giving up her own life.

I’d never been loved like that. Or if I had, my mother had died too young for me to remember it. Ever since then, I’d been searching. But to dwell too long on what I’d found—and what I hadn’t—was much too dangerous for my fragile psyche.

“Kyrelle—”

“I must do it.”

“No.”

“Let me go.” She ducked under my arm and managed to get a hand on the worn-down door handle. I twisted, grabbing her wrist and wrenching it away. But the door was already opening. Kyrelle threw all of her body weight at it. It wasn’t much, but I was off balance.

In the space of an inhale, I made my decision.

She wasn’t going through that door. I was.

I shoved her out of the way as I stumbled backward into the temple.

“Go,” I could only mouth, all of the air knocked from my chest by the fall. “Go,” I tried again and failed. Then I kicked the door closed and sealed my own fate.