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Chapter 72

Lotte

She dreamed of the Ice Heart Girl.

Once, in the days when stories were real, there was a girl with a stepmother.

The girl was beautiful, as all girls in stories were.

And the stepmother was jealous, as all the stepmothers in stories were.

One day, the stepmother sent the girl out into the snow to search for holly to hang above the hearth. The stepmother sent a knight under the pretense that he would protect her. But really, he had orders to kill her and return with her heart.

The knight was loyal. He followed orders.

The girl’s heart dripped blood all the way home.

If she wasn’t a girl in a story, that would be where it ended. But in this story, she was found lying in the snow by a Vettir, an immortal spirit who was both born of winter and the maker of it.

He was so taken by her beauty that he crafted her a new heart out of ice. The girl rose from her deathbed of snow and followed the drops of blood that had fallen from her own stolen heart all the way home.

When she got there, she couldn’t find her heart. She searched every chest and every cabinet and every drawer. And when she was done with those, she started searching the inhabitants of the home. One by one, she ripped out the hearts of every person living in her father’s great hall, to see if any of them were hers.

It didn’t matter how they pleaded for mercy. The girl had been kind once, but her heart was ice now.

Her stepmother was the last person she searched for the heart. She didn’t think she would have it. The girl had offered her heart to her stepmother many times before, and the woman had refused it. The stepmother begged like everyone else had, but with her dying breath, she finally told the Ice Heart Girl what they had done with her heart.

They had thrown it in the fire.

And so, the Ice Heart Girl plunged her frozen fingers into the last embers of the fire, and there she pulled out the smoldering lump that was left of her first heart. She put it next to her new ice heart. And then…none of the stories agreed on what happened next. Whether the ember melted the ice, or the ice doused the ember, or whether they both burned the other one out and the Ice Heart Girl simply died.

Lotte’s hands flew to her chest, fingers clawing at her breastbone until she found her heart, beating frantically in her chest.

She was awake.

She was alive.

Drugged. Not dead.

She remembered what her grandmother had said the first time they’d met. That she would never kill her own blood. Lotte hadn’t believed her then. And she hadn’t believed her when Lis had closed in on her with a drawn knife.

Maybe Mercy Holtzfall didn’t have the guts of the Ice Heart Girl’s stepmother. Or, more likely, there was some other reason she was being kept alive.

She didn’t have to open her eyes to know where she was. She had slept in this bed for sixteen years. At least, on the nights when she hadn’t been confined to the briar pit. Now, as she fought her way out of the last of the drugged sleep, she was aware of dusk’s light leaking through the small window of the cell.

She used to rise at dawn here in the convent. Now she was rising at sunset. It seemed she had picked up some things from the Holtzfalls after all.

Lotte struggled to sit up, her body weak.

She had no idea how long it had been since her fight with her mother in Walstad. Hours, days…months. It might be all over. The last trials of the Veritaz gone.

Nora might be Heiress.

Or she might be dead.

She managed to pull herself out of bed, stumbling toward the door. Nora’s last words to her echoed in her mind.

As long as I’m wearing a ring, you’ll have a place in this family.

The door rattled, firmly locked under her hand.

The old familiar anger and fear that Lotte always felt in the convent began to rise. The feeling of helplessness. Of being trapped here. Of being alone and unwanted.

Except she wasn’t.

She was Ottoline Holtzfall.

The thought occurred to her so suddenly and so simply that it caught Lotte off guard.

She was Ottoline Holtzfall. She wasn’t powerless.

A handful of charms, courtesy of Nora, had adorned her hands when she’d stood across from her mother. But they’d taken those. Lotte moved toward the suitcase she saw in the corner. But as she rifled through it, she realized that it had nothing but the plain dress she had worn when she arrived in Walstad. There was nothing else in there. Nothing left of her life in the city.

And then something sharp pressed against her breastbone. Right above her heart.

For the first time, Lotte took stock of what she was wearing.

It was the same dress she had worn to the dance hall, still smelling faintly of smoke. And over it was Theo’s jacket. The jacket she had worn that day on the balcony, when Nora had first tried to teach her how to activate charms.

Lotte felt around the collar of the jacket until her fingers closed over it. The tiny silver pin that was meant to light a candle. Lotte turned the silver pin in her hands, the charmed symbols catching the last of the light through the window, desperation cracking into hope. She would rather have been accidentally left with the lasa charm she had used to open the door at Johannes this was a trial, and it wasn’t one meant for anyone but a Holtzfall—even if it had been inflicted on so many who weren’t playing their games. Journalists had been poised, waiting, waiting, until at last Grace Holtzfall broke back through the ice.

She had barely dragged herself up before she turned back to the frozen surface in a desperate bid to get to her brothers and sisters. She’d been fast. Fast enough to save almost all the other Holtzfalls.

But not fast enough to save everyone.

The newspapers only ever remembered that trial as the day that Valor Holtzfall drowned. His name, his young face, on every paper, as the city seemed to be expected to mourn him. They never mentioned the names of the two dozen others who had been killed.

Certainly not Nik’s. There were no photographs of him printed day after day, saying how tragic it was to die so young. There were no pictures of the mourners at his funeral under headlines about how brave the Holtzfalls were to go on with the trials without him.

As usual, the Holtzfalls didn’t know what they had cost others, and they didn’t care. They didn’t care that they’d taken Brigitta Kleiner’s whole future. Forced her out of the city to swear herself to a convent to avoid starving to death.

And even here, she hadn’t been free of the Holtzfalls.

Grace Holtzfall had arrived in a sleek black car, wrapped in furs and pearls, with a knight at her shoulder. As if she had come to taunt Brigitta. That her little problem could be solved by coming here for a few months. And then she could just leave, wrapped in those same pearls, shedding her shameful child like an accessory that wasn’t in fashion.

Brigitta could feel her resentment swelling to fill her entirely, burning her to rot inside. They might not care about the child that she left behind any more than they would care about Brigitta or the boy she lost to the ice. But this girl was still a Holtzfall. The closest Brigitta Kleiner would ever get to having her revenge for what they had taken from her.

“Let go of me, you wretched girl.” Sister Brigitta yanked her hand out of Lotte’s grip, splashing candle wax across Lotte’s palm as she pulled back. But it was too late.

Lotte knew everything.

All this time, she had thought of herself as nameless.

All the time in the city, she had struggled to believe she was a Holtzfall.

But she had always been one.

She had pulled away from the heirship because she had believed she was unworthy. Because no matter how far away she was, there had always been some small voice whispering that she was unworthy of it. Unworthy of her family.

But now she was looking that voice in the face. And she saw her for who she really was.

She saw herself for who she really was.

“You know who I am,” Ottoline said calmly. “And you didn’t have a choice in what my family cost you on the ice.” Sister Brigitta’s face blanched at the mention of what she had seen in her mind. “So I’ll give you a choice now: Move out of my way or I will burn the whole convent to the ground.”

Sister Brigitta hesitated for just a second. And Lotte found herself wondering whether her hatred of the Holtzfall family really would get the better of her. Whether she would stand her ground. Whether she might think Lotte was bluffing.

And then finally, Sister Brigitta moved.

It was the right choice. Because the Sisters had been right about Lotte her whole life. She wasn’t very virtuous. Certainly not virtuous enough that she would have felt guilty setting this place alight.