Page 11

11

BESSA

I watched the chandler as the chandler watched my candle. He seemed perplexed. Eska had gone wild, nipping and yipping, jumping all over my shoulders and down my dress until I followed her away from the candle shop and back to the castle. Even if she couldn’t speak, she still got her way, the feisty, little thing.

Somehow, she must have sensed the chandler lurking, because there he was. Lurking.

Well. Two could play that game. Quietly, we watched as he examined the remains of my candle of courage, running his finger through a drop of spilled wax, hardened on the scarred, wooden table. He brought it to his nose, and I saw one of his eyebrows quirk up. Then he turned on his heel and quickly left the council chamber, barely giving me enough time to hide in the shadows.

“What do you think?” I whispered to the fire fox. She lifted her nose to my face and licked my chin. “Just what I was thinking, too. Let’s go.”

We tiptoed after him, through the castle, out of the kitchen, and into the garden. Instead of turning toward the frozen river market and his candle shop, he headed for the woods. Throwing my hood over flaming red hair, I followed, Eska wrapped comfortingly around my shoulders. My mind whirled with questions.

The chandler plunged through the snow, seemingly unaffected by the rising wind and flurries that began to fall faster, until he disappeared through a particularly dense copse of trees. I froze in my tracks, Eska’s tail twitching manically around my neck.

“Stop tickling me,” I hissed. “We’re supposed to be spying. Where did he go, girl?” She yipped and vaulted off my shoulder, almost getting completely buried in the snow drifts as she hit the ground running. If it wasn’t for the black point on her tail, I couldn’t be sure where she was, although within seconds, every speck of snow around her fiery body melted.

She zoomed through the snow, leaving a wet mess as she went. For at least another half a mile, we searched to no avail.

“Come on,” I scolded. “We’ve lost him somehow, and I’ve got a ton to do back at the castle.”

But Eska wasn’t ready. Only out in the woods could she be free. I knew the feeling. I think it was one of the reasons we’d bonded so quickly. We both loved the intoxicating feeling of being free. No one judged the trees, nor the wind. No one whispered about prophecies or birth parents or twin brothers who’d imprisoned you. No one cared at all. That was true freedom.

I threw out my arms, reveling in the ability to shed my cloak and use the magic of my fire fox to keep me warm, twirling in one dizzying circle after another. Eska leapt up and down, following my loop with her own happy leaps. The snow melted, revealing a thick sublayer of ice. Beneath its glassy clearness, I could see the forest floor, twigs and mushrooms, frozen in time and place. On a whim, I placed the palm of my hand against the ice where a colony of red and white dotted toadstools were clustered. Slowly, then quicker, the ice melted around my hand, leaving soft indents of my fingers. My fingertip brushed the top of a toadstool, spongy and real. “Eska, what if I could do this everywhere?” I asked in awe, plucking the toadstool from the ground. “What if…”

“What if what?” said a voice.

I leapt to my feet, spinning around with the toadstool hidden behind my back and the guilt written all over my face. It was the chandler. “I thought you were gone,” I accused. He was standing right there, so large and so very male, out here alone in the woods.

He raised an eyebrow. “No, not gone. Simply slipping my pursuer.”

“I thought you hadn’t noticed,” I protested. “You didn’t act as if you were being followed.”

“Was I supposed to?” he asked.

“Oh you are so?—”

“Innocent of all charges?”

“Infuriating,” I finished.

Ambrose crouched down, his jacket dusting the snow as he sat on his heels and held out a fist. Eska, nose and whiskers twitching, put one paw toward him and then another. When she’d gotten within a few feet, he turned his fist over and opened it, revealing a piece of dried trout. In a snap quicker than human eyes could follow, she’d snatched it from his hand, swallowed it down, and jumped up to lick his face.

Ambrose fell backward in surprise, landing in a snow heap.

“Traitor,” I whispered to her, but she merely sat on a dead tree stump and began licking her paws.

“I think she likes me,” he said, a hint of mirth in his eyes. I wondered for a wild second what he looked like when he smiled, really truly smiled. And what it would feel like if I made that smile happen. Probably like winning a war.

I stood with my arms crossed tightly over my chest, however. “So? Are you going to tell everyone?”

Ambrose stood up, dusting the snow off his pants with bare hands. “I ran into your sister Mika. I’ll tell you exactly what I told her. I don’t gossip.”

“Is that a no? Because I think I could come up with some pretty interesting gossip myself to disseminate,” I said, staring pointedly at his bare hands, which didn’t seem the least bit frostbitten. They were large enough to wring a horse’s neck, if he wanted to, and calloused from years of physical labor. What kind, however, was harder to decipher, and it made me wonder about his history.

Ambrose tilted his head as if considering me, or perhaps he was revisiting his decision to stay in a kingdom ruled by a woman who clearly annoyed him. But all he said was, “Follow me.”

I cast a skeptical look at Eska, but the little red fire fox was already prancing behind Ambrose. After only one piece of lousy fish. He’d given me a whole magical candle, and I still didn’t trust him!

“Eska,” I hissed, trying to call her back, but she flipped her tail left and right, stoutly refusing to listen. “I’m going to make a real fur scarf out of you,” I threatened half-heartedly and then, sighing, grabbed my cloak and began to follow, too.

Ambrose left large footprints in the snow, and I had to hop to land in each one. His stride was as long as Noll the tavern keeper’s, and everyone knew Noll had ancient giant blood in him.

“Can you slow down?” I called, causing Ambrose to turn around and watch in some obvious amusement as I struggled.

“Why don’t you just melt the snow?” he asked.

I bit my lip. “So you did see that.”

He nodded. “Aye. I did. And I saw you melting the ice under the frost fair tents. It’s rather lucky Frostvale is so damnably cold that it refroze as soon as you stepped away. Isn’t it?”

I dropped the pretense. “Fine. Why don’t you tell me how you came to have a magical candle?”

“Who says it was magical? Courage is pretty subjective, don’t you think?”

“Are you telling me you gave me a placebo candle?” I demanded, but Ambrose put a finger to his mouth.

“Shh, we’re here. I don’t want you to accidentally scare them.”

“Them?” I whispered, my voice lowering to match his, although my heart had begun to race.

Ambrose reached out for my hand, his deep brown eyes, as nuanced as fertile soil, never left mine. I took it, and Ambrose pulled me behind him, guiding me toward a circle of trees. The ever-thickening pines suddenly thinned, as if by magic.

Even from a distance, I could feel the thermal vent’s warm embrace, the air full of life-giving heat. Somehow, he’d found another one in the woods. Everything in me strained to race to it, see what was hidden and try to understand. There was no dug-out tunnel to the warm vents for deep-earth farming. There was something blurry around it. Something my eyes couldn’t quite focus on. In fact, if Ambrose hadn’t pointed it out, my gaze would have slipped right over it to the next copse of trees and the next.

“Do you want to see my secret?” he asked.

“Why would you share your secret with me? I thought you didn’t trust me.”

“It would be better to have the trust of the queen than not.”

“I guess,” I said, still trying to get used to the fact that, when someone said ‘the queen’, they were talking about me.

“And to gain trust, one must offer it first,” Ambrose continued, as if trust were that simple. “And to be honest, I’ll simply pack up and leave if things go south.”

“That’s quite the attitude.”

He watched me closely, and I could feel my soul being flayed open and scoured clean like the sky after a blizzard. When his voice dropped, I leaned closer to catch his words. “Who says I don’t trust you?”

“You did,” I whispered back.

“Your majesty has lit the possibly-magic candle. I think you’ve earned a little bit of trust.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from him. “What does that mean?” My words caught in my throat.

“Only those with pure intentions can light a candle of mine,” Ambrose said, drawing me deeper into the grove. “You must have passed.”

I was mesmerized by his voice. He must be one of the ancient blood, truly mesmerizing me under some spell. Frostine be praised, he was tall, his beard neatly cropped. Most men in our frozen tundra kept theirs long out of sheer necessity as an added layer of protection against our endless winter.

“I knew it was a trick.”

“I’d call it a test.”

“As the queen, I should be angry about that.” And yet, I wasn’t. Not much. He hadn’t been bound by any laws to tell me, and if true, it meant his morals were worth more than his life. That was most rare.

“You could be angry about that,” he gently corrected, his eyes piercing a veil within me. “You could also be angry that I found a thermal vent and didn’t immediately tell the Glacial Council so they could tap into it for deep earth farming or whatever else they deemed necessary. Instead, I used it for my own purposes.”

“Which are what, Chandler?” I asked, making my voice severe, although it was much more difficult to do when my body churned at his voice and the cheeky grin he gave me to counter my scowl.

“Flowers, of course,” he said, muttering the words I’d never heard of before in a language I didn’t understand but sounded intoxicating and ancient.

Primus. Secundus. Tertius. Quartus. Nox.