He looks at me, expectant.
I actually manage a chuckle. “You’re asking me? You’re the one with Ventrallan blood.”
Theron cocks a grin. “Ah, but I’d hoped some of me had rubbed off on you by now.”
My cheeks heat, egged on by the group of my advisors still watching us, by the way Theron straightens, tilting his head to me. I can’t tell if he knows Sir lied—all I can see is the look he gets whenever something artistic is around, a softening at his edges. Seeing him like this is such a nice change from his recent tension, balancing on the edge of fear and memories, that I almost miss where else I’ve seen it before.
I jolt with realization. It’s exactly how he looked at me on the fields outside of Gaos, and every time he wants to kiss me—like I’m a work of art he’s trying to interpret.
My heart thumps so loudly I’m sure he can hear. If we were standing in his room, he the prince of Cordell, myself a soldier of Winter, I would have swooned without another thought.
But I look around the tent, at Sir, Dendera, Alysson. Even Conall, Garrigan, and Nessa. They all look at me with similar gazes—like they’ve only ever known me as the queen of Winter, a figure owed reverence and worship.
I’m not a work of art or even worthy of their reverence. I’m someone who just helped lie to one of her closest friends.
This is what Winter needs. This is who Winter needs me to be.
I hate who I am now.
A deep rumble bubbles up through the earth. The vibration catches me off guard, numbness washing over me while the world quivers in a violent cacophony of tremors and belching thuds. A few abrupt seconds and it all drops as still and quiet as if nothing happened.
But something happened. Something that makes the families of the miners, still in the square, scream in terror, knowing what that noise and sensation means:
A cave-in.
Clarity hardens every nerve and I launch away from the table. My skirt tangles around my legs until I bundle it and push faster, but just as I angle across the square, someone grabs me.
“My queen!” Sir’s voice is his familiar tone of command. “You can’t—”
“There are miners down there,” I shout back. I can still feel the tremors in my legs. The people around me rush toward the mine entrance too, crowding against Cordellan soldiers who fight to keep them in the square until decisions can be made. “Mypeople. I’m the only one who can heal them, and I won’t let them stay down there!”
I knew we shouldn’t have opened this mine. And now, if some of my people have died because of Noam’s insistence on searching for something we will never find—I’ll kill him.
Sir’s grip tightens. “You’re the queen—you do not rush into collapsed mines!”
I almost scream at him. It fizzes in the back of my throat, and already I can feel parts of myself sigh at the familiarity of yelling at Sir.
But no scream comes. Because over the ridge rushes one of the Cordellan soldiers charged with guarding the entrance to the mine.
“A miner!” he announces over the square to cries for details. “Coming up the shaft!”
Relief springs in my gut. The magic—it gave them endurance and strength. Maybe it let one of them escape to run desperately fast up the mine shaft.
Sir pushes through the crowd, letting me follow a beat behind.
When we make it to the ridge, the hill on the other side curves down before splitting around a path lined with boulders. The path leads to a cave that seems like any other—dark and fathomless. Sir and I sprint for it, and a trail of people—Conall and Garrigan, Theron, a few Cordellan soldiers—gathers behind us. As I focus on the entrance, I beg the darkness to relinquish the miner, for news that the cave-in wasn’t a cave-in, but something else—
Just as we reach the entrance, the miner stumbles out and falls to his knees. He’s so covered with grime that his ivory skin and hair are gray, and he hacks a funnel of dust into the sunlight. I drop before him, my hands on his shoulders.No thought, no chance to reconsider—the magic swells in my chest, a surge of frost that coats every vein as it rushes down my arms and slams into the miner’s body, clearing his lungs, healing the bruises along his limbs.
All the air drains from me, leaving me to pant from the unexpected use of magic as the tension on the man’s face alleviates. Does he realize I used magic on him?
“A wall collapsed, my queen,” he coughs. “Weren’t expecting it, not there, but—”
Theron falls to the ground beside me, his attention boring into the miner in a frantic pull of pure, aching need.
“We . . . found it,” the miner says like even he can’t believe his own news. He blinks at me, and I try with everything I have left to breathe, just breathe,keep breathing.
“We found it, my queen. The magic chasm.”
