Halberg whimpered before launching into another confession.
“The prince didn’t steal my ledger. I lost it in a game of snowdice… and the stablemaster still owes me a goat.”
Several of the courtiers murmured disparaging comments, their gazes filled with scorn as they passed Halberg.
And Nevara tried to hold in her laughter as we walked away, but a strangled sound escaped anyway, scandalously loud.
I arched an eyebrow, tugging her deeper into the hedge maze. “Did you just… snort?”
“Absolutely not. I would never be so?—”
Behind us, the lord continued screaming. “It’s not fae pox… and the Healer says it’s persistent!”
“—indelicate,” she finished, cracking completely.
She doubled over, laughing so hard she nearly lost her balance.
I yanked us around the corner, away from the male’s prying eyes just before I met the same fate, my low chuckles sounding in time with her chiming laughter.
I blinked, and the vision of her bent at the waist in mirth was replaced with the reality of her before me, ethereal hair coated in blood, chest rising and falling too erratically to be peaceful.
The tips of her braids and her fingernails were edged with an ominous darkness, like they’d been dipped in swirling ink, the stain spreading in faint, vein-thin tendrils. An effect of the Korythid’s venom?
I ground my teeth, a muscle in my jaw aching with the intensity of it all.
Don’t be selfish, Nevara. You can die when I say it’s time, and this sure as hells isn’t it.
A violent surge of mana erupted from my wife’s slight form, snapping my attention back to her. It barely had time to spread before I drew it into myself, siphoning the excess through our bond, my own ice closing around it until the surge broke and faded.
It wasn’t as if we needed the reminder of all the ways this day had gone to the seventh level of hell and back again, but her newfound mana was, once again, eager to oblige.
It pulsed unevenly, straining as those vast reserves she had nearly died to claim pressed outward in protest. I muttered a low curse as I held the connection steady.
Frost threaded back around her arm under my guidance, soothing the erratic flare until her breath stuttered, and a reluctant shiver traced a line down her spine. The darkness coiling in the air loosened, then withdrew, leaving her contained, if not yet calm.
Was she even aware of how often her mana had tried to destroy itself—and her—and the entire shards-forsaken room at this point? How many times it had done so since she landed in the middle of a bloody and frozen battlefield?
Could she feel it clawing at her skin the way I felt it scraping at mine? Like creeping frost searching for faultlines, or shadows pressing against thin ice, waiting for the moment where they could break through?
But of course, that wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t allow it. And if the Shard Mother valued any life in this Court, then she wouldn’t allow it either…
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I registered Noerwyn speaking to her sister.
Words like ‘impaled’and ‘stable for now’drowned in the crashing wave of guilt and fury that overtook me standing between the two females who had both carelessly risked their lives tonight. And there hadn’t been a frost-damned thing I’d been able to do to protect either of them.
Not Nevara when we shared the same battlefield, and sure as hells not my wife when she absconded from the palace walls, alone, without so much as a word.
Just like I hadn’t been able to protect my mother.
I heard her scream echo in my head, saw Nevara flinging herself in front of the shards-damned emissary, smelled the blood pouring from the wounds on Everly’s body when I found her in the frost-forsaken cave.
She squeezed my arm like she could sense my distress, like she was willfully oblivious to the way she had caused it.
A muscle ticked in my jaw. Shards help Winter, help all of Aerivelle, if I lost her now. There was nothing in this realm or the next, not in the past or present, not in any court or kingdom, that could stop me from grinding the world to ice and dust if it tried to take my wife from me.
I clenched my fists before remembering that my hand was still clamped around her arm to keep the shadows at bay. She didn’t flinch beneath the pressure, didn’t move from where she was fixated on the Visionary’s unmoving features.
Nevara sucked in a breath that was more like a wheeze, and Everly stretched out a hand to comfort her.
