Dread churned in my gut. His response had come too quickly to contain anything helpful. I dismissed the messenger with a curt nod, shutting the door behind him before returning to the desk.
Frost bloomed from each place I stepped and coated my fists as I broke the wax seal. I forced my focus toward the healer’s cramped, angular scrawl and paused unwittingly as Everly’s laughter wove from her bedroom through my hallways.
It was soft and bright. A thread of warmth in a world drowned in blood and ice… perhaps all the more alluring because of it.
For one dangerous heartbeat, I almost let myself imagine who we might have been to each other if the world hadn’t carved me hollow long before she entered it. But even that fleeting thought felt indulgent. Reckless. I crushed it before it could fully form.
I dragged my attention back to the page.
The message was brief—four curt lines in that harsh, utilitarian hand of his. All of them merely reiterating what Noerwyn had already shared.
Useless.
I crushed the parchment in my fist and hurled it into the cold hearth. The absence of flames did nothing to dampen the urge to set the whole thing alight simply for the satisfaction of watching it burn.
A sharp pulse of frustration surged through me. Images I’d tried to outrun clawed their way forward:
The Korythid’s serrated stinger plunging through Nevara’s spine.
Black venom spilling from the gaping wound.
Her iridescent hair dulling, her nails darkening to something obsidian and wrong.
Her breath rattling, shallow, fading.
Damn her for this.
Damn her and her precious Shard Mother for taking my Visionary when I needed her most.
How in all the frozen hells was I supposed to do this now?
Without my Visionary.
Without my sister. Let alone when my wife was on the verge of combusting from her own ill-thought-out decisions.
Suddenly, across the hall felt much too far from her.
The storm pressing against the windows thickened in response, thick clouds swallowing the wan sunlight, sleet pelting the glass like fistfulls of pebbles. The weather always listened when my control slipped.
Refusing to let it run unchecked, I forced myself toward the desk again.
I pulled a fresh sheet of parchment toward me and dipped my quill, drafting a letter to the Archmage.
Isren,
Once again, your expertise is required. Winter’s condition grows precarious, and the events that have taken place since your departure have only made that clearer. I expect your immediate return—or I will take action to locate you personally.
—D
Before I could place the letter in the mailbox outside my window, a palace phoenix materialized on the sill, a creaturecarved from frost. Its wings unfurled with a whisper of icy crystals, scattering flecks of shimmering frost into the air.
They never flew in storms like this.
A sign, perhaps, that the Shard Mother had finally chosen to spare her favored one.
Or that she had simply decided to test us again.
Either way, I hissed a curse at the sky as the phoenix evaporated into a cloud of snow.
