He leaned back, satisfied. “Do not fail me again, Kaelith. The frost forgives no second hesitation.”
He turned his face toward the aurora beyond the high window, the light staining his features in shifting green. For a heartbeat I saw the man he had been—patient, brilliant, endlessly sure. Then the light moved on, and he was only a king listening to ghosts.
I bowed low enough for protocol and turned away. The sound of my own breathing filled the silence until the doors closed behind me.
In the corridor, the air felt thinner. My fists ached from clenching. The frost along the wall pulsed once under my touch—alive, curious. I drew back quickly.
He was wrong about many things, but not about one: something had changed when the mortal crossed the gate. I could still hear her voice in the hush, could almost see the heat of her breath fogging the cold between us.
I started walking, faster than before. The castle listened. I didn’t care. Duty, suspicion, fascination—whatever this was—it had already found its way beneath my skin.
The corridors twisted back toward my quarters, narrow and glass-bright. Every step sent small echoes running ahead of me, whisper-thin, almost like breath. For a moment I thought I heard her voice folded insidethem—quick, defiant, the way she’d saidunfortunate but true.I clenched my jaw until it passed.
I should have gone straight to the council wing, drafted the report he wanted. Instead I kept walking. The frost on the walls gleamed with its own light, and in every reflection I looked a little less like myself.
When I reached my door, I pressed my hand against the ice frame. It bit deep, sharp enough to ground me. The pain should have cleared my head. It didn’t.
The mortal’s image stayed—dark hair, stubborn chin, eyes that refused to lower. My father’s warning echoed after it:She burns too bright.
I pressed my hand against the ice until the sting drove the thought away, yet the warmth lingered on my skin. The mortal’s defiance, my father’s madness—two sparks too close to the same flame.
I should have felt nothing. Instead, my pulse echoed through the silence like a flaw in the frost.
Chapter four
Katria
When I woke, the world was white.
Not the soft white of morning snow over Hollowmere but a colorless gleam that seemed to swallow everything. Light pressed through the walls, too bright to look at directly, as if the room itself had been carved from frozen sky.
I sat up slowly, my breath clouding in the air. The bed beneath me was cold stone softened by a thin layer of fur. It should have been uncomfortable, yet the cold had its own stillness—too perfect to disturb.
My satchel lay near the foot of the bed. I reached for it, fingers stiff, and pulled out the bundle of herbs I’d hidden there. Dried mint, feverleaf, a little kingsroot from the hollow behind my cottage. The leaves had blackened overnight. Their smell—once sharp and alive—was gone.
“Too cold for anything living,” I whispered.
The walls seemed to hear me. A faint hum rippled through the frost, like the sound of a far-off chime. I pressed my palm to the nearest surface; it bit back, numbing my skin instantly. The palace of Winter was alive, and it didn’t like me.
A soft knock broke the silence—three quick taps that echoed too loudly. When I opened the door, a Frostguard stood there, pale-eyed and expressionless.
“Lady Katria,” he said, voice flat as polished stone. “His Highness requests your presence at midday. You will wear appropriate attire.”
He offered a folded garment: a cloak heavy enough to crush my shoulders, silver fur along the collar, runes stitched in shimmering thread. I thanked him out of habit. He didn’t reply—only bowed his head and vanished back into the corridor, the door sealing itself behind him with a faint hiss of frost.
I unfolded the cloak. It glittered like a sheet of ice. The runes crawled faintly under my fingertips—alive or pretending to be. It was beautiful in the way knives are.
“No,” I murmured. “You’ll not make me one of them.”
I hung it over the chair and went to the window instead. The glass looked solid, yet I could see movement within it—light drifting like underwater currents. Beyond, the world stretched, endless and pale, mountains shining like fractured mirrors under a sky that never changed.
A sound somewhere below—boots striking ice, the faint rhythm of patrols—reminded me that this stillness was not peace. It was vigilance.
I straightened my shoulders, rubbed warmth back into my hands, and looked around the room for anything that still belonged to me. Only the satchel. The rest might as well have been grown from the same frost that built this palace.
“If they mean to keep me,” I told the empty air, “they’ll learn I don’t freeze easy.”
Frost along the window bloomed in delicate spirals, answering me like breath on glass.
