I tugged off one glove. My hand was shaking. Not from cold—never from cold—but from the raw emotion that coursed through me. My fingers still remembered the curve of her jaw, the way her pulse had fluttered beneath them.
“This has to stop.”
The words came out hoarse. I clenched my fist, shattered the frost that had crept over my glove, and turned away. My reflection in the frostglass mirror by the hearth didn’t look like me. My eyes looked darker—silver dulled by some unseen tarnish. The line of light that ran down my right glove glowed unsteady, pulsing with the rhythm of a second heartbeat.
I tore the glove off. The mark on my wrist—once faint, a birthright rune of Winter—was burning pale blue, too bright, too alive. I could almost feel it whispering. Or maybe that was just the enchantment.
Queen Sareth’s letters. I should have burned them both. I’d felt her magic the moment the first one arrived, silk-wrapped poison threaded through politeness. I’d told myself it couldn’t touch me.
But the longer the letters stayed near the Hold, the stranger I became. The more I thought ofher.
Not just her face. Not just the shape of her defiance. The way her presence bent the room, changed the air, silenced the frostlight.
The mortal had become a fault line in my world, and I couldn’t stop returning to it.
I paced. Three steps forward, three steps back. The habit of soldiers and scholars both. Anything to impose pattern over the madness.
But my mind didn’t obey. Every path of thought returned to the same place—her voice, her scent, the softness of her lips against mine. I’d spent decades mastering restraint, and a single heartbeat had undone it.
I pressed a hand to my temple. “This isn’t real.”
But it was. The memory of her warmth pulsed through me, not illusion but imprint. Something in the magic around us—hers or mine—had tangled, and now I couldn’t separate the two.
I knew Autumn couldn’t create emotions that weren’t already there; it could only amplify them, no matter how small. The truth was condemning.
I crossed the room, opening the frost-locked chest beside my desk. Inside, the stack of Sareth’s letters lay tied in silver cord, the wax seals still intact. I hadn’t opened the last one. I didn’t need to. The magic bled from the parchment, subtle and steady, a living current of warmth that didn’t belong to Winter.
“You’re not doing this,” I said, voice low, as if the magic could hear me. “You don’t control me.”
The top letter twitched slightly, parchment curling toward me in the faintest ripple.
I slammed the lid shut.
The frostlight flared again—angry this time. My temper had never been mine alone; Winter’s power was alive, threaded through my blood. When I lost control, the Hold felt it. I could feel the castle responding to me now—groaning faintly as the temperature dropped, ice creeping up the corners of the windowpanes.
I drew in a long breath. “Enough.”
It didn’t answer, but the frost stilled. For now.
I sank into the chair by the hearth. The fire there was faint, a courtesy flame meant for mortals who occasionally visited the chamber. I stared into it and thought of her again—of the way the frost had melted under our hands, how warmth had spread through me as if she’d rewritten what Winter meant.
The enchantment whispered. Soft, coaxing, female.She is the spark you’ve been denied.
I closed my eyes, jaw tightening. The voice wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. But it sounded like Sareth—and worse, it soundedright.
The warmth beneath my skin pulsed again. I gritted my teeth and forced my breathing to even out. “You are Winter,” I told myself. “You don’t bend.”
But the firelight in front of me said otherwise. It danced, bright and alive, painting the surrounding frost in gold.
And I kept seeing her face in its glow.
I’d spent hours mastering stillness, but now my body refused to obey. My hands wouldn’t stop moving—clenching, unclenching, reaching for something that wasn’t there. The ghost of her touch still lingered on my skin. I could almost feel her breath against my throat, the heat that had melted through every layer of my control.
The Hold was listening. I could hear the slow creak of the ice, the faint hum of the runes embedded in the walls. Winter itself was watching, waiting to see which master it would obey—its heir or its hunger.
I looked toward the chest again. The frost rimmed its edges, glittering faintly. The top layer of ice had cracked since I’d closed it. A thin wisp of warmth curled through the air, carrying the faint scent of autumn spice and something sharper—like amber smoke and deceit.
Sareth’s magic.
