Both my arms are pressed against my sides, so it takes some maneuvering before I’m able to wrench my hands together in front of me. As soon as I do, I start tugging at the cuff as hard as I can, spinning it, trying to squeeze it over the bones in my hand. I even pick up some of the snow beneath me and shove it under the cuff, hoping it will help, but it doesn’t.
It won’t come off.
When the fae king comes striding in, I nearly jump right out of my skin.
Dressed in stone-plated armor and a marbled crown, his granite eyes land on me as he comes to a stop. I can’t move. I’m stuck in place, fear freezing me.
“TheCold Queen. You thought you could keep us out with a few shards of ice?” he asks, and while his words are mocking, his tone is hardened.
Anxiety stomps down my nerves as he regards me, and though no stone presses down on me, my breath feels tight. Suffocated.
“Are you responsible for the death of my soldiers?” he asks.
My heart beats wildly, but I don’t reply.
The king takes another step so he’s looming over me, watching me like one might study an insect that lost its leg. Deciding if he should step on me now or leave me to struggle.
I lift my chin, looking back at him without falter. I have learned to look men like him in the eye when they wished me to drop my gaze and bend my neck in submission.
My gaze tells him the same thing as my silent mouth: I won’t submit to him.
I am a queen, and cold does not cower.
The two of us stare at each other, while the twins stand several paces behind him. Outside, I can hear the wind shuffling, can hear soldiers shouting as his army breaches Orea.
Again.
Still, we watch each other.
Within this overbearing glare between enemies, there is a push of wills. A push ofworlds.
He is so very fae, and I am so very Orean, and though I am not yet forty years, I can feel centuries’ worth of hostility emanating from us both. As if I hold the blood of every Orean who has ever been betrayed by a fae, and he holds that of every fae who has hated an Orean.
He wants to crush us, I want to be rid of them, and it’s obvious that a broken bridge and even a barricaded one was only a temporary respite. So long as our realms are tethered, death and threat will always have a way to return.
Perhaps Dommik was right. Perhaps the bridge to nowhere was a lie and that track of landdidlead somewhereelse. Somewhere far from the fae, so that the Oreans who crossed it went somewhere new, somewhere better.
The bridge was never supposed to connect us. I see that as clearly as I see the grooves of granite in the fae king’s eyes and the chiseled lines of his jaw.
The girl who crossed into Annwyn, who married a fae and bound our worlds together, perhaps she was the true villain in all of this. For all that’s happened since then is betrayal and war and, now, annihilation.
Our worlds were never meant to tether.
So the fae king can look at me with hate, and I can look at him right back, because none of this should have ever happened.
King Carrick tilts his head, as if it’s tipping with the thoughts weighing down his mind, and I wonder if perhaps he was thinking similar things to what I was.
“No,” he finally says, answering some unspoken question. “You’re far too weak to have killed my soldiers. You weren’t even able to successfully block the bridge.”
Humiliation and anger scrape against my insides, rubbing my shortcomings raw.
Satisfaction pulls at his face and he leans closer to me. “This is why you’re losing your world, Orean queen. Because you are not strong enough to keep it.”
He starts looking around the ruins, critical gaze taking in the disintegrating structure. “This is your great history of Orea?” he asks with a disparaging tone. “This isnothing. So insignificant that it wasn’t even worth my time when I first arrived.”
Then he lifts his hands, and the entire structure begins to shake and shift, the very ground trembling. My heart pounds past my ribs as the walls start cracking. Then they start shifting and smoothing, stretching and realigning.
He smiles cruelly. “Let me show you how quickly your Orea will be forgotten.”
