“We need to be moving on from the castle,” he says, and I fall into step beside him. “I was supposed to take Odette into the clouds with me for a day. Not a week. And it’s going to take at least that long to get back across the Frostlands.”
“Probably a week and a half,” I agree. “Neve seems to tolerate moving through the shadows just fine, but her magic doesn’t let her travel quickly over long distances. She’s powerful, but no faster using her magic in her condition. Maybe she could glide on ice, but it’ll only get her so far. We’re going to have to shadow hop for a long time to get to the borders.”
Zarev stops me, his scythe appearing in front of me to halt my steps. “You’re planning to leave the kingdom?”
I hold out my hands, glaring at him. “What’s left here? The people are frozen, and my magic has never allowed me to unfreeze anyone before. Neve tried, and it melted the person’s head.”
“But the Frostlands aren’t barren,” he argues. “There are people in the outer villages. The onesyousent me to check in on while you took care of the Queen. And other little dwellings I didn’t get to visit because it was too long a distance between the living and the cave we were staying in. People are still alive here.”
“For how long?” I ask him. “You’ve seen the spirits up here, same as me. They do not want Reapers here. They want to go with the Icebound. AndGlacia.”
My eyes narrow. I told him about our experience up the mountain, and as expected, Zarev had no more insight than I did. He doesn’t make the scythe disappear, propping it over his shoulder instead as he glares at me.
“The Frostlands are weak right now. The Mad Queen’s interference is strong here, and the people are paying the price. Do you think the Queen running away will somehow help?”
“Will anyone know?” I ask him seriously. “You walked through the villages. You’ve heard how slowly word travels here. Ronnie didn’t trouble herself telling the peasants about current events because she didn’t think it mattered to them.”
Zarev scoffs. “Did you just call the Dowager Queen ‘Ronnie’?”
“You try and say her real name.”
He shakes his head, turning away. “All I’m saying, Ban, is this land may have betrayed you, but that doesn’t mean she has to betray it. If Neve leaves and Davina hears, it opens up anotherambush. She already seems to think the kingdom is shared between Wonderland and Camelot.”
I don’t have a response to that. Zarev brings up several points, but there’s one glaring problem he is ignoring. “This land didn’t just betray me. It betrayed Neve, too.”
“But the Queen is dead–”
I whirl around, snagging my staff from the shadows, and drive it toward his head. Zarev reacts as fast as I expected him to, blocking the blow and glaring at me where our weapons collide. “And not a soul except me cared where Neve went for a century.”
“Yes, a nice little secret you kept there,brother,” he growls in return. He slides backward, breaking the connection, and spins so the blade of his weapon is angled toward me. “When did you plan to tell us about the Queen exactly? After you woke her up? Or only if you succeeded?”
My eyes narrow. “Careful, shifter.”
He spins the scythe in his grip, the shadows following his movements. “You’ve kept a lot of secrets up here in the north all these years. What else did you learn on the mountain that you aren’t telling me?”
“Nothing,” I snap. I told him about the girl, Glacia, and Neve’s father’s spirit. There’s nothing more to share. “Hiding the truth benefits no one.”
“But hiding Neve did,” he challenges.
“Her curse was my burden to bear,” I growl, slamming the staff into the floor. The ground ices over, the scuffed spots from fighting smoothing out until it’s glimmering and slippery again. “I wasn’t going to risk telling someone about Neve until I had what I needed to help her.”
His eyes flash, understanding shining in his gaze. “Swan Lake. Ray said you were down there, searching for some needle.”
“A spinning needle,” I confirm. “I followed a spirit who crossed paths with me all the way down there. Spoke to someonein Odette’s castle about it, too. It led me to Dima. Once we escaped the lake, I came back here to break the spell.”
“And you just…knewhow to do that?” he cries, waving a hand in the air. “It took you a century to accomplish, but you get a needle and a bag of fucking dreams, and then you could suddenly wake the rightful queen?”
“I heard Ronnie speaking once, when I was hiding while waiting for answers.” Holding up my free hand, I let the shadows glide off my fingertips. “Davina’s curse actually helped with that. As an ice mage I could only get so close. I couldn’t turn into the snow or hide in the wind. The shadows let me eavesdrop until one day, Ronnie started talking to herself about the curse.”
“Andthatmade you think this was a good idea?” he asks.
“It was the only one I had. I waited seventy years for a hint of what to do. The rest of the time, I visited Neve on occasion to make sure she wasn’t dead. Ronnie kept her alive for a purpose.”
“And that was?” he asks, circling his fingers in the air. The blade is still drawn, but the more we talk, the less I feel like getting into a fight with him. We’ve done a lot of fighting over the last week, and getting into it with each other won’t help.
Pursing my lips, I debate what to say. Zarev is defensive right now, thinking I’ve hidden things for an ulterior motive. I only ever hid the things I barely understood myself. “Ronnie needed a way to break her frozen sleep. To fight off a curse she brought with her from across the land, before she married Andor. Their daughter is the most powerful of the three of them. I revealed to Neve recently that her mother is the one who struck her father down, not me. I believe she cursed Neve the night before the funeral because she needed Neve’s magic when she couldn’t have mine. She used her daughter all these years to suck the magic out of her and force the curse away. Since Ronnie’sdead, I can’t ask whether she put her daughter into a deep sleep to control her or because she was slowly killing Neve’s soul.”
Zarev’s frown deepens, his orange eyes peering off to our right, in the direction of the throne room. “No signs of a spirit?”
