“First keep the promises you have already made,” Lavendera finishes instead. Her pink and purple eyes are filled with steel as she holds Draven’s gaze before she locks them on me. “You promised me.”
My expression softens, and I give her a nod. “I know.”
“So where is it? Where is the Soul of Trees?”
“Orion said that it’s in the Ice Palace, remember?”
“Wherein the Ice Palace?”
We all glance to Orion. The Unseelie King looks back at us all in silence for another second before clicking his tongue.
“Underneath it,” he says. “It’s encased in the thick foundation of ice that the castle is resting on. Apparently, burying it there was incredibly exhausting and difficult, which is why Bane had a bad memory from that time.”
A sharp hiss rips from the Dryad Queen’s throat. “It has been frozen inicefor six thousand years?”
She lets out a vicious growl that rumbles through the room likea volcano ready to erupt. The leaders of the fae resistance flinch and cast terrified glances in her direction before looking back at us for guidance. Since the rest of us are somewhat accustomed to the primal rage of the dryads at this point, we all just watch as the vines in her hair and clothes whip around her like furious snakes.
“You have ice magic,” Rin Tanaka begins, her dark eyes sliding towards Isera. “I know that you can’t make someone else’s ice disappear, but can’t you just move this artefact up to the surface?”
“It is not an artefact,” the Dryad Queen says.
“No,” Isera replies to Rin’s question. “If it’s buried in the whole foundation of the palace, I won’t be able to move the ice in a precise enough manner to lift out one small artefact.”
“It is not an artefact,” the Dryad Queen growls again.
Draven turns to her. “Is it fragile?”
“No.” She raises her chin. “It cannot be destroyed. It isnotan artefact. If it was possible to destroy it, Bane would have done so after they fused the Mother Dryad with Lavendera.”
Vestra and the others stare at her in utter confusion, but we don’t have time to explain all of this to people who don’t need to know. So Draven just continues speaking.
“Then how about we just blow up the Ice Palace?” he says.
Across the table, Isera sits up straighter, interest sharpening in her eyes. “How?”
“Hector and the rest of the human rebellion planned to blow it up a few years back, but since that would’ve putmyclan in danger too,” he flicks a glance towards Galen and Lyra before looking back at the rest of us, “I managed to convince them that it was a bad idea.”
“Wait,” Yerion sputters. “You were a member of the human rebellion?”
“I was a member ofyourrebellion too.” He gives them all a knowing look. “The white mask with the two crossed swords on it. That was me.”
Their jaws drop.
Smug satisfaction pulses through me as I watch them gape at Draven.
“Yeah, I hate to point out the obvious,” Alistair begins while raising his eyebrows at us all. “But the human rebellion is dead. All the humans from Frostfell are dead, remember?”
“No, they are not,” the Dryad Queen says.
We all turn to stare at her in surprise. When we were in Frostfell earlier to kidnap, orrescue, Lavendera, there was not a single human in the entire city. So we just assumed that the Icehearts killed them all after the failed rebellion I sparked.
“They are living in the forests outside the city,” she finishes, completely oblivious to our surprised looks.
Relief and anticipation wash through me. I turn to Draven. “Do they still have the explosives they planned to use?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “As far as I know, they left them stored in some of their safe houses. Not sure where, though.”
Lavendera shoots up from her seat. The move is so sudden that half of the table jumps and reaches for weapons. But all she does is to walk over to a shelf and pull out a piece of paper before returning to her seat. The paper rustles as she smooths it down before her. Then she starts sketching something.
