“That was not love,” he spits, the word sounding foreign in his mouth. “Love does not squander itself so easily. Love does not trade a season for a breath, or a future for a past.”
“And what wouldyouknow about it?” I whisper.
The temperature plummets.
The frost beneath my boots cracks like breaking glass.
Luceran steps toward me once, just once, and I stumble back without meaning to.
“You will go to your room,” he says, voice low and lethal. “I do not want to see you again until morning.”
He turns his back on me with no further instructions.
“I don’t know where…”
He lifts a hand before I can finish.
Cold gathers instantly in his palm, swirling, thickening, until two tiny winged creatures bloom into being. They are pale as snowflakes, but their wings shimmer in kaleidoscopes of blue—cobalt, sapphire, glacial teal—beating so fast they blur into whirling streaks of color. They zip around me, impossibly quick, releasing high-pitched whirring sounds that raise the hairs on my neck.
Sprites? That’s what I think they are. I’ve never seen anything like them. So small, so delicate, so deceptively sweet.
Luceran doesn’t even glance at me when he gives the command.
“Take her.”
The sprites dive.
A startled cry tears from my throat as tiny hands latch onto me, my boot, my sleeve, my elbow, the fur at my neck. One even snags a fistful of my hair, its wings fluttering madly as it pulls. I’m lifted clean off the ground. They shouldn’t be able to carry me, by size alone, by logic alone, but they do, with frightening ease.
“Wait!”
Too late.
The doors blast open on a gust of cold, and I’m propelled through the archway. Up a spiraling staircase. Down a corridor. Everything streaks past in a blur of stone and shadow as my limbs flail uselessly. Each second I’m certain they’ll drop me. My braid whips my cheek, my boots knock together; one sprite tugs so hard at my hair my eyes water.
“Put me down! Now!”
They don’t listen.
They don’t even slow.
Only when we reach a tall, heavy door at the end of a dim corridor do they pause. Another icy gust and the door slams open. I’m hurled through the threshold, at least ten feet, before landing on a massive bed with a muffled, breathless yelp.
Before I can scramble upright, the sprites begin to unravel. Bodies loosening into drifting flakes, wings dissolving into glittering frost. They swirl together in a miniature storm, rush toward the open balcony doors, and burst into the night beyond.
Then a silence follows, so deep it swallows even my frantic breathing.
I sit there trembling, the thin frost clinging to my skin dissolving against my warmth. My gaze stays fixed on the balcony, on the darkness beyond it, as the final flake spins away on a cold draft.
My throat tightens.
What have I done?
I draw my knees to my chest, pulling my fur tighter around me as the cold steals into my bones.
I press a trembling hand to my chest.
“Father,” I whisper into the empty room. “I hope you make it home. I hope you are safe.”
