“No,” Rakel said. Privately, she considered the idea. Could she? How hard would it be?
“Why not? Does your magic not work off mountains?” Gerta asked.
“Vefsna is still on Ensom—it’s onlynearthe base,” Kai said.
“It has nothing to do with my magic.”
“Then what is it?” Gerta crowded even closer.
Flustered by the close scrutiny, Rakel took a step backwards. “It’s because I’m not going to embark on a campaign to save all of Verglas.”
“But you’re the princess,” Kai said.
“In title only.”
“What does that mean?” Gerta asked.
“It means I’m not really a princess.”
“Your parents weren’t King Ingolfr and Queen Runa?” Kai asked, scandalized.
“They were, but they discarded me.”
“And that means you can’t save Verglas?” Gerta asked.
“It means Iwon’t,” Rakel said, even as she continued to weigh the possibility.Without Oskar there, would the villagers kill me once I rescued them? It seems fairly likely…
“But the people need you!” Gerta argued, waving a mitten-clad hand in the air. “Mommy says all the other villages are a lot worse off than Fyran. She says the invaders have got their teeth in our throat.”
“So many have died,” Kai said in a small voice. “You can’t do anything?”
Rakel remembered the crossbow bolt and the scrape of the sword. She didn’t want to die like that. “No.”
“You saved my mommy…why not my grandmother?” Gerta asked, her voice shaky with unshed tears.
Rakel exhaled, knowing she wouldn’t be able to explain her reasoning. “I will show you out,” she said. She led the children all the way to the wooden gate of the wall. With a flick of her finger, the ice barring the gate fractured, allowing Rakel to push it open.
“Thank you, Princess,” Kai said as they left.
“Yes, thank you,” Gerta said, drooping like a wilted flower.
“I’ll go get the sled. You stay here,” Kai said.
“Alright,” Gerta agreed.
When Rakel closed the wooden gate behind them, she could hear them no more. They weren’t, however, so easily banished from her thoughts.
She sighed. “I wish the world were the kind of place they think it is.”
Hours later,Rakel was laboring over a fox ice statue—an attempt to quiet the racket her mind was raising—when she heard a man shout “Princess?”
She was so shocked someone had ventured deep enough into her castle that she could hear them that she almost yelped.
“Yes?” Rakel clutched the fox to her. She belatedly realized it could be viewed as a weapon and thrust the sculpture onto a table, rapidly backing away from it as Oskar and a gruff man she recognized as Captain Halvor—another person who had likely angered someone powerful, for he had served as the captain of her guard for five years instead of the usual three—entered the library with four villagers on their heels. Captain Halvor stood out like a wolverine among chickens. He was much shorter than Oskar as well as a few years younger, but he was more wiry and tough. His ash blond hair gave him a bland appearance that his perpetual shadow of whiskers belied.
Rakel inspected the villagers and placed the woman with a bruised face and bandaged head as Gerta’s mother.
What is she doing here?
