My cry never leaves my lips.
Suddenly, I find myself continuing to speak with the Ember King as if nothing happened, and, at the very same time, I’m spinning to the Frost King.
He has jolted to a stop, his reactions as quick as a wolf’s.
He’s taller than the Ember King and also leaner, although his shoulders are broad, his waist narrow, and, even though plates of silver armor cover most of his body, his movements speak to his physical strength.
His hair is white, the long, straight strands falling past his shoulders, both sides tucked behind his pointed ears. His features are otherworldly, beautiful in their iciness; his pale gray eyes mimic smooth stone, his high cheekbones are razor-sharp, but his lips speak to a passion that defies his cold power.
I heard a whisper that his mother was Lethian, and the shape of his ears and the near-white color of his eyes confirm it. A peaceful people lost to the passage of time.
He carries two long swords at his back, both with pearly-white hilts, and brings with him the chilling scent of winter. It wafts across my face like dancing snowflakes, defying the Ember King’s blistering heat, cooling my skin.
The Frost King’s gaze is forbidding, but surprisingly troubled.
I prepare to speak to him when another stream of golden light courses up my arm.
No! Not another!
This time, it brings a vision from the blade?—
I’m falling, plummeting into darkness. Complete darkness. As I fall, teeth strike and tear at me, hot blood flows across my arms and legs and chest. My life bleeds from me, but then, a wash of ice explodes across me. A chilling hope?—
As I come back to myself, words fall from my lips, rushing from my mouth, even though I don’t yet understandtheir meaning. “Come for me when the stars go out. Find me where the light hides.”
Simultaneously, another vision hits me, consuming a piece of my fractured mind?—
I’m running as fast as I can, my heart pounding while growls and shrieks fill my ears and the hot breath of beasts hits my back. I can’t run fast enough. Paralyzing fear threatens to overwhelm me, but then my footsteps crunch on sand, fire blossoms across the air, and once again, I have the smallest sliver of hope?—
To the Ember King, I whisper, “Come for me when the sun turns bitterly cold, and the sand bleeds iron.”
I don’t know what those two visions mean or where the events within them happen or even when. All I know is that they fill me with fear, and if the Ember King and Frost King don’t do as I ask…
I don’t know if I’ll survive.
At the very same moment as I speak to the Ember King, a new threat approaches.
The Iron King steps from the shadows directly ahead of me.
While my other fractured parts continue to face the Ember King and the Frost King, my present self faces the Iron King.
I gasp when I recognize him.
He’s the warrior who raged against the Frost Fae when they trapped me. His blade barely missed my head, the same axe he used to cut through the icy wall blocking my escape. He let me go. A mistake on his part, I’m sure, although he clearly didn’t know who I was at the time.
Our encounter happened so fast, I didn’t have the chance to study him, but I do now.
“You,” I whisper.
“Me,” he snarls, prowling toward me, a towering form, hisshoulders impossibly broad, his torso clad in large, fitted plates of black armor that extend up and over his shoulders as well as down around his legs. The steel does nothing to conceal the thickness of the muscles on his arms and legs, and the closer he comes to me, the more strongly I inhale the scent of burning iron.
His axe swings down by his side, its sharp edges cloaked in the scorched blood of the Frost Fae he fought.
He stops a mere three paces away from me, looming over me, his shadow blocking out, once and for all, the sunlight that had glinted on the Dragonstone Blade.
His presence up close is dizzying. His gaze is unrelenting, except for the briefest moment when his focus flickers to the thread that has shortened between him and me, the rope contracting as he approaches.
There’s no doubt he sees it. Also, no doubt, hedespisesit.
