A familiar face pokes around the corner into the entrance hall. Marigold’s eyes widen. She’s wearing her usual pink apron, but it’s stained and dirty. “Your Highness! My goodness, you’re back! It’s been months. I’ll prepare your room straight away—”
I walk past her with barely a glance. “I’m not staying.”
My heavy boots ring upon the glistening floor. A few more eyes poke around as word passes to the servants that the High Prince of Spring has returned. They all crouch back, none so brave as Marigold to approach me. I don’t blame them. I can only imagine what I look like.
A towering being of dark metal, scarred by monsters and stained with blood, with vengeance in each step.
I start up the stairs when a quiet voice breaks through the echoing silence. “Ez? Y-you’re back.”
Farron stands at the top of the landing. He’s a mess. There are dark circles under his eyes, and I swear he’s wearing the same tunic he was when I left months ago. A scraggly bit of scruff covers his jaw.
Deep within my chest, there’s a part of me that wants to grab him and pull him to me. Apologize for leaving him here in the cold alone. Tell him it’s going to be okay.
But that part is too buried beneath the scorching rage.
“Ez?” He stands in my path when I don’t answer.
I don’t even think. I shove him in the chest, causing him to stumble. I keep walking toward the Winter Wing.
“Well, well,” a voice slurs, “if it isn’t the long-lost faceless wonder.”
Dayton leans against the entrance to the Summer Wing. Like usual, he wears only a patterned wrap low on his hips and nothing else. Stars, he’s thin. At least by his standards. His chest, usually broad and bursting with muscle, seems narrow, his normally tanned skin pale and sallow.What happened to us?
But I know what happened.
And I know whose fault it is.
Ice shatters beneath the force of my boots; I am a spring gale. I am the thunder and the lightning. I am a reckoning.
Winter has taken Castletree.
It is time for Spring’s melt.
Idly, I notice Farron and Dayton following me, and behind them, two of the staff. Marigold and Astrid.
I fling open the door to Keldarion’s chambers. Despite it being day, a giant white wolf lies before me, his head down, eyes closed. If possible, it’s even more of a monstrosity than I last saw it: bright blue icicles jut out from the shoulder blades, and the ice covering the floor is marred with long claw marks. Clouds of mist form in the frigid air around its nostrils, the only sign it’s still alive.
“Keldarion,” I roar. The audience behind me, even the two High Princes, tremble.
The white wolf barely raises its head, cracking open a single glowing blue eye, then lowers its head again.
My comrade. My best friend. My brother.
My traitor.
For all else, I have turned my gaze. But not for this.
Not after what he did to her.
With the raw frenzy of a spring storm, I grab the wolf by the fur of its back and throw. The massive white beast sails through the air, breaking through the huge glass window, and lands in a heap below in the gardens.
Dayton and Farron cry out and grab my arms, but I tear loose.
Outside the window, the wolf gives a shudder, its body receding, shimmering into that of a fae man. He struggles up to his forearms and glowers at me through a curtain of white hair.
I stride over to his bed, reach underneath to retrieve the discarded Sword of the Protector, and chuck it out the broken window.
“Ezryn,” Dayton cries, “are you mad?”
