“Most likely.”
She exhales into the wind and I’m impressed at how quickly she regulates her response. “Iker is sick, which means he must be physically frail, but I assume his children are not.”
“We will need to watch out for all seven of them. Obviously, they don’t have my Lethian power, and they can’t command frost like I can, but they’re all ambitious and cunning. They know the rules of the Winter Strife and could seek to invoke it.”
As hard as that would be. First, they would have to draw my blood and spill it on the ground before the blood can coagulate. Then they would need to live long enough to speak the words invoking the Strife.
Thyra leans forward again. “We won’t underestimatethem.”
Clouds cast shadows across the sun as we approach Iker’s compound.
Nara slows her pace, moving steadily but cautiously as we descend the final gentle incline toward the compound’s gate.
The landscape around the vast structure is exposed and makes it pointless to try to sneak up on the compound.
Besides, everyone within those walls will know I’ll come for Lilis.
“It looks like your palace,” Thyra whispers.
“The similarity is deliberate. Iker wanted his own throne. Icy-blue walls that he could control and shining buildings that symbolize the power of his blue frost.”
Her brow furrows as she squints across the distance. “Where are the guards? I don’t see anyone up on the wall.”
A heavy quiet lies ahead of us, the gate now three hundred paces away.
“Nara,” I call, “take it slower.”
Thyra has straightened, stretching out her back and neck before her head tilts, just as she appeared when she guessed that three of my staff members were approaching the Rose Room. “It’s too quiet.”
I narrow my eyes at the stillness of the compound. “There should be a hum of sound. Hundreds of heartbeats. Even if they’re all lying in wait.”
Thyra nods. “Like sensing an unmoving presence in the dark.”
“I’m making out maybe forty heartbeats and that’s all.”
“Could Iker have evacuated his people to minimize casualties?”
“Possibly,” I say, “but I doubt he’d be so careful.”
Up ahead, the gate opens and a gust of wind billows through it.
Nara’s head snaps up, her nose raised to the air. She gives a sharp warning growl, the snarl she makes when?—
“Northerners,” Thyra gasps.
She must recognize Nara’s snarls from our encounter with the shapeshifters outside the Alak-Teah.
“Is Iker allied with them?” Thyra asks. “Or?—?”
At that moment, there’s finally movement on top of the wall.
Nara pulls to an abrupt halt and Thyra smothers a cry as bodies drop over the wall, each one hanging from a rope.
Eight bodies with nooses around their necks.
None struggling. All clearly dead.
Thyra won’t recognize them, but I do.
