My eyes fly open, and my scream pierces the air, pealing out into the snowstorm raging around me.
Excruciating pain shoots through every part of my body, through fingers and toes completely frozen, through lips that crack as I move them, through flesh that no longer lives, and across a heart that breaks with every deepthumpit’s being forced to make.
Forced. Because I’m certain I was dying. I’m certain my heart was about to stop. And now, somehow, I’m awake. Conscious. Alive.
I can’t form words, can only scream through the agony, wishing for oblivion as that harmony, that melody, continues to fall from the Frost King’s lips.
His face tilts to mine, his stony eyes consuming my view, unearthly and unsettling, as his lips brush my cheek and the power in his voice traps me more securely than any chains ever could.
His touch is soft, near gentle, but his song…
Too cruel.
Within those moments of agony, I take in every detail around me. The snowflakes whipping at us, the wolf at my back, its body barely a shield against the wind, its fur as icy cold as the swirling snow.
The king’s hard arms are clamped around me, but my right arm pushes upward. A move I’m not consciously trying to make.
That’s when I see the three threads gripped in the Frost King’s hand, each thread tugging in the wind, trying to pull free. I know these threads. They formed when I first met the kings.
But now…
There is a black thread I’ve never seen before.
That dark rope is wrapped around my forearm, pulling on me, as if it would drag me away.
But to where?
My focus flashes back to the Frost King, my cry pealing out around me, rising above the wind, nowhere near as powerful as the dark melody he continues to savagely hum.
His face is empty of emotion, unchanging. Hard. Beyond cruel.
Then, his brow draws down and his lips, now moving toward mine, twist.
The next note he sings is like a chime. A pure chime as clear as the tap of a hammer on steel.
A nail that pins me to this life.
With that, all four threads retract and disappear. Vanishing again.
I should be relieved that the black thread disappears too, but I’m in too much pain to feel anything but desperation.
Somehow, I manage to cry, “Stop. Please.”
“No.” His reply comes with another note, sung low, and the clamp chaining my life to my dying body only tightens. “Your body has given up. If I stop, your body will relinquish your soul, and you will die.”
I search his eyes as I sob. “You would keep me in this agony?”
His icy countenance crumbles. But only for a moment. Quickly hardening again. “For as long as it takes me to carry youthrough the snow.”
Suddenly, I’m consumed by another spark of memory.
A single, clear thought rises:I foresaw this moment.
Before I summoned the kings, one of my blade visions showed me a time when I would be immersed in snow, chilled to the bone, pushing against a weight of nothingness, just as I am now.
That same cluster of blade visions showed me the dangers waiting for me in the Iron Kingdom, too. I foresaw iron dust and chains and a need that couldn’t be satisfied—except it wasn’t my need, it was Antony’s. That vision was about him; the iron dust he didn’t know his brother was making, the chainsIlatched aroundhimwhen I challenged him not to hurt me, and his thirst for fae blood that he fought against quenching.
That vision had too many fractured parts for me to make sense of them, but not this vision.
