Soundlessly, they slip from between my body and Stellen’s, becoming a stream of glistening silver as they flow toward the gap in the cocoon. An opening, barely wide enough for a fae to pass through, sits at the edge of the pond.
Only some of the threads remain wrapped around my body, covering my breasts and pelvis and keeping my hair coiled at the back of my head.
As the silver threads flow onto the water, they gather together, winding into the shapes of flowers. Roses. Theshape of the blossoms, I imagine, my mother once created with her power.
She was highborn. She didn’t know that the man she loved was the Oracle at that time, or that when I was born, she had given birth to a future Oracle.
“Look,” I whisper to the Frost King, although I didn’t need to tell him.
He’s frozen, his sword arm still upraised, his weapons glinting in the air, but his wary gaze is already passing across the now quiet and still cocoon and toward the pond.
Several of the flowers the Lethian threads formed glide up around the open edge of the cocoon while others float peacefully across the water, where, impossibly, they don’t sink. Simply swirling with the waterfall’s flow.
Stellen’s pale gaze flashes back to me, his lips parted, as if he would ask the thousand questions I read in his eyes.
To which I can only give one answer. “A blade is death to living wood.”
The pucker in his forehead clears. “They are one and the same.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about, and his unearthly smile is so sudden, it makes my head spin.
“The Alak-Teah are trees,” he whispers.
It’s probably the closest description. “Of a kind.”
His gaze suddenly rakes over me.
I’m nearly completely naked now. A band of silver threads has remained across my breasts, and another conceals my pelvis. But I can no longer feel most of my body, leading me to a sense of near detachment from the bare skin beneath his hands.
“Will you take me into the water?” I ask.
A cold light enters his eyes, and a moment later, he leans to the side and smacks his fist on the rocks withinthe small confines of the cocoon.
The ice around his hand shatters, freeing his blades, which he abandons, leaving them lying on those rocks.
He isn’t weaponless. He can call his frost power at will.
But if he leaves his blades within the cocoon, the Alak-Teah will feel safe.
My stomach swirls, a sliver of sensation returning to me as Stellen scoops his hand across my backside, securing his grip while my stomach and breasts graze the silky material of his torn tunic.
He rises to his feet, and now I can better understand the scale of the cocoon the Alak-Teah built around us—only slightly taller than Stellen but wide enough that he can take two steps in either direction before touching its inner sides.
As he draws me upright against his chest, he slowly…very slowly…guides my legs up and around his hips.
How gradually he moves feels excruciating now that the water’s warmth is so nearly mine, but the stiffness of my legs tells me he isn’t delaying to be cruel.
He’s being careful.
All of my limbs are too stiff. Too breakable.
I don’t have the strength to hold my legs in place, but he lifts me a little higher, enabling my thighs to hook above his hips while one of his arms remains firmly positioned beneath my backside, seating me against him. His other arm presses to my upper spine, the fingers of that hand tangling in my hair as he cradles my head once more against his neck.
My palm hasn’t left his heart, while my other arm wraps around his side.
He pauses, seeming to test his hold before he slides off his boots.
Steam wafts up around us as he steps through the opening in the cocoon.
