An archive room. Of course. Historical records and artefacts. Crown jewels and neatly preserved accounts of monarchs passed.
The archives would lead him to Avette’s pendant.
They had to.
???
Kai spent every evening of the next few weeks hunting through the archives at length. His obsessive habit might have roused suspicion had Adeline not introduced him to the archivist herself, and stressed that Kai was to have full access and total peace while he studied Eisalaan’s history.
He tried not to feel the insistent guilt that prickled at him, tried to shove it aside or bury it under logic: he was only doing what he had to. Even so, the few times she had accompanied him, he burned with shame in her presence, wilted under the shining light of her trust. And all the while, the Princess chattered amicably with a lying stranger who spent his nights pawing at the carefully filed secrets of her ancestors.
It was all for nothing, for the pendant was nowhere to be found.
Kai turned over jewels and baubles that seemed like the glittering, gaudy things Avette might have worn. He leafed through correspondence, and studied inventories detailing her belongings.
It was as though it had never existed, and if Kai didn’t have the scarred palm to prove it, he might have believed it was so. There was no mention of it even under accounts of what Eisalaan’s historians called The First Frost.
At most, the books gave him an insight to the romantic portrait history had painted of him. Selma had told him that he and Avette had their place among Eisalaan’s fairytales, but he could never have imagined what their story had become.
They called him The Drowned Prince, and wrote of his deep and unending love for Avette Beira, the Last Sorceress. The woman who, they said, had split her heart open and burst into a violent flurry of snow, casting their Kingdom into an eternal winter to protect him. Kai read story after story compulsively, even when the flood of images turned his breath to a sickening dry heave.
Despite his poor luck, Kai couldn’t help but feel that he was circling the truth of Avette’s lost treasure. He entered the archives with fresh hope each night, ready to shift through dusty tapestries and eroding metals, to read more epics about their great love story, no matter how sick and breathless they left him.
When his vision blurred with rage and nausea, he told himself it would be worth it. That every saccharine lyric, every late night, every little white lie drew him closer to the pendant, to the end of this Winter.
To his homecoming.
Chapter 24
Adeline
The coldest winter days unfurled like the petals of a white rose falling away to reveal their warm yellow centre.
Mid-Winter was approaching and Iseult would soon be home where she belonged. Adeline would soon hear her sister’s tiny, insistent voice babbling breathlessly in her ear, she would soon scoop Iseult up into her lap and bury her face in her sweet-smelling halo of copper hair. How was it that the girl always managed to smell like sugar, like she’d slept in a vat of honey? Adeline could never figure it out. She only knew that missing her baby sister was a physical feeling, like an itch she could never reach.
Of course, missing her older sister was a physical feeling too, a new one; an emptiness. As cold and vast at the space beside her where Mareda used to be.
But Mareda was not there, not at Adeline’s side, not anymore. Iseult soon would be. Just a matter of days, her father told her one morning. He’d come to break his fast with her in the family dining hall before her morning training. It went unsaid that he was there so she would have some company should Mareda decide to waft in and drift past Adeline’s seat as if she weren’t there. Happily though, they had the room to themselves thus far.
“Sebastian sent a boat for Iseult just this morning,” her father said.
Adeline did a little seated jig and the table trembled with her, setting her mug of milky tea to rippling.
“I won’t last! I’m going to die for want of cuddles before she even gets here.”
“Well you won’t have long to wait,” he said, spreading gooseberry jam on a thick roll of bread. “Sebastian says she’ll be home with us by the end of the week.”
Adeline felt a soft smile play at her lips.Home with us.He may have sired only one Beira child, but Silas truly cared for her sisters, and doted on Iseult in particular. Adeline suspected that her cheeky little sister reminded him of her own youthful mischief in years long passed. Although when she’d expressed that thought to him, he’d assured her that he had nothing to be wistful about. In his words, she was still as wilful as ever.
“How is Sebastian?”
She hadn’t seen him in quite some time, and though she didn’t know the man as well as she probably should, she knew her father had taken him under his wing; and more recently, acted as a buffer between Edward and the groom-to-be.
“Well enough,” Silas nodded slowly. “He’s still coming to terms with the prospect of ruling Eisalaan one day. He tells me he spends much of his time thinking about what it would mean to be King.”
Adeline snorted.
“I doubt he’ll have much to worry about. Mother’s not one for delegating, is she, illness aside? I mean, she’s spent most of her life telling the world there won’t evenbea King Beira, I can’t see her going one further and letting himactuallydo anything other than sit at her side wearing a nice shiny crown.”
