“But you did it to your people, too. And I will make sure they know that. You might one day thaw, in only the most superficial sense – but you will never be free of what you’ve done.”
With a last glance around the still, evergreen enclosure, Kai dropped his hood and moved closer to the statue. Her pointed chin was tilted toward the darkening sky but he towered over her just as he had in life; she could have been looking up at his face if her eyes had not been closed. Her spindly eyelashes rested on her skin like pale spider legs, and her frosted rosebud lips curved in a small, taunting smile. A smile. His stomach heaved. She had doomed thousands of Merrow to a cold, lonely purgatory – children and babes among them – and smiled as she did it. Kai doubled over with a sudden and violent retch, clapping a hand hard over his mouth as the sickness wracked his body.
There’s no time.
Someone could be along any moment now to offer their prayers to this pretty monster. He had to get control over himself, over the hot roiling in his gut. He clamped down against the nausea, tightening his throat, his gills flickering weakly with the effort.
The pendant.
He needn’t even look at her, he just needed to somehow work the pendant free. Kai shuddered as he reached for her throat, letting his fingers blindly scrabble along the cool white column until they found her collarbone.
No.
Bare. His head came up too fast, spine whipping straight. Nothing. Nothing at her neck, nothing hanging below her collar. Her hard white skin was smooth, no sign that anything had been pried from her chest. He pushed closer even as his stomach heaved again, his boots scattering offerings of jewels and candles, and crushing the silver and evergreen garlands that lay at Avette’s bare feet.
No.
She had been wearing it, he remembered, shehad.He searched her beautiful, sickening face wildly, almost willing the ice to splinter, for her eyes to fly open and -
Her eyes.
Kai realised then what he hadn’t seen before in his reluctance to reallylookat her. Those long thin eyelashes didn’t rest on her skin; they were carved into it. He lifted a hand tentatively, touched a finger to the tip of her chin. Cold, but not ice. A grey vein ran through the stark white of her cheek. Marble. A marble statue.
Kai staggered backward, nearly tripping over a sack of grain. He righted himself and stared at Avette’s face from this new angle – and itwasher face, exactly her face. How could that be? The sick stirring in his gut burned and became something else, something dark and feral that rumbled up his chest and opened his throat in a growl. He turned and snatched up the sack of grain in one blurred movement, hefting it easily into his arms and spinning on the spot to lurch it at Marble Avette with a roar that stirred birds from their bare nests in the depths of the forests.
“Kai!”
He dropped to his knees in the mess of wheat and seeds, barely registering the patter of Ceriwyn’s boots on the snow as she rushed to his side from nowhere. She fell to the ground and threw her arms around his shoulders, drawing him to her like a mother scooping up her injured child.
“Koo, what –whywould you come here? How could you think this was a good idea?”
Kai’s eyes gazed, unfocused, at the statue’s billowing white skirts.
“I thought it was her, Ceri,” he said flatly. “I thought it was really her.”
Ceriwyn hugged him tighter, and he felt her chin brush his scalp as she turned to look at the marble princess. “No, Koo. She’s gone. You’re safe. You’re safe.”
He shook his head once, but then stilled. Ceri, Os, Alun; they had been treading water at his side that day, had heard the angry words that Kai hurled at his former love. They’d seen her spread her arms to the heavens before the vicious wind pushed them all below the surface and the ice closed above their heads. They were the only ones, aside from Kai, who knew who Avette really was, and what she had done.
But they didn’t know whatKaihad done for her; they didn’t know about the pendant. And so, all those centuries later, when he swore them to secrecy about his final moments with the Princess, they had pried no further, had no reason to. Now Ceri shushed him and whispered reassurances, and it was with no small amount of shame that he held his silence and let his sister comfort him. He turned his head to her shoulder and closed his eyes and Ceri stroked his hair.
After some time, he stopped shaking – he hadn’t realised he was until his hands stilled at his sides – and Ceriwyn drew away from him.
“It’s only old stone and frost, Koo,” she said gently. “There was an ice statue here once, but it’s long gone.”
“Gone,” he repeated, not quite a question, without even the energy to rouse an interest. What was the point? Every time he got any closer, the world fell out beneath his feet like the cracked ice on the Laune. And he could drown no longer.
Ceri went on: “Stolen and melted decades ago, the Marchioness says. So it couldn’t have been her. She’s really, truly gone.”
The Marchioness was wrong. Ceri was wrong. Oh, Kai had no doubt there had been an ice statue here once. That eerie marble effigy could have been carved from nothing but her own likeness. So there must have been a true, frozen Avette in these woods once upon a time. Someone had looked upon her cold face and sculpted it out of stone.
Something echoed in the hollow of his chest, and he was surprised to hear the flat laughter that fell from his lips.
She held him still, really. Avette had faded away with a smile on her lips, and still Kai walked the blank wasteland that was her legacy, tormenting himself.
Perhaps one day, he would find that pendant, if it wasn’t already lost, buried under six hundred years of snow.
Until then, by the grace of Mother Adhlas, he would allow himself to live.
