Silas was thrown by the sudden shift in her attentions, but managed to croak out a shivered; “Gone.”
“Gone where?”
He snorted. “You cannot believe I would tell you. And so, I’m afraid, you’ll never know, since you’ve made it clear the cost of silence is my murder before yourloyaland certainly not coerced court.”
“Murder?”
Silas turned a pointed glance to the ice shard hanging above his skull. Avette’s laughter seemed to twine around the stalactites.
“Oh, dear Duke! I’m not going tokillyou.”
Silas said nothing; her words hung on some unseen precipice. Perhaps she wasnotgoing to kill him, but she was not going to let him walk free from this hall so easily.
“Where is your daughter?”
“Gone.”
Avette nodded, a gleam in her eye that said she’d hoped he’d refuse.
“Well, I suppose I have no other option but to believe you.”
A trap, but Silas returned her nod. “I suppose not.”
“And I suppose you have no other option,” she went on, “but to kneel.”
Silas felt his numbed lips curve, trembling around the chatter of his teeth, into a wry smile.
“I’m fine where I am.”
Avette’s smile came more easily.
“Then you may remain there.”
He could not feel his toes to begin with, and so at first, Silas did not feel the frigid doom consuming him. Not until his knees went weak, and the impulse to move, to find balance, was met with a solid wall. His body was not answering. Silas glanced down, but by the time the yell of horror rose within him, his chest was already encased in the same ice that had crept up his legs. The cry was crushed inside him before it could find purchase, the only thing falling from his lips a white gust of panicked breath as the ice clouded his vision.
And then Silas knew no more.
He could not move. Could not see. Could not think.
He was nothing and no one.
So he did not hear Avette’s triumphant little sigh, nor see the tilt of her head as she admired him, a living statue of hard ice and shimmering, white frost. He did not see her turn from him to the crowd of kneeling courtiers, did not hear their strangled screams, white gusts of gasping breath forming clouds around the rows of daggered stalactites.
And he did not see Lady Imogen take her glittering skirts in one hand, and finally drop to her knees.
Chapter Two
Adeline
At the surge and slope of each wave, her insides sloshed like hot tea in a flask—Adeline was going to be sick.
Behind her, a number of voices hissed angrily, overlapping in argument. Through the fog of her nausea, Adeline could just about pick out Ceriwyn’s soft tut.
“Considering she’s a Princess of Eisalaan—”
“Don’t care if she’s the Queen of the Four Waters,” a gruff voice cut in. “She’ll not be spilling her belly down the side of my boat.”
The water swelled beneath them and took Adeline’s stomach with it, soaring for her lungs before free-falling toward the shifting wooden boards beneath her. She heaved, and someone gave a wordless cry of panic, answered by Ceri’s exasperated sigh.
