Fairy Queens: Books 5-7

by Amber Argyle

  “You should have told me how bad it was.” She was hurt that he hadn’t. “Now, let’s take a look at your shoulder.” She unwrapped it and was pleased to see the dark bruises had faded to a sickly green. “You should move it and stretch it every day now. But if there’s any chance you might get hurt, you should keep it in the sling.”

  “So, it should pretty much always stay in the sling,” he joked.

  She smiled at him, realizing he not only joked around when he was trying to lighten the mood, but also when he was afraid. She started rubbing his shoulder to get the muscles to loosen up. Adar grimaced and gave a little groan. “The accident you mentioned, where you got these scars—what happened?” Elice asked him

  “Let’s just say it involved a chariot race and a bet I didn’t win.” He lifted his arm and tested its motion, then smiled with what she hoped was gratitude.

  Sakari passed Elice a bone cup of something brown and steaming. “Moss tea,” the girl said. Elice tipped it up and took a swallow, choking as it scalded her mouth. They all stared at her in confusion. Embarrassed, she let her mouth flood with cold to sooth the burn.

  “You have to blow across the top to cool it,” Adar said as he cupped the liquid with his left hand, letting the steam rise to his face.

  Not wanting to repeat the experience, Elice set the cup down. Sakari, who was laying out Adar’s clothes to dry, gasped when she saw the dagger. Elice reached over, took her father’s belt, and settled it beside Adar. “It won’t hurt you.”

  Sakari eyed the fire. “Won’t it melt?”

  “No,” Elice said simply. “Where are we?” she asked the highmen.

  Kiviuq used the knife in his hand to point west. “Two days by dogsled to my village.”

  “How many days until we leave the Winter Queendom?”

  Kiviuq tipped his head to the side. “I do not understand.”

  “A place where ice melts completely from the ground, plants grow, and animals can live off the land and not just the sea.”

  Kiviuq stared at her. “I have heard of such a place. It is very far south, farther than I have ever been.” He stepped back. “We must finish butchering the meat before it freezes. Rest here.” The two men stepped back outside, Sakari reluctantly following them.

  As soon as they were gone, Elice looked at Adar in concern. They’d only left the palace a few days ago, and she couldn’t be sure how long they’d spent inside the glacier—a couple of days, maybe. Already he had been dangerously close to dying three times.

  She scooted closer to Adar, whose hands were shaking too much to drink his tea. She took it from him and held it to his lips. “I’m sorry.”

  He swallowed. “What for?”

  “I couldn’t keep the ice from breaking. I—”

  “Ice is brittle, Elice. You can’t change the nature of that.”

  “But I should have made it thicker. I should have been faster.”

  He grinned at her over the rim of the cup. “Look at the bright side. Nothing tried to eat us.”

  She closed her eyes. In her world, he was so fragile, so easily broken. How was she going to keep him alive for however much farther they had to go? “If I went back to my mother now, she’d let you go. You would be safe with these people. They can help you get out of the queendom.”

  Adar leaned in to her and whispered, “Elice, your mother has already proven she’s willing to break her promises. I’m safer with you than not, believe me. Besides, I can’t leave you pining away after me in that palace for the rest of your life—you’d make a terrible piner.”

  Elice choked on a drink of tea. “I would not!”

  His eyes twinkled. “There’s the fire.”

  So many retorts filled Elice’s mind that she couldn’t pick just one. She nearly glared at him before remembering that he liked it when she glared at him.

  Adar laughed outright. “You really are the best person I’ve ever teased—including my sisters. And I have seven of them.”

  Elice let out a long-suffering sigh. “I don’t know why I ever considered you a friend.”

  He gave her an exaggerated frown. “Just a friend? I thought we were past that.”

  She was saved from having to respond when Sakari came back inside with strips of blubber and skin in her hands.

  “What is it?” Elice asked.

  “Narwhal.” Sakari poured liquid from a water skin into cups. “My uncles bring you blood to make you strong, and blubber to keep you warm.”

  “Wonderful,” Adar said, his face a little green. But he drank the blood and ate the blubber without complaint. Elice cut off a piece for herself and chewed and chewed and chewed, then sipped at the blood.

  Sakari watched them for a few minutes, then said, “If you go south, I will come with you.”

  Elice stopped chewing. She and Adar exchanged a dubious glance. “Why?”

  Sakari stared at them, unflinching. “I would leave the forever ice.”

  Elice didn’t know what to say, or how to react. It was Adar who cleared his throat and said, “What about your uncles? Surely they won’t want you to leave them.”

  Sakari blinked slowly, as if just waking up. “It is not their decision to make. Besides, my mother’s family is from the south, a village that grows in the forests. They are reindeer herders. We lived with them when I was a girl. I will go back to them.”

  “It wouldn’t be safe for you,” Elice said gently. “My mother hunts us.”

  Sakari gazed into the embers. “This winter, we hunted the narwhals on the edge of the ice. The ice shook beneath us and cracked, splitting and breaking up. My father stood watch at the edge and fell into the water. I used my harpoon to pull him out. But he was already dead. I turned back to find my mother, but she was gone, fallen between the cracks in the ice. I floated for many days, thinking I would die with them. But my ice floe reached the shore.

  “When I returned home, my two younger brothers and I moved in with my aunts, who cared for us as they always had. Very few men returned from hunting on the ice. The man I was to marry and another of my uncles were among those who did not come back. Then followed a very bad winter. There was no food to eat. My brothers starved. Many of the children starved.” Sakari’s voice was hollow.

  “In the darkness, an earth tremor shook our tents, ripping apart the skins. My brothers froze to death.” Her voice trailed off. “I am not afraid of the Winter Queen, for she cannot hurt one who is dead already.” Sakari’s dark eyes glittered. She rose to her feet and slipped back outside without a word.

  Elice stared after her long after she’d left. She recognized the haunted look in her eyes—Sakari blamed herself for the deaths of those she loved. And she felt guilty for surviving when those she loved had not. Elice understood Sakari’s pain all too well.

  Hours later, the three Svass came back inside the tent, their hands chapped and covered in blood. “We have loaded the meat onto the sleds. We will take it back to our village. Sakari tells us she will go with you.”

  Elice waited for the men to forbid their niece to go, or at least try to talk her out of it. But instead, Kiviuq squatted down and pulled back the furs on the ground to reveal the packed snow beneath them. He drew his knife and traced a long curve that plunged downward. He tapped the top of the crescent. “This is where we are.” He drew the knife until he reached the point where the crescent straightened into a long dive. “Here is a village of highmen. We trade with them for caribou hides—warmer than seal. So they should know a place where animals live off the land. That is all I know.”

  Elice recognized the drawing from the atlas back home.

  “How long will it take to reach the village?” Adar asked Kuviuq.

  Kuviuq stroked his scraggly mustache. “Many weeks.”

  Elice calculated in her head. They’d spent maybe two days in the glacier, making it about seven days since Winter’s End began. “We only have seven more days to reach the Summer Realm,” she said to Adar.

  His brow furrowe
d as he studied the map carved into the packed snow. “We’ll have to go by sea.”

  “We can’t risk the open ocean again,” she told him. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Adar shook his head. “Ilyenna doesn’t know where we are. If she did, she would have attacked us by now. The longer the journey takes, the more chances she has to find us. And we don’t have weeks. We have days.”

  Elice looked into his eyes. “It’s too hard to protect you over the water. And besides, we don’t have a boat.”

  “You could make one,” he said with a confidence she didn’t feel.

  She rubbed her forehead. “Which she’ll easily spot. If she finds us out on open waters, it’s over.”

  “So disguise it,” he suggested. “If you can make something as grand as the Winter Palace, you can manage this.”

  “I’m not sure . . .”

  “Your magic is capable, Elice. You are capable of more than you know. Remember the aurora?”

  She stared into his eyes, seeing nothing but faith in her. “I’ll try.”

  “And I will guide you,” Sakari put in.

  Kiviuq studied his dead-eyed niece. “Yesterday is ashes, tomorrow is wood. Only today does the fire shine brightly.”

  “I choke on ashes, Uncle,” Sakari rasped.

  Kiviuq let out a long breath. “When the fire burns bright in you again, perhaps you will come back to us.”

  She looked away. “Perhaps.”

  They shared another meal of meat and blood, and Adar had the intelligence not to complain once. Kiviuq and Anuniaq had brought him thick clothing made of brown fur and showed him how to put it on over the linen clothing he already wore. The first layer went fur side in, the second fur side out.

  Elice watched silently. When they were finished, the highmen broke off to talk between themselves. Sakari sat quietly beside them. Adar leaned into Elice and whispered, “The fairies are looking for two people, not three. Fairies are terrible at telling people apart. Having Sakari come with us might work to our advantage.”

  Elice watched the girl, knowing her calm exterior hid a raging blizzard inside her. Adar yawned hugely. “Get some sleep,” Elice told him with a smile.

  He curled up in some furs, his face red with heat. Though Elice was exhausted, she slipped outside and crossed the waters on an icy path. When she was certain the ocean was deep enough, she held her hands out to her sides and pulled more winter than she had ever pulled before.

  After huddling so close to the fire his cheeks burned, Adar was loath to step back into the cold. He braced himself and left the warm hut after Elice and Sakari. To his surprise, the clothing he wore shielded him from the brunt of it. Only his face stung, the bitter breeze blowing off the ocean making his cheeks burn in a different way.

  He struggled to keep up, to make his steps even. His body still felt sluggish and weak, and the pain in his arm pulsed with each heartbeat. His injured shoulder ached, but he was determined not to let the discomfort show. Elice had cleaned the bite marks, but he could tell from the look on her face that she knew it was infected. The girl, Sakari, had given him something she said would ease the pain. So far it wasn’t working.

  Just behind Sakari, Adar paused on the shore as another path of ice spread out before them, thicker and wider than the last one. Elice must have figured out how deadly a spill into the water could be for him. “We’re not walking across the ocean, right?” he teased her. “’Cause that didn’t work out so well last time.”

  Elice cast him a look that said she knew exactly what his banter was trying to conceal—his fear. “I thought you trusted me.” She posed it like a challenge.

  “I trust you,” he muttered. “It’s your mother I’m worried about.” Still, when she said it like that. He took a deep breath and tried to pretend the icy path was paving stones. When that didn’t work, he simply wiped at the sweat freezing on his brow and put one foot in front of the other.

  They strode toward a massive iceberg, as big as some of the mountains Adar had seen in the Highlands. It wasn’t long before he realized that was where they were heading. He narrowed his gaze—there was a dark hole in the side of the iceberg. As they came closer, he realized the hole was an opening, just large enough for him to fit through. They stepped off an ice floe and onto the iceberg. He might have felt relief, except the iceberg was an awful lot like a ship. That hadn’t worked out so well for him.

  Elice paused before the opening and motioned for Adar and Sakari to go ahead of her. “It’s bigger inside. And we’ll be hidden from view.”

  Sakari didn’t hesitate before slipping out of sight. Adar followed her, but turned when he noticed Elice had paused just past the entrance. “What are you doing?”

  Elice stood with her back to him and sealed off the entrance to the iceberg with a thick layer of snow. “I anchored it to the sea floor. I have to free it.” The iceberg suddenly wrenched.

  Adar’s gloved hand shot out, gouging out packed snow and making his arm sting. Memories of the sinking ship swamped him. He’d been climbing the rigging when the horde of ice fairies had circled the ship once, twice, three times. Behind him, the captain had started shouting, calling for the ship to turn. Adar’s gaze had shifted from the fairies to the water. A long, thin dagger of ice shot out from the iceberg and plunged into the starboard side of their ship, wrenching the craft hard. A tearing sound vibrated through boards as men spilled off the icy decks and into the black water.

  Adar had slammed into a mast and lost his hold. He free fell, hands scrambling at the ropes, black water rising up to meet him. And then he’d felt a rope slide through his palm. His hand fisted around it, jerking him to a stop. He’d felt a pop in his shoulder and a moment of bright pain. For an unending moment, he struggled to hold on, to grip the rope with his other hand as his feet dangled over the dark water that swallowed his shipmates, drowning out their screams as their heavy clothing pulled them down. Their faces upturned, eyes meeting his from beneath the water.

  And then his fingers had opened of their own accord. He was falling toward the ocean when the ship shifted underneath him. He hit the deck hard, his head slamming into a barrel. He’d collapsed on his side. For a time, sound had gone. There was only the vibration of running feet, and then water washing over the deck. The moment it touched him, he had gasped in shock. His body and mind were still sluggish. He couldn’t run. Couldn’t call for help—not that there was any to be had.

  He’d done the only thing he could—wrap his arm around a bit of rope dangling from the same barrel he’d hit his head on and hang on as the ship sucked him down.

  Suddenly, the same face he’d seen when he’d surfaced was looking at him, though her expression was more concerned than desperate. “Adar? What’s wrong?”

  He shook himself, trying to find the joke that would let him forget, let him pretend all was well, but all he could find was the feel of the ship shuddering in her death throes, see the faces of his shipmates begging for help as they’d been sucked into the black abyss, feel the cold cutting into him.

  Elice’s arms wrapped around him, holding him together. “I can’t promise it’ll be all right. But I’m here,” she said softly. Above them, the aurora appeared, a pure white that made her dark hair gleam.

  Adar was not alone. And if he did die in this forsaken place, at least one person would mourn him. He felt his muscles unlock one by one. Then he let out a long breath and held her too, because maybe she needed to know she wasn’t alone either.

  With a deep breath, she pulled back and rested her palms against his cheeks, which burned with fever and cold and now for another reason entirely. How could her cold hands spread a fire through him? Fire and burning, he wanted to touch her. Kiss her. Hold her in a way that spoke of more than comfort and friendship.

  He felt the cold slinking back, held at bay by her gentle hands. And with the cold went the last of the horror. Elice stood on tiptoe, tipped his head down, and pressed her soft lips against his forehead. The act stunn
ed him. He wanted to take her face in his hands and kiss her. But she was not his to touch. She never would be.

  “You’re still fevering,” she said matter-of-factly. She took hold of his hand and pulled him deeper into the glacier. He went willingly—he’d follow her anywhere. “Below sea level, I shaped the glacier like a paddle to catch the currents. The top is shaped like a sail to catch the wind.”

  The tunnel widened into a cavern. Sakari was waiting for them, her face devoid of any of the wonder she should have felt at the shifting rivers of pastel light above them. Elice looked at the girl with the same expression on her face as when she saw a wounded animal: a single-mindedness that said she was going to heal the creature whether it liked it or not.

  Adar almost felt sorry for the girl. Elice’s healing was always painful.

  Elice eased him down and helped him out of his layers of fur to expose his injuries. They didn’t have a fire or any way to make one, so she simply rubbed his arm. There was less pus than the day before, which he thought a good sign. At least the tight throbbing eased a little. Her touch was cool, and the coolness spread. She left his arm open to the air—with her touching him, he didn’t really need all the layers anyway—and hummed something tunelessly. But Adar felt himself drawn toward the sound, toward this girl of color and light. He rested his head on her thigh and fell asleep.

  Adar watched as Elice reappeared into the cavern, brushing snow from the front of her tunic. With all her layers of fur, Sakari looked positively fluffy beside her. “We’re making good time,” Elice began. “Better than I thought. Sakari says the trouble we’ll have is convincing the villagers to loan us their dogs.”

  “How long have I been asleep?” Adar asked.

  Elice shared a look of concern with Sakari and hurried over to him. “Hours.”

  Adar winced as he sat up, his body aching deep in his bones. “Can’t we buy them?” At Elice’s look of confusion, he added, “The dogs?”

  “You don’t have anything the villagers want,” Sakari answered.