by Amber Argyle
Vision stained red with her own blood, Elice forced herself to pull her fists away from her ears and looked out over broken bits of the palace and forest churning around her and her grandfather. Another wave broke over them and shoved them under again. Something slammed into them from behind, sending them spinning and crushing one end of the pod. Sea water poured through but Elice quickly froze the hole shut.
She blinked blood from her eyes. “Grandfather, are you all right?”
He groaned in response. Before the ocean could toss them about some more, she set about freezing her grandfather and then herself to the sides of the pod. Next she shored up any cracks. The angry sea swallowed them and spit them out, over and over and over. It felt like an age had passed by the time the waves finally calmed.
Eyes clenched shut, Elice’s grandfather lay against the ice, his face gray and his lips blue. She needed to get him to her cave, where she could work on his arm. She pulled in the ice above them and carefully stood to peer out. She couldn’t see much of anything, but she was shocked at how warm it was outside—almost like summer. She stared at the horizon, searching for any sign of her home. But it was gone. They were alone.
“She must have won. Nelay must have won,” Elice said softly, sorrow rising and falling inside her.
“No,” her grandfather said, his voice thin. “If she had won, the winter fairies would have retreated to the safety of the queendom. Nelay would be hard pressed to touch the heart of winter, Winter Queen or no.” He stopped, trying to catch his breath. “This is something else.”
Elice knelt beside him and ripped off the hem of her dress to make a wrapping. She tried to take his arm, but he leaned away from her. “Leave it.”
“I don’t know where we are, Grandfather. I can’t see any land.” She tried to swallow her fear. They were adrift in thousands of leagues of sea. “If the Summer Queen didn’t do this . . .” She faltered. “Then the only other answer is the Sundering.”
He started to take a deep breath, but his chest hitched and he stiffened. “My girl.” He finally opened his pale-blue eyes—the color of the winter sky.
Elice studied his gaze. “They wanted Mother. And when she was a woman, they took her as queen. But why? Why did they want her? She wasn’t even born yet.”
His brow furrowed and then he looked up at Elice. “It’s you. Nagale wanted a child with the blood of Idara, the clanlands, and the highmen to overcome the old hatred. When your mother didn’t stop the Sundering, Nagale put her hope in you.”
“Why didn’t they just tell us?”
“It’s not in their nature.” Her grandfather started shivering. But he couldn’t possibly feel cold, for he was part of winter. “I’m fighting, and I’m losing. Oh, my girl, how can I leave you now?” He reached inside his overshirt and pulled out the beaver carving he had made so long ago. He pushed it into her hand with his icy fingers.
Elice attempted to draw the cold into her, but this cold wasn’t from winter. It was something far more final. “Grandfather, I can’t take this carving.”
“Some lessons should be passed on.” His hands fell back empty to rest on his chest. He strained toward her as if trying to speak. His body slowly relaxed, but his eyes remained fixed on hers. Just as he collapsed against the ice, he gasped, “Winter’s heir.” Then the light faded from his eyes, his gaze going unfocused.
“Grandfather?” Elice cried. “Grandfather?” She pressed her ear to his chest, but his heart had stilled.
Elice’s weeping was interrupted by the sound of someone calling her name. She stood and peered over the edge of the ice pod. A huge owl flew toward her, followed by dozens and dozens of fairies. There was a spider fairy, a moss fairy, a bush fairy—with all white eyes—a brown owl fairy, and a snake fairy, which made Elice shudder. The wings of the lead fairy were white with black striations, and Elice knew this was the fairy who had orchestrated this whole thing.
It wasn’t long before she realized the owl wasn’t a fairy at all, but a winter owl. The creature riding its back was the fairy—an old one with knotted joints, skin like a withered old apple, and eyes that were gold under the rheum. Her few remaining feathers were tattered and looked brittle. The owl landed on the lip of the ice, and the fairy appraised Elice with a gaze sharp enough to cut.
“Fairies don’t age.” Elice couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I have been stripped of my right to shift and have therefore been trapped in this body for forty years.” The old fairy smiled, revealing beaklike gums instead of teeth. “After all the trouble we have gone through to save the world, that’s your question?”
Elice shrugged. “I know the rest. You arranged for my grandparents to marry and have my mother. And she had me. You want me to kill my own mother. I won’t. Even if I could, I’m trapped here.”
The fairy snapped her gums a few times. “Are you?”
Elice passed a hand down her face in frustration. “Why me? Adar is the warrior—go ask him.”
The fairy dropped her gaze. “I doubt he will live through the night.” The fairy’s grip tightened around the owl’s feathers. “The magic is failing. Breaking apart.”
“Adar,” Elice whispered, wishing desperately to go to him. She fought back the despair. “How? How do I stop this?”
The fairy gave a half smile. “Blood of the three kingdoms, but citizen of none. A daughter of winter and a lover of summer’s son. Now you have everything to lose.”
Elice felt the cold rippling from her. “Just tell me how.”
The fairy leaned forward, giving Elice a view of her ruined wings. “The darkness comes.”
“How?” Elice shouted.
The fairy smiled a terrible, cruel smile. “Your mother became the queen when you were within her womb. The same change wrought upon her was wrought upon you. Outshine the darkness.”
“I don’t have all her powers.”
The fairy watched her. “Don’t you?”
“I can’t fly!”
“Can’t you?”
Elice froze. Her grandfather had called her winter’s heir.
“The quaking that destroyed the Winter Palace occurred when the queens faced off this evening,” the fairy went on. “Nelay retreated, but they will clash again soon. The queens’ powers are meant to balance one another—to complement each other. Using them against each other has set in motion the Sundering. If you don’t channel the magic to save the world, it will destroy us all.”
There wasn’t room for anything but belief. Elice reached for the power deep within herself. She was a channel to winter, just like her mother. She focused on her back, concentrated the power of winter there. Imagined how it would feel to have wings. The cold gathered, tightening until it burned, and then there was a sweet release. Elice gasped in a breath and peered over her shoulder. Clear, prismatic wings flared from her back, sparking with an inner fire.
Her grandfather had been right. And if she was winter’s heir because she was in her mother’s womb when she changed, then Adar was summer’s heir. Elice straightened to her full height, her wings spreading out to fill the horizon. She looked down at her grandfather, so still, and tucked the two halves of the beaver carving into her overdress. “I will remember what you taught me. I promise you.”
She jumped a little, and a down stroke of her wings carried her upward. Hovering unsteadily, she drew the ice of the pod into herself. It disappeared. Her grandfather floated for a moment and then sank, his pale face vanishing beneath the dark waves.
Nagale and her owl flew up beside Elice. “Call up a southwest wind,” instructed the fairy. “I’ll show you the way.”
“I don’t need you to show me. I can feel her.” Elice reached into winter, called for the wind, and stretched her wings. The wind rushed past her face and forced the tears from her eyes. The dark ocean slipped beneath her, turning slowly green-black and then navy.
Along the coast of Svass, the villages were flattened, their seagoing ships stranded far inland
. Elice realized the sea had risen up, dragging the ships ashore and wiping out anything beyond her borders. She could only hope Sakari and her people were safe.
Elice flew fast, the wind shooting her across the sky like a falling star. Mountains rose up before her and increased in size and scope the farther she traveled. She passed the smoking ruins of a city. A smattering of survivors wandered, lost and dazed. There was a vibration in the air. The ground rumbled and birds exploded from the thick trees. A naked mountain thrust up from the land, black smoke bursting out in a thick cloud shaped like a mushroom.
“It’s already begun,” Nagale said from beside Elice.
Elice shifted midair, then diverted around the rising smoke to emerge on the other side. Above a high line of glacier-topped mountains, she saw her mother and Nelay wrapped around each other. Ice poured from her mother’s hands, fire from Nelay’s. As the elements met, the ground trembled again. A swath of trees shifted, then rolled down the mountainside, churning with rock and mud. The mass headed straight toward a village nestled beside a large lake.
Elice reached into winter and sent ice raging outward to create a barrier between the village and the slide. At that moment, she recognized the mountains—she’d been sculpting them all her life. This was Argonholm, the village of her father, where her grandmother still lived.
Just as that profound realization sank in, the rockslide blasted through the ice barrier. Screaming, the people tried to flee. Elice set her jaw. If she couldn’t stop the rockslide, she would divert it. She formed an ice wedge just before the village. The slide tumbled into the ice and shifted to both sides, some spilling into the lake, some into a field. Even as Elice fed more ice into the wedge, a boulder bounced over it, collapsing a house as though it were made of sticks instead of rock and lumber. Rocks and debris spilled over the edge of the ice and toppled into the village.
And then it stopped. But the villagers couldn’t stop running, for one of the mountains was spouting yellow and orange magma, along with the churning smoke. The queens’ battle was tearing the world asunder.
Elice dove toward the battling queens and formed a jagged-edged wall of ice between them. The queens reeled back from each other, their eyes snapping to Elice. “Stop!” she shouted. “Can’t you see you’re destroying the whole world?”
Ilyenna gaped at her. “Elice—you have wings! What happened?”
Keeping a strong barrier between the Summer and Winter Queens, Elice carefully watched them both. “You have to stop this, Mother. Stop this war, before the world is gone forever.”
“How is this possible?” Nelay asked, the fire fading from her eyes.
Studying the woman who loved Adar, Elice found she could not hate her. No matter how much damage she had caused. “I am winter’s heir, as Adar is summer’s.”
“Adar is dying.” Nelay’s voice broke. “He may already be gone.”
A chasm opened up in Elice’s chest. “You can save him!”
Disbelief and hope mingled on Nelay’s face. But before she could choose either emotion, fire erupted beneath them, and a churning cloud of ash and magma exploded. Elice only had time for one powerful down stroke before the smoke enveloped her.
“Elice!” her mother cried.
Holding her breath, Elice whipped around, eyes burning as she tried to catch sight of anything. But it was dark. So dark. The old fear rose up inside her. She had to get out of the smoke, get to the light. She pumped her wings. Static crackled through the air, lifting the hairs on her body. Heat boiled up from below. She tried to shift her magic, to shield herself from the fire and ash rising toward her.
With a deafening boom, magma burned through her thick ice like it was nothing. She screamed as it splattered her feet, and then she gasped in a ragged breath of poisonous fumes. She was choking. Falling. Then something slammed into her. Arms wrapped around her and dragged her through the air. The heat no longer blistered her skin, though the smoke still choked her.
It was growing lighter, a thick charcoal instead of the awful black. Elice coughed, her throat raw. The Summer Queen had saved her. A few more pumps of Nelay’s wings, and she set Elice down in the shelter of a rock outcropping at the base of the mountain.
“How can I save him?” Nelay asked her.
Elice looked up through tears. “He is your heir,” she gasped between coughs. “He’s had the power all along. Same as me. Give him the realm—name him your king. Then summer will embrace him and heal his hurts, as it healed my mother’s long ago.”
Nelay shot to the sky without hesitation, her form almost immediately swallowed up by smoke. Then she was gone, and Elice was left in the choking vapors and falling ash. She tried to stand, hoping to glide down to the valley that had to be somewhere below, but pain stabbed up from her feet. She didn’t dare look at them to assess the damage.
With every poisonous breath she took, her head grew lighter and her wings more limp. Then a strong wind pumped beside her and she was enveloped by her mother’s cool arms and carried from the churning blackness of the lava cloud. Elice gasped a breath of clean air into her charred lungs. Bits of cooling magma fell from what was left of her feet. Her mother settled on the far side of a gentle rise, where they collapsed, Ilyenna’s wings trailing behind her like murdered ghosts. She leaned over her daughter.
Elice couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Breathing hurt terribly. Much worse than her feet, which she still couldn’t bring herself to look at. But if the look of horror on her mother’s face was any indication, it was very bad. Curled on her side, Elice saw that she lay in a field of grass and dandelions. She reached out and grazed her fingertips across the soft, spiny petals. Then she gave into the great, hacking coughs. She spit black mucous into the grass, then vomited. Her mother pounded her back, her face lined with dread.
Head spinning, Elice lay back on the grass and stared at the churning column of smoke that blotted out the sky. Dozens of bolts of lightning continuously sparked in the darkness. She felt strangely disconnected, like she was watching all of this from far away.
“Elice, you’re turning blue. You have to breathe. Take it in.”
Her gaze shifted from the smoke and lightning to her mother leaning over her. “Where are we?”
Her mother’s eyes glistened. “The Shyle. We’re home.”
Elice smiled a little. “I saved Argonholm . . . from a rockslide.” She choked and gasped. “They wanted me to kill you,” she admitted. “Tricked me into bargaining them for it.” She tried to laugh but ended up coughing instead. “I showed them. I beat their bargains.” Her life would be the price, not her mother’s.
“Of course you would never murder me. You’re my daughter.” Her mother formed ice crystals over Elice’s skin and scrubbed the soot from her face.
Wheezing, Elice watched her mother go through the motions of healing—motions that by all accounts had once been second nature to Ilyenna, but now seemed foreign and awkward. “I’m sorry I hurt you, Mother. I love you.”
Ilyenna rested a hand on Elice’s check. “I know.”
Elice relaxed into the field, one hand still grasping a dandelion. She could feel her life slipping away, like water through her fingers. “You could save me. Name me your heir and stop the Sundering.”
Ilyenna’s mouth tightened. “There are worse things than death, Elice. I know I should love you. And yet, I don’t. My love for you is trapped beneath a layer of ice and I cannot reach it. So I must do what I have always done—what your father would have wanted me to do. It broke me, becoming a queen. It broke me, and I will not let it break you.”
Elice tried to touch her mother’s face, but her arm was too heavy and it fell back to her side. “It won’t break me, Mother, because I am your heir. I was born with the magic of winter.”
Ilyenna looked at Elice, her face strangely composed. “No, my daughter. Go to your father. Go to your rest. I will not leave you in this broken world.”
Elice felt oddly at peace. Her mother was capable of ac
ting out of love, but not really feeling it. Elice forgave her for that. Forgave her for failing to stop the Sundering. Forgave her for not loving her in the gentle way a mother should. Giving Elice her grandfather had been the best Ilyenna could do with what little humanity she could remember.
Elice felt herself sinking into the loam beneath her and rising up to the sky at the same time. She was everywhere and nowhere and everything and nothing. Then her father was there, his face smiling at her. She smiled back, ready to go with him and leave her broken body behind.
But he shook his head sadly. “The price has not been paid, Elice. First you must destroy the Winter Queen.” Then his ghost knelt beside her and whispered a phrase. He gave her a gentle smile, stood, and pulled back into the vapors.
Elice felt herself rising up, following him, but the phrase he’d given her left her lips moments before her body stilled. “You still have the same soul.”
Ilyenna gasped. “Rone?” She choked on a sob as tears ran slick down her face. Then she leaned forward, blocking Elice’s view of the world beyond, and pressed her cold lips to Elice’s. All the scattered parts of Elice suddenly slammed back together with crystal clarity. Her body healed in an instant. A connection to the fairies snapped into place. Ice and snow and storm converged through her, whipping with enough force to freeze her soul and shatter it to a thousand pieces.
But Elice was impervious to the cold.
She gasped in a breath, filling her lungs with clean, cold air. Every remaining fairy turned and locked their eyes on her. The trembling of the earth stilled and the volcanoes ceased spewing smoke and ash and fire. Elice pushed herself to her feet, feeling at once whole and perfect in a way she had never felt before. Her wings yawed out behind her. She stretched out a winter wind to clear away some of the smoke.
She took another free breath, her lungs no longer aching, and turned to find her mother crumpled on the ground, tears streaming down her face as she stared at Elice. The wings at Ilyenna’s back slowly faded before disappearing altogether. The hard, sharp-edged aura that always surrounded her softened, like snow melting and life springing back. Her cutting expression thawed until she looked like a young girl, shivering with cold.