by Sara Raasch
“Theron”—I reach for him and he extends his arm, reaching for me too—no, not reaching for me.
He swings his hand over my shoulder to grab my chakram.
“No!” I shout.
But he shoves me back as I try to grab it from his hand, and in the beat between me stumbling backward and launching at him again, he aims the chakram at his father and lets it fly.
The blade spins through the air, twisting for so long I think maybe we’ll all just stand here forever, poised between nothing and everything.
But it reaches Noam. It reaches him, and slides through his neck, a perfect blow.
Everyone moves. Mather scrambles for me but gets pinned back by Cordellan soldiers; Garrigan ducks around them, angling for me; Ventrallans shield Jesse and Raelyn, more Cordellans catch Noam as he falls, plummeting backward with unbelieving eyes. And I fly toward Theron still, my mind hooked around the need to stop him, but to stop him from what? He already threw it.
My fingers connect with Theron’s arm and he whirls on me, rage tearing apart his features. He’s never been this angry before, this inhumanly livid, and he grabs my arms, shoving me back until I slam into the wall, paneled molding biting bruises along my shoulders.
The shock of Theron treating me like this makes me numb when movement behind him grabs my focus. Garrigan makes it out of the soldiers, sliding into the place Theron occupied before he forced me away.
This has to be a dream. A nightmare. Because as I look at Garrigan, his clear blue eyes pinch with urgency . . .
And my chakram returns.
The entire world dissolves and rebuilds in the seconds between Garrigan turning and noting the blade. He can’t catch it, not that fast.
The chakram sinks into his body with a solid thunk.
His eyes slip down, dragged by the weight of the weapon sticking out of his chest. Even when Sir fell during the battle for Abril, his wounds weren’t this deliberate. This certain.
Garrigan is dead before I can even think to use the magic to save him.
He drops to his knees, to his side, nothing but a body now.
The world speeds back up, a burst of noise and movement that jolts me into the present. Someone says words that don’t make sense, babbling incoherently.
“He’s dead. The king of Cordell is dead . . .”
I look at Theron, hands shaking, arms shaking, everything shaking in the earthquake of this moment.
Theron glares down at me, his eyes almost as lifeless as those of the people he killed.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Meira
RAELYN AND HER soldiers smile, the only people in the room not rocked by disbelief. They’re pleased by this chaos.
My body stiffens with shock, that single emotion shoving all others away so that all I am, all I feel, is action. I rear my knee up and hit Theron in the gut, shoving him off me, and dive at Raelyn. Angra isn’t here, and that lingering fact makes me dizzy, because if he’s causing this much pain and he isn’t even present, what’s happening to the rest of the world? I may not be able to fight him now, but Raelyn—Raelyn will die. Someone will suffer for this—
I leap for her, but the ballroom shifts, retracts, and before my feet connect with the stage, a wicked force sweeps my legs out from under me. I crash onto my elbows, pain reverberating up my already bruised arms from my earlier chase across the rooftops of Rintiero.
Dazed, my mind swirls with the wrongness of soldiers lowering Noam’s body to the ground and taking Cordell’s conduit out of his belt. The wrongness of Mather and his Thaw trying to get to me but struggling against soldiers, of Conall and Nessa kneeling over Garrigan, Nessa cradling his head in her lap and mumbling a lullaby through the turmoil.
“Lay your head upon the snow,” she sobs, stumbling over the words, and the more she tries to force them out, the more my body wells with misery.
The force that yanked me to the ground pulls my attention, but I can’t get it to make sense with everything else. I only see that word pulsing through me, wrong, wrong, wrong, and the numbing, empty blanket of shock that clings to me, becomes me.
Theron tips his head and surveys me like I’m an animal he brought down in the hunt, some prized trophy he’s deciding how to skin. The expression itself isn’t what makes me tremble—it’s seeing that expression on Theron, who has never in all the time I’ve known him looked at me with such possession.
“My king!”
The voice precedes an object thrown into the air. Theron catches it, his eyes never leaving mine, his fingers tightening around the hilt of the dagger through the purple haze it emits. Cordell’s conduit—his conduit.
He’s the king of Cordell now.
That thought alone would be enough to cripple me, but when another sight catches my eyes, I dissolve entirely. Every bit of fight, every last flicker of drive—it all evaporates as someone else emerges from the door beside the stage, stepping out of the shadows and into the light as if he’d been lingering there all along.
I could almost dismiss him as another vision or something in my own head, except for the way Raelyn looks at him too. And Jesse, and my Winterians, everyone staring with either joy or horror at the king of Spring.
“Convincing, King Theron,” Angra purrs, meeting his eyes. “Convincing indeed.”
I can’t look back up at Theron. For once, I choose to focus on Angra, to keep gaping at him rather than face the horrifying reality that Theron is just as possessed by Angra’s Decay as Raelyn. And now that Angra is his conduit too, the Decay is limitless. It can spread to anyone who doesn’t have pure conduit magic in them.
Without thought, I reach for the magic within me and will it into the Winterians in the room, filling them up in a protective burst of icy chill.
But Angra took Theron. Started working on him long ago, in Abril, when he used the Decay to worm into Theron’s mind and pinpoint his weaknesses. Those weaknesses are all Theron is now, has been, for months. I should have seen the change in him . . . I should have pressed him more about why he was so hurt, should have helped him. . . .
But does he even know the Decay has him? Does he realize that’s what it is? He is the wielder of Cordell’s Royal Conduit now, but if the Decay is already planted deep in his mind and he doesn’t know to use the magic to block it or fight . . .
The magic is all about choice. It won’t save him unless he wants it to.
I scream again and try to claw my way up the stage to Angra. There’s nothing left inside of me but desperate, pure instinct, fingers curved in deadly hooks and teeth gnashing like a rabid wolf. I will stop this, I can still fix this, I can still—
Someone grabs me, fingers tight over the fabric of my shirt, and I wither, knowing whose hands they are, how very, abominably different this is to all the other times he held me. I catch a glimpse of Cordell’s dagger tucked into his belt and as Theron pulls me to my feet and Raelyn turns to Jesse, who watches all this happen with the empty eyes of a man in complete disbelief.
“Please stop this,” Jesse murmurs, his voice sad and brittle.
“If you want your soldiers to obey you, make them.” Raelyn’s statement is a dare. “But you won’t, because you are weak. And we will not stand for weak rulers anymore.”
She signals one of her men to rip Ventralli’s conduit off Jesse’s belt. The soldier tosses the crown to Raelyn, who catches it. It’s powerless in her hands, though—this object-conduit only reacts to Jesse. But she doesn’t need object-conduits anymore. She has Angra’s Decay.
“Such a pretty bauble,” she coos, lacing her fingers through its spires. “And so fragile too.”
I gape. She can’t mean what I think she does—Angra wouldn’t let her break it. Jesse would become like us, endlessly powerful.
Raelyn squares her shoulders. “Something awfully fantastic happens when a Royal Conduit is broken in
defense of a kingdom, I’ve been told. But if it were to break by accident . . .”
Jesse dips forward, watching his wife in numb terror.
She turns to him and steps closer. Before anyone can intervene, she cuffs him over the jaw with the crown. Jesse rears back, blood exploding around his face as the ballroom resonates with the delicate sound of two of the crown’s spires snapping off and hitting the floor.
It broke. His conduit broke.
The gray glow instantly snuffs out.
I stare at Jesse, waiting, hoping Raelyn was wrong. His conduit wasn’t broken in defense of his kingdom, because he hangs there, not reacting at all, but maybe the magic still sought him out . . .
He looks from his conduit’s broken spires up to Raelyn, blood dripping in ruby tendrils from his mouth. This is a man who wasn’t defending anything, caring about anything, when his conduit broke. No emotion to spur the magic on.
What happens to magic when a conduit is broken carelessly? When the conduit-wielder has no emotion in his eyes, no act of selflessness or sacrifice in the way he stares up at his wife, his eyes glazed with aching defeat?
The magic is all about choice. And if Jesse chose not to care, maybe the magic is just . . . gone.
My body sags in Theron’s hands.
Angra’s control is widening.
A crack slithers up my mind, letting a single question slip through.
Why?
Why now? If Angra has been planning this takeover since he fell in Abril, why wait so long to enact it? Why not just sweep through the world immediately?
Angra steps off the stage, smiling at me like a long-separated friend. “Why now, indeed, Highness?” he taunts, and I jerk with disbelief, slamming into Theron.
Angra heard me. He heard my thoughts. We possess—we are—the same type of magic now, though, so maybe we’re connected? The thought is too disturbing to consider.
He leans closer to me. “You have such flimsy control of that magic, don’t you? I expected more from you after the chaos you unleashed in Abril. But no matter.”
“Meira!” Mather’s pained shout comes from the ranks of the soldiers who have him and the rest of the Winterians. A clanking of armor follows as he thrashes to break free.
“You have a plan now, don’t you, Winter queen?” Angra purrs. He reaches up, running one finger down my cheek, and I brace for an onslaught of visions—
But nothing comes.
He grins. “Yes, such lofty plans.”
Angra saw something, but I didn’t?
He . . . blocked me.
I tremble, every muscle in my body an earthquake of horror.
He can control his magic more than I can.
This—the carnage of death at my feet, the victorious smirk of Angra before me—is everything I’ve feared my entire life.
And I can’t move, can’t fight him, every nerve limp with the knowledge that despite everything I’ve done, everything we’ve endured, we still failed.
I still failed Winter.
“I’ve always been more powerful than you,” Angra spits. Theron adjusts his grip on my arms, fingers tight. “But you think you have a way to defeat me—by getting yourself killed, hmm? No, Highness. I’ll make sure you stay alive for a long, long time, enough to watch me kill everyone else in your kingdom. Once everyone in Winter is dead, once I own every flake of snow in that miserable land—” He pauses, reaches into my pocket, and yanks out the key, wrapped in the square of cloth. He keeps his eyes on me as he reaches into Theron’s coat pocket and takes out the one he had, holding them triumphantly before my face. “I will make you watch me destroy your mines once and for all. I will bring those mountains crumbling down.”
My mouth pops open, a flicker of clarity pushing through my throbbing dismay. Our mines?
Angra’s green eyes tighten on mine and all the questions break around the one answer I’ve been wanting for years.
When Spring overtook Winter, Angra never used our mines. He boarded them up and let them rot despite the riches they held.
Any time another kingdom tried to take the mines from Angra—whether by force, as Yakim and Ventralli attempted, or by treaty, as Noam did—he retaliated. Violent, destructive retaliation, slaughtering the armies that invaded or marching into the kingdom that dared negotiate with him.
Angra seized the one person in the world who wanted to give pure magic to everyone—Theron, who in turn killed the one other person who wanted to open the chasm—Noam.
The mines. The magic chasm.
That was the reason for the whole war. That was why Angra slaughtered Winter for centuries—because he knew one day we’d find it. Angra even let Theron continue on his quest for the keys, waiting to overtake the world so he’d be in thorough possession of the one way to open the chasm.
That’s his weakness. That’s what he fears.
Pure conduit magic as a counter to the Decay.
Angra catches my revelation—I see it in the way his face tenses with fury before smoothing into a forced grin. He flashes his eyes to Theron and leans in, hissing words just for me.
He doesn’t want Theron to hear whatever he’s going to say.
I beat down the thought, not wanting Angra to see any more revelations I might have.
“You will never defeat me,” Angra whispers. “I will destroy everything long before you get that chance. You are nothing in this war, no matter how high you think yourself, but I will gladly let you be the one I blame for every moment I had to wait for this freedom. You are unable to stop this, Highness—you see that now. No matter what path you take, it will end the same for you—death and failure.”
I yank against Theron’s grip, unexpected strength leeching into my veins. Angra has a weakness, still. He fears something. “What you offer isn’t freedom. The world will know that—they won’t fall to your control.”
Angra’s sickening grin returns. “King Theron,” he announces, eyes still on mine. “Restrain our guests. They may need time to learn what you have.”
“Theron.” I writhe against him as he takes a step back, pulling me on. “Theron, stop. You’ve seen what Angra has done to the world! You can fight it—you have magic now!”
My voice crashes out over the ballroom, everyone holding still as if they’re just as desperate for Theron’s response as I am.
He looks down at me, his expression flickering with a rapid array of emotions. Resolve, grief, hope.
“You’ll see,” he tells me. “This is the best way to unite the world. I’ve spent months going over it, Meira—I’ve spent months searching for other options. Angra is offering this power to everyone. No more conduits—no more limitations. You’ll see. You have to understand.”
I’d feel better if he sounded insane. If his words came angry and harsh, babbling of plans to make the world bow to him, like Angra. But Theron sounds like . . . himself.
Angra watches Theron as he tries to convince me, his smile softening. It catches me so off guard that I almost miss it. But no, Angra actually smiled at Theron.
Is there more happening here? Did I miss something in the visions of Theron’s memory in Abril?
On the edge of my mind, I’m aware of Cordellan soldiers dragging Nessa and Conall away from Garrigan’s body, Nessa’s piercing scream when they kick his corpse in passing.
“You’ll see,” Theron says again, absently, and hauls me toward the door. The rest of the soldiers follow the unspoken command, the men holding Jesse taking him toward the other end of the ballroom, presumably to be dealt with by Raelyn later.
Theron drags me away, the rest of my party in the hands of his soldiers. I can’t even bring myself to offer some encouragement to them, my mind caught on how everything collapsed so quickly. Why didn’t I see it happening? Why didn’t I feel Angra’s evil infiltrate one of my closest allies—one of my closest friends?
And now Angra has both keys. Theron had the key from Summer; Angra took the one from Yakim, and the one in Ventralli . . .
>
I jolt in Theron’s hands.
Where is the third key?
Theron pulls me down the palace’s gilded halls until we reach a door. Alongside every other beautiful thing in Ventralli, this one stands plain and blank, just a simple iron door with simple iron bolts, hovering in an alcove. The door to the palace’s dungeon.
The colorful brilliance of the palace vanishes in favor of heavy gray stones that spasm in the dancing sconce light. A staircase shoots down, taking us deep beneath the palace, farther from any chance at escape. We reach a long, straight hall lined with doors, each one the same heavy iron as the one above. But these have windows, small, barred openings. Cells.
“Lock them up,” Theron commands.
Nessa’s screams die as a door slams on her, Conall, and Dendera. The Children of the Thaw are corralled into a cell beside them, Mather shoved in last. He fights the Cordellan soldiers, fights with every bit of strength I no longer have, kicking off of the door frame and slamming the men holding him against the opposite wall. My body seizes in Theron’s grip as a soldier lands a blow to Mather’s cheek.
“Stop.” Theron opens a cell and shoves me in. “Put him in here, then leave us.”
I stumble forward, swinging around in time to catch Mather as the soldiers toss him in after me. He rights himself and spins in front of me, keeping one hand on my arm to hold me behind him as we both face the door. I cling to him, using him to ground me here, the way he crouches defensively, his cheek already red.
The Cordellan soldiers leave, as instructed, marching back up the long stairwell. Theron tips his head and the moment the door above slams shut, he enters the cell.
“Touch her and I’ll kill you,” Mather growls, taking a step back toward me.
But Theron walks past us, stopping at the wall on our right.
Leaving the path to the door open.
Mather notices it when I do, and every one of his muscles formerly poised to attack uncoils, dragging me to the door without hesitation. We get halfway there, so close to being out, to some advantage, when a noise makes me stop.