by Lucy Tempest
“Aneira,” she corrected quietly.
“—picking that place as her hiding spot, I’d still be in there.”
“I recognized him as the prince you accompanied to the ball…” Aneira said, before being talked over again by Keenan.
“Feeling particularly brave—or cowardly, I still can’t tell—she told me everything as she untied me. And after hearing that you were missing from the dungeons, we set out to look for your ungrateful bark.”
I scrutinized her, bristling at her decidedly cowardly behavior when her mother had been burning me while her sister had stolen my face. “And what was she running from?”
“My mother, mostly,” she blurted out, avoiding my eyes. “And the guards chasing us because Darla stabbed the king with a carving knife.”
“It’s pure luck that Yulian’s body is so cold his skin and muscles have hardened into a protective layer,” Keenan cut in again. “Or else I’d be obligated to return your head to our new Winter King, Simeon and his queen, my apparently crazy sister.”
After a last moment of confusion over Darla’s action, everything suddenly snapped in place.
Darla must have been controlled like I had fleetingly been. That ghost had ordered her to kill him like it had me, but she hadn’t been able to resist the compulsion, like I had.
Yet, instead of going for a quick kill, like stabbing him in an eye, or slitting his throat, it had made her stab him in his chest.
It had been going for his heart!
The freezing heart that was killing him and by extension, his kingdom.
But I now remembered his wound had been on the right side of his chest. The ghost that had been controlling Darla had thought right was left.
Because it had been seeing Yulian the wrong way. In a mirror.
With that realization, another piece crashed in place, completing the picture.
Sorcha, like Keenan, like their father and Bonnie’s father, had grey eyes. When she’d attacked me, her eyes had been as blue as an ice cave, the same color Yulian’s eyes had become the longer he’d spent around me.
The same color eyes I’d seen watching me in the mirrors.
Sorcha had been possessed by the ghost in the mirrors all along!
She must have attempted to resist, that time she’d punched the mirror. But the ghost had gained control of her, after all. It had forced her to try to assassinate Yulian that night I’d saved him. Then that ghost had sent her to get rid of me after I’d seen it, and resisted it. It must have been furious when Sorcha had failed to kill me. But then it had taken control of Darla, probably thinking her really me, that it had succeeded in taking control of me this time.
That made it three times now that mirror-ghost had possessed the bodies of women to try to kill Yulian.
But why? What could this ghost have against him? Was she someone who’d died in the castle? A vengeful servant or mistress of some former king or—
Her eyes. Her eyes were Yulian’s true eyes.
She was a relative. A close one.
His aunt, Isolda!
Everything suddenly made sense.
The woman who’d tortured Yulian while she lived, but who’d disappeared in mysterious circumstances. She must have died under suspicious conditions like both his parents.
But it seemed not even a disembodied life after death would keep Queen Isolda from making her nephew’s life a living hell. A life she now clearly wanted to end.
Suddenly, something else made horrible sense.
If Isolda had disappeared before Yulian had proposed to Belaina, then she had been in the mirrors of the castle and maybe the whole land all along, had been in the one in his quarters. When he’d brought Belaina there to discuss her future as his queen, her inexplicable running off, the same way I had, could have only been from the same scary experience. Isolda had tried to take control of her, too, had tried to make her kill him.
Belaina hadn’t told Yulian about it, just like I hadn’t. But I’d forgotten about it. I didn’t believe she had, since she’d run and never come back. She must have remembered, and realized that if she ever went back, Isolda would take her over eventually. Maybe she’d thought Isolda would be in every mirror in Faerie, and she had to leave it completely to escape her.
And while that might be true, Isolda did seem to have limitations, and I was beginning to see what they were. But they weren’t enough to stop her. She was the force Yulian suspected wanted him dead, and she wouldn’t stop until he was.
Now that I knew all this, which I believed to be the truth, what should I do?
There was only one thing I could do.
Stop Isolda. At any cost.
“For the life of me, I can’t understand why Darla would go against Mother like that, and not even in a reasonable way like I did,” Aneira was rambling, chucking the anklet aside. “She went to the other extreme, trying to take out the man Mother wanted her to marry!”
All fired up by my burning resolution, I caught handfuls of Keenan’s cloak and Aneira’s gown, shaking them both. “It wasn’t Darla. It wasn’t Sorcha who locked you in that closet either, it was Queen Isolda.”
Keenan’s jaw dropped as morbid fascination gleamed across his wide eyes. “I never expected her to be the most forgiving of ghosts, but egads!”
I started at his instant answer, then frowned at him. “You believe me?”
He tilted his chin downwards to give me a comically judgmental look. “Cinders, you’re a tree-person, your stepmother is a slave-trafficking troll, and we came looking for you in a giant pumpkin. You could say you sneeze glitter, and I’d believe you.”
“But—I didn’t even explain yet.”
“You can explain on the way back to clear your name and save my sister from the most sadistic ghost in history.”
“Your sister isn’t at risk here, it’s Yulian. Is he alive? Please tell me he’s still alive.”
Keenan shot me a glance over his shoulder as he ran to the carriage. “He should be, why?”
“Why? Didn’t you just hear me say Isolda is capable of possession?” I panted as I ran in his wake. “But she seems to be only able to inhabit the bodies of other women when they look into any of the mirrors in the castle, possibly just women Yulian speaks to. But I gather she’s only capable of it starting at nightfall.”
“Which means?”
“Which means Sorcha is going to try and kill him again tonight!”
Keenan turned and shoved me and Aneira into the carriage. “That should have been the first thing you said to me!”
“Having spent hours made of heartwood, you’ll forgive me if my brain is a little scrambled!”
Piling into the carriage with Aneira as Keenan hopped into the driver’s seat, I braced myself as he let out an ear-splitting whistle, sending the reindeer erupting into a gallop.
As the carriage jostled violently in their wake, I warded off Aneira who tried to cling to me for stability, nerves stretching to the breaking point as the tenuous daylight waned from one breath to the next.
I might have saved myself, but I would never be free as long as Yulian wasn’t.
Until now, we’d been matched in our fates. But it seemed I now not only had the unfair advantage of knowing what my problem was but how to solve it. He wasn’t even aware of his own.
Agitation made my blood rush in my ears as the Castle of Glass came into view. But it was only on Yulian’s behalf.
I’d spent my whole life cowering and afraid, and running away from danger whenever I could. Now I welcomed it, was going to run straight into it.
Yulian had dived into frozen waters to rip me from the hands of the Horned God. And by whatever gods created the northern lights, the wonder he’d made me experience, the hope he’d made me taste, I was going to save him from a similar fate.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Our way past castle security benefitted greatly from the element of surprise.
The guards stationed at the entrance leaped out of th
e way of the charging pumpkin carriage that Keenan drove right up into the entryway, blocking it. Aneira and I had to crawl through the window while Keenan distracted them. He unbuckled the reindeer, and rode Angus in dizzying circles around the guards, strumming a lute and singing a jaunty folk song. They were so baffled they made no move to attack for the moments it took us to run into the castle.
I wasted no time hopping on Oscar and bursting across the hallway, in the direction of the commotion coming from the depth of the castle.
Another one erupted behind me as guards finally engaged a cackling Keenan, and I found Aneira loping by my side at an impressive speed, her body in flux, shifting into an odd cross between her troll shape and her fairy features.
“Where are we going?”
“Where the noise is loudest!” I steered Oscar towards a wide staircase leading to the left tower. He cleared the first flight of half-moon steps in a single leap. With each flight he bounded, the overlapping voices became clearer until we arrived within sight of an assembly hall.
I slowed down as I approached its entrance, found it surrounded in glass panels and mirrors with an elevated section full of seats. Most of them were unoccupied as everyone formed an agitated arc around someone at the hall’s end.
Yulian. Standing stiffly with the largest mirror in the room at his back, facing his subjects, almost entirely blue now. But alive. Still alive!
As I shuddered in relief, I realized what he was doing, and my heart plummeted into my gut.
He was declaring his heir—and announcing his impending death!
An agitated Simeon, said heir, was flanking him defensively, while a calm Sorcha stood on his other side, watching him like a hawk—with blue eyes.
My heart boomed as my gaze snapped to the nearest mirror. A pair of intense blue eyes blazed back at me in malicious hatred.
Isolda had already come out for the night, had Sorcha under her control!
Rage and determination spiked as I forcefully prodded Oscar across the threshold, had him galloping straight towards the gathering. People finally heard the thundering hooves through their commotion and leaped out of the way as I crashed through the seats.
As I scattered the assembly, heading straight for Sorcha, Simeon left my line of sight, yelling for the guards. Yulian, the worst I’d ever seen him, stared at me, frozen face void of expression.
But for a moment, I read his reaction as clearly as I felt mine. His slackening posture, parting lips, and his chest suddenly expanding in a ragged intake of breath shouted joy at my sight. Then the freeze clamped back over him, shutting him down.
It didn’t matter if he or anyone else thought I had returned to finish the job. Isolda now knew I’d foil her purpose one way or another, and seemed to throw all caution to the wind.
Pulling Sorcha’s strings, she made the possessed woman pull a dagger out of her gown and pounce on Yulian, holding it to his throat.
Horrified gasps broke out across the crowd of courtiers and citizens, most fearing to move as Sorcha increased her threat, pressing the blade harder against his now-blue skin.
My mind raced with options, until I decided to put faith in Keenan’s words about Yulian’s skin being toughened by his extreme coldness. It would take Sorcha substantial force to cut through, giving him a chance to break free without a lethal injury. All he needed was a distraction.
I would give it to him.
Screaming an enraged cry, I exploded straight at them.
Yulian moved the same moment I did, and Sorcha’s forceful swipe barely scraped his throat as he threw himself sideways.
Sorcha stood stuck between wanting to dive after him and holding me off. But I wasn’t aiming for her.
I was aiming for the mirror.
Prodding Oscar on, he lowered his head and knocked Sorcha out of the way before he slammed into the giant, gold-framed mirror.
But his ram didn’t shatter the glass, only cracked it. It hadn’t been enough.
Hopping off Oscar’s back, I lurched sideways barely in time to dodge a slash from Sorcha’s dagger, my head hitting the mirror’s spiderwebbed crack.
Yulian rose behind her, brandishing an elongating, sharp-pointed icicle.
“No!” I missed Sorcha’s second stab by an inch, and tackled Yulian before he buried the icicle in her back. “It’s not her—she’s possessed!”
“Possessed? Is that the excuse you’re both going to use now?” he said as he pushed me away to face Sorcha.
Though he seemed cold and unforgiving, I couldn’t forget the instance of heart-stopping happiness that had come through his frozen layers when he’d first seen me. And he was trying to protect me now, putting himself between me and the murderous Sorcha.
“Why did you come back here?” he panted as he warded off another slash from Sorcha. “I see you got the anklet off. You should have run when you had the chance.”
He didn’t sound angry, but more like he was urging me to turn and run. As if he wanted me to save him from having to do his kingly duty of dealing with me as a fugitive, one who’d apparently attempted to assassinate him twice.
Yet against all evidence, he didn’t want to believe it had been me who’d attacked him. It was all the more reason why I had to give him the peace of mind of proving him right.
“I couldn’t run, not before I exposed the cause behind all your family’s misfortune.”
No longer capable of displaying confusion, he said, “What are you talking about?”
“This!” My balled fist morphed into a thick, gnarled branch and I swung it at the mirror with everything I had, shattering its reflective face into a thousand pieces.
As shards burst out, a ghoulishly chorusing shriek erupted with their trajectory, and ghostly tendrils floated out of every flying fragment.
Sorcha hit the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut as, twisting in a ceaseless, mind-shattering screech, Queen Isolda took form among the wreckage.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The figure that formed before our stunned eyes wasn’t a true restoration.
Isolda’s translucent skin was webbed with thousands of cracks, her long, unbound hair was a dirty white rather than blonde, her fingernails blackened and the dark circles and veins around her frost-blue eyes made her look like a waterlogged corpse.
“Isolda?” Yulian choked, stumbling back, a hand over his heart as he gasped shallow breaths, eyes threatening to pop out of his skull.
But something else distracted me from the horrendous apparition of Isolda.
Color was seeping back into Yulian’s body like a rushing tide, the roots of his hair turning various shades of gold, his skin losing its hardness and blue tinge, and his irises growing vivid enough to stand out against the whites of his eyes.
Delirious relief flooded me as he defrosted with every ragged breath, his condition improving far beyond what I had seen before it had regressed and worsened. I reached for him, hand itching to feel his softening skin as elasticity returned to his face and it broke into a disbelieving smile directed right at me.
But that moment as we lost ourselves in the delight of his restoration, forgetting what I’d just unleashed, came to a harrowing end.
Panic overtook his smile as he tore me back, yelling—but it was too late.
I felt a collision against my back then a deep, immediate chill flooded my body from the inside.
“At last!” An eerie, hair-raising voice—Isolda’s—echoed in my head then out of my mouth. “After all these years I’ve been trapped in this castle, unheard, unseen, suffering in solitude.” Horror drenched me, deepening the chill as my body moved against my will, a hand rising to point accusingly at Yulian. “Robbed of my body, my voice, my throne, all because I wanted the best for this entire realm—all because of your father!”
“Get out of her!” Yulian advanced, materializing a sharp icicle in the shape of a glassy misericord. “Release her, now!”
My body contorted, back bending, head thrown back
as a cruel, taunting laugh blasted out of my throat. “You disgust me, boy. I told Timofey this was how you’d end up. I told him you’d bring us more scorn and dishonor than even our father by getting too attached to servants, until you tried to make a maid your queen. I would have killed you all before letting that happen!”
Memories flitted through my mind, paralyzing me with their intensity, each glimpse into this woman’s mind dripping with scalding venom that corroded the edges of my consciousness.
I saw her abusing her power as princess, overcompensating for her low-born mother by toying with and torturing anyone beneath her in class. I felt her paranoia growing as whispers spread about the people favoring her brother as heir even when she was the one with Winter’s power. I saw her constantly wanting to rid herself of her brother, Prince Timofey, without making her father, King Feodor, disinherit her. Then I felt her seething when her nephew also displayed her same powers, and her father dictated he would become her heir once she became queen.
Then she took the throne, and she considered no nobleman in her Court worthy of her, since all would benefit from her, rather than the other way around. While no king in Faerie would leave his Court for her, or agree to merge their realms into a greater kingdom. So she plotted to conquer her neighbors and rule as their Empress. Only then would King Theseus of Summer be forced to accept her hand.
But her plans to create an heir with Winter’s and Summer’s powers, who would replace her nephew, failed. And she was saddled with that vile weakling who used his magic to entertain peasant children, who spent precious little time practicing his powers or authority, squandering it instead on servants and staff. He wanted nothing but to tour other Courts, being friends with his contemporaries, and talking nonsense about his childish desires to fly among the stars.
How had fate handed her this idiotic boy to be her heir? He was so indiscriminating he was even eager to befriend that Autumn Prince, that nightmare who reeked of human blood and left chaos in his wake. Not even his parents could control him, and he would corrupt her heir.