Snow Like Ashes (7 page)

It’s the first time I’ve seen it. A silver chain snakes around the back half of a heart-shaped locket, gleaming though it’s more than a few centuries old. Half of Winter’s conduit. I exhale, my shoulders slouching. I still can’t believe it’s
here
, a hand’s breadth from me.

The moment Sir opens the box, Mather’s whole body stiffens. My eyes swing to him, and I want to continue our conversation from moments ago. I want to apologize for earlier, for bringing up the biggest weakness in his life like it was nothing more than a discussion of the weather.

My breath catches against those questions again, the things no one ever dares ask aloud.

Will this be enough? Will reuniting our conduit halves restore our magic, or will Winter forever be the only kingdom in Primoria without magic to make it whole? If so, how will we defeat Spring, a kingdom steeped in magically induced strength, when all we have are eight refugees and a pretty necklace? Will another kingdom even ally with us once we have the locket whole again, if our only heir is unable to use it?

It’s possible to live without magic. We’ve been doing it for sixteen years—barely, but we have. We grew a small garden in the Rania Plains. We train our bodies to be strong. But those things will never be enough when all the other kingdoms in the world have something that transcends human limitations, when Spring is able to wipe through our strongest soldiers, when the Rhythms are able to do the same.

Mather was right: Primoria may seem balanced, but . . . it’s not.

Sir closes the box with an abrupt click and I flinch. I was quiet too long. He stands, shaking his head, and a gut-wrenching certainty forces me to stand too.

“It was too dangerous,” he says. “When we start looking for the other locket half, you’re not to argue your assignments, do you hear me? You’re back on food-scouting missions.”

“No!” I shout. Sir turns but I grab his arm. I’m starting to feel the effects of traveling—legs wavering, head spinning. But I will not let him take this from me. I earned my keep today, a hundred times over, and I’ll be damned if he casts me aside so easily again.

“I brought you half of the locket!” I shout. “What else do I have to do?”

Please, tell me what I have to do to feel like I belong.

Sir looks at me so severely that I drop my eyes from his face and my hands from his arm, blood roaring through my head. I’m so tired, exhausted to the point where I’m not certain this is happening. I can’t deal with this right now. I need sleep; I need to collect myself and stop feeling like what I did wasn’t significant.

I stomp out of the meeting tent, ignoring whatever Sir or Mather calls after me, and run to my own tent. The size of our camp doesn’t allow for dramatic stomping sessions, though, and I fly into it in less than a few seconds. But my tent isn’t only
my
tent, so when I shove inside, Finn and Dendera look up at me with wide eyes.

Dendera refocuses on patching a hole in one of her boots. “Just once I’d like to see you leave a meeting with William like a lady instead of a panting bull.”

I snarl and flop onto my bedroll. Finn retorts something about me not being a lady, which makes me smile, but it makes Dendera rant about how there’s still hope for me. I bury my face in my pillow and tune them out.

Dendera once told me that she had been a member of Queen Hannah’s court. She was respected for her opinion and her mind, and no woman under Hannah’s rule was allowed to feel small. I’ve asked her, and everyone, about Winter so often and heard so many tales that their memories are my memories now, and I can trick myself into feeling like I remember. The frozen berries and iron fire pits. The mines in the Klaryn Mountains. The thick, earthy aroma of refining coal hanging over every city.

If I close my eyes and cover my ears and block out everything else, I can see the court Dendera described. I can see the city Sir told me about. Jannuari’s great white palace stands above me, its sprawling courtyard filled with ice fountains. It’s so cold that foreigners have to wrap in layers of fur to walk from building to building, while our natural Winterian blood keeps us warm even in the worst conditions. And snow is everywhere, always, so much that the grass beneath it is white from lack of sun. An entire kingdom wrapped in an orb of eternal winter.

But here is where my made-up memory always crashes around me. The cold and snow dissolves into explosions. The screaming starts, pushing over the palace complex like a wave, and I’m running through gray streets choked with smoke as hordes of people run too, more explosions corralling us into Angra’s grasp. That’s what they’re doing—corralling the Winterians like sheep so they can lead them to a life of slavery and pain.

Except for us. Originally twenty-five refugees who kept Angra up at night, reduced to the seven who still live with Winter’s future king.

But no matter how dire our situation, how desperate Sir gets, he will never see me as an asset. Just the overexcited child he had the misfortune of raising.

CHAPTER 6

THOUGHTS OF OUR
kingdom’s destruction aren’t exactly fodder for restful dreams. Only a little while after falling asleep, I’m shaken awake by nightmares of a shadow engulfing Jannuari’s desolate streets, a darkness so complete and absolute that all buildings and people disintegrate into oblivion. I fly up, gasping on my nightmare, thankful that the tent is empty. The only noises come from the fire crackling on the distant edge of camp. It must be suppertime.

I stand, still fully clothed, and pull my white hair into a braid. The sun is just starting to set when I step outside, casting the Rania Plains in the gray-yellow haze of a day about to die.

To my left, the flap of the meeting tent swishes, and my muscles tighten. I have no desire to face Sir yet unless his face is apologetic, which is less likely than the Kingdom of Summer freezing over. So as the tent opens I hurry away from it, running until I reach the southern edge of camp and crest the hill.

The setting sun pulsates directly in front of me, and a hint of relaxation creeps into my muscles. One of the only good things about this place is the sunset. The fiery hues bleed into the landscape until the world around me is nothing but colors—the encroaching black night, the flickering yellow sun, the reaching beams of scarlet, the waving brown prairie grass.

I slide to the ground, elbows resting on my knees as the campfire crackles somewhere behind me and the wind hisses somewhere ahead. In the face of all that has happened, it feels good, really good, to just breathe for a moment. So in my mind, I sketch out the map I saw hanging over the desk in Lynia, my nerves calming as I focus on the withered yellow edges, the faded brown lines, something simple when everything around me is so . . . not.

The Rania Plains—a great swath of empty prairie lands between all the kingdoms. The Seasons—Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring to the south, wrapped together in the arms of the jagged Klaryn Mountains. The Rhythms—Yakim, Ventralli, Cordell, and Paisly, spread across the rest of Primoria. Four Season Kingdoms, four Rhythm Kingdoms, eight conduits.

The locket half flies through my mind. I bite my lip, the thin sheen of calm I constructed shattered by a victory that feels more like failure. Will we always fail, even when we succeed? Getting this half of the locket, getting the next half, forming a whole conduit, gaining allies to free Winter—when will it feel like enough?

“Meira?”

I whip around, heart caught in my throat until I realize it isn’t Sir—it’s Mather.

He watches me in silence, his eyes flitting across my face. My heart
thwump-thwump
s against my ribs and I don’t look away from him, hating how with one glance he can crack me open. Anyone else I’d be able to ignore, to hide my fear from them behind a cocky smile, but Mather sees everything. I know he sees it, because for the briefest moment he drops his expressionless mask and the look in his eyes shows me he feels the same way. A mirror of every part of myself I can’t bear to face.

He drops down beside me and asks, his voice quiet, “Was it that bad?”

I frown. “Getting the locket half? What makes you think it was bad?”

“You barely yelled at William earlier. Either you’re sick or Lynia was . . . I went on and on about my own problems when you . . .” His eyes linger on the bruise on my cheek as if seeing it for the first time. “You wouldn’t have gone if it weren’t for me, and I didn’t even realize you’d been hurt. I’m an idiot.”

“No,” I snap. “No. I mean yes, you are an idiot sometimes, but don’t you dare apologize. You don’t need to feel guilty for letting me go to Lynia—I’d do it again, no matter how close I came to being captured.”

Mather’s face falls and I flinch at what I said.
Captured.
He turns to the sun, unreadable thoughts whirring across his face. I never could tell if his ability to push away his emotions was something Sir drilled into him or whether it was Mather’s natural gift. Either way, when we were younger and I’d talk him into stealing weapons or painting the meeting tent with ink, Mather was able to keep a straight face when Sir asked if we were the culprits. I mean, of course we were—we were the only seven-year-olds in camp and were covered in thick black ink. But Mather always held strong in his unwavering lie, repeating with a freakishly believable certainty that he and I were innocent.

Until I burst into tears and admitted the whole thing to Sir. But Mather never got mad at me for pulling him into mischief or for breaking during Sir’s interrogations. He’d just smile, throw his arm around me, and say something encouraging.

Mather has always been a king, every moment of his life.

I shake my head. “I wasn’t that close to being captured,” I amend. “Herod just—I’m fine. Really.”

But Mather’s eyes dart over every part of my face, and when he finally meets my gaze, he lifts one of his hands, his callused fingers coming to rest on my cheek. A spurt of pain lances across my face when he touches the bruise there, but I don’t move, needing to feel his fingers on my skin more than I care about the pain.

“No one who faces Herod is fine,” he whispers.

A cooling breeze blows at me as night replaces the roaring heat of the plains. I inhale the mustiness and try not to move as Mather pulls his fingers off my cheek, his eyes shooting once again over my face, as if he’s hunting for more injuries. His gaze stops on my lips, hovers there, and I’m torn between needing to know why and forcing myself to pull us apart.

“He stole my chakram, though,” I say, grabbing at anything to lighten the mood.

Mather finally smiles. It takes up every part of his face, from his eyes down to his lips, and lights the air around us like a candle in a cave.

But almost immediately it falls, the light snuffing out. “William values you, you know.”

I spin away, plucking blades of grass and tossing them into the air. Mather doesn’t pick up on my sudden distance—or maybe he does, but knows I need to hear what he’s saying.

“William was one of Winter’s highest-ranking generals.” Mather waves his hand through the air, brushing at a few of the blades I freed. “And he feels like he failed. He sees you as someone who should be dancing at balls, not scaling towers and killing soldiers. Just try to be considerate—”

I turn to him, my face hot. “Considerate to the man who can’t even manage a pat on the back when I push us one massive step closer to freeing our kingdom?”

Mather tips his head. “Try to understand that he feels guilty for needing you to help free our kingdom at all. It’s not that you didn’t do a fantastic job—you did, and everyone’s gathered around the fire right now swapping stories about you.”

I grin, if only a little. “I am pretty amazing.”

Mather smiles back. “I bet you would’ve survived even without the lapis lazuli.”

I laugh and run my fingers over my pocket where the small stone pushes into my hip. I keep forgetting it’s there, like I’ve already accepted it as part of myself. “You’re giving credit for my success to a rock?”

He shrugs. “No one has gotten the locket half before. It can’t be a coincidence, and I expect you to heap appropriate amounts of praise on me for giving it to you in the first place.”

“
You’ve
had it with you on locket missions before. Why didn’t it ever help you?”

Mather exhales and suddenly he’s just watching me and I’m watching him and all trace of humor is gone.

“You’re right. I guess it wasn’t the stone; it was how amazing you are,” he says.

Coolness balls in my stomach against the heat that rises to my face. Sitting there, the dying light playing on his strong features, his words lingering between us . . . Mather is the steadiest force I’ve ever known. Angra has every right to fear him.

With half of the locket in our grasp, we’re so much closer to Mather being who he’s always been meant to be—and I need to see him as that man. Sir has mentioned a few times that Mather will soon need to wed. And he’ll be expected to have a female heir, and I will cheer for him and his beautiful new family, and pretend it doesn’t kill me to not be enough for him.

So I stand. I brush the stray pieces of grass off my pants and stare daggers into him on the ground, ignoring the frantic way my hand grips the stone in my pocket. “You are right, as always, Your Highness. I will try to be more understanding with Sir.”

Mather looks up at me, his mouth falling open like he wants the right words to tumble out. I’ve heard Sir tell him too:
You’re royalty, she’s not, and there’s too much riding on your future to squander it on an alliance that won’t benefit Winter.

He stands, his eyes boring into my face. “Remember when I told you the world isn’t balanced?”

I hesitate, all the air trapped in a knot in my throat. “What?”

Mather’s fingers brush my hand, the one that isn’t desperately clutching the stone, gentle pricks of contact that make the knot of air in my throat tighten. He hooks a finger into one of mine, his breathing ragged. “I’ll find a way to restore the balance,” he promises.

I stare at him, unable to process his words. He doesn’t try to explain what he meant or do more than stand there next to me, watching me, waiting.