Snow Like Ashes (14 page)

I fall back to Sir. “No. Tell him we don’t do this, not in Winter. We don’t let—”

But Sir’s eyes drop. His entire body looks like it might dissolve and I’ve never, in all my life, seen him show so much emotion at once.

We’re entirely at Noam’s mercy until he decides either to help us or fling us back out into the dark where no one else will come to our rescue. I had always assumed Sir had a plan for who our allies would be after we got our locket back. If this is the best option—a trap—then would anyone else even bother helping us? Or would the other Rhythms rather wait for us to disintegrate under the Shadow of the Seasons and then swoop in to claim our kingdom and, by extension, access to the chasm of magic? With their own internal struggles, none of the other Seasons are strong enough to overthrow Angra.

We’re stuck.

I back up a step. Mather puts his hand on my spine, leaves it there, his thumb moving slowly over the fabric of my dress.

No, no,
no
.

“Lady Meira.” Noam sweeps his arm back toward the ballroom. “This ball is in your honor. It will raise suspicion if you are gone too long.”

I shake my head but start to walk forward, my feet taking me toward the light of the ball. When I’m parallel to Noam, I stop. “Why me?”

Noam’s smile falters for half a heartbeat and he casts an amused glance at Sir. “That is part of the arrangement, that you will be given a proper title in Winter. By Cordell’s golden leaves, have you been led to believe that you would fade into history once Winter has been reborn? That you wouldn’t matter to your reestablished kingdom?”

I look over my shoulder at Mather, Sir. Next to Noam, who stands cool and relaxed, they both look defeated in the flickering light of the ballroom. Noam has said more things that make sense in the past few minutes than Sir ever has. That sad realization makes something click, something that shuts off the ache deep in my stomach.

I never wanted to fade into nothing, but Sir never told me I wouldn’t. He never let me believe I mattered to Winter beyond my responsibility to lead a normal, safe life once our kingdom was free from Angra, regardless of how fervently I tried to prove to him that I was more. He just let me think I would be lost in all this, that I wasn’t important enough to matter further.

And now this is it. This is how I will matter to Winter. As a marriage pawn.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I did believe that.”

Walking away from Mather and Sir feels like a nightmare. A nightmare in which I want Mather to run after me and fight off Noam and admit he could never do that to me, marry me off to someone else, because he’s been in love with me all along.

Noam opens the door to the ballroom for me, smiling as the music and laughter of his court rushes out. “You are part of this family now,” he says when the door shuts behind us. “And it would benefit you greatly to remember that my son has options. Many more
beneficial
options that do not involve us in a war. My kingdom progresses, adapts, and changes, while your people fester in stagnation like stones eroded in a stream, sitting atop power but not caring in the least that it’s there. This is a favor, granted only out of my generosity.”

I hold back a growl. Noam slips his hand around my arm, pulling me to a halt, and as his thick fingers tighten against my skin, a memory sweeps into my mind, one of Sir’s lectures on court lineages. Noam had a wife. Theron’s mother, Melinda DeFiore, a princess of Ventralli. In my mind’s eye, I see Noam kneeling at her bedside, her frail body sinking slowly into the tight grasp of death. She was sick, very sick, but there’s something wrong with Noam—did he let her die?

I shake my head. When did Sir tell me how she died? He must have. I remember it so vividly that sometime in all his lectures, he must have mentioned Queen Melinda of Cordell’s death.

Noam shakes me out of the flash of memory by tightening his grip on my arm, holding me the same way Theron did. No, not the same way. Theron was gentle, made sure I knew I could pull away at any time. Noam clutches me like he owns me. He owns everything in Cordell and is used to every person, animal, and plant bowing under the power of his conduit. And even though I’m not Cordellan and his conduit can’t actually affect me, I still feel the power he wields when he curls his hand around mine and squeezes. He
does
own me now.

Couples spin past us to fast-paced orchestral music. Their laughter falls into the background of Noam’s sudden glare, still disguised by his pleasantly calm aura.

“You need me,” he hisses. “
Winter
needs me. You will begin proper training to instruct you in the ways of etiquette and Cordellan history. I advise you to
not
refuse this training and to obey me in all things.”

A tremor runs up my arm. In that moment as he feeds on my fear and revels in power, I see Herod, hissing threats like he was a cat and I was a bird with my wings trapped in his claws.

I yank my arm out of Noam’s grip. “Is that what your wife did? She disobeyed you?” I spit, throwing the accusation out like a chakram into a dark room.

As his face collapses, some of my dislike of him unravels. It’s the last thing he ever expected to hear from me, from anyone, and it shakes him off whatever pedestal he keeps himself on.

“What—” Noam’s mouth falls open. Closes. Opens again, and when it does, his shock shifts away in favor of anger and he grabs my wrist in a threat.

I dig my nails into his skin. “You may have me trapped in this.” I tug him off me. “But you aren’t the first man to underestimate me, so may I advise you to start treating me with a little more respect,
King
Noam.”

Before he can respond, I spin around and dive into the rows of dancers, darting back and forth between them until I reach the center of the moving bodies and swooshing fabric. Colors swirl around me—glistening gold, dark green, blue taken straight from the deepest part of the Destas Sea. The colors and music combine to create a strange lull in the chaos, a weirdly peaceful hub in the center of the ballroom, surrounded by music and the rotating circles of people. It almost relaxes me.

Almost.

I cup my hands over my face and exhale, inhale, exhale again.
Just keep breathing.
No matter what happens, no matter who turns on me, no matter what pompous swine thinks he has power over me, I am still me. I will always be
me
.

Who is that, though? Apparently it’s this girl in the ruby gown and smudged face powder, getting examined by Cordell’s upper class. Someone who can treat the king of Cordell with as much revulsion as he treats me. A lady. That can’t be right.

It’s definitely not someone important to Mather or Sir. Definitely not someone who will have any standing in the new Winter, no matter what Noam thinks. Just someone who gets bounced around in whatever position needs to be filled, used and used like a candle on a moonless night until I burn away into a puddle of compliance and obedience.

I wanted to be a soldier. Someone who would
earn
standing in Winter. Someone Sir would look at with pride. Someone Mather would look at and—

No.

This is who Sir wants me to be. He’s made it startlingly clear that if he had his way—and look, he’s finally having his way—I’d never be a soldier. And Mather can just leap off Bithai’s four-story palace and land on a golden tree.

A hand cups my elbow and I jump back when I look into Mather’s eyes. He scoops me into his arms, arranging us into a proper dancing pose as if he can sense how dangerously close I am to hitting him. “I just want to talk,” he pleads as we move through the sea of bodies to the music.

“Well, I don’t,” I retort, and pull out of his arms. People eye us as they swirl past, but I refuse to start dancing with Mather again despite the way he holds his arms out, his face pinched and his eyes glassy.

He brushes the emotion off his face, one solid sweep of nothing. Hiding it, pushing it away, pretending it doesn’t mean anything to him when it should mean
everything
.

I shake my head. I will
not
cry. I will not show emotion either. “I thought you said you knew,” I start, the words grating against my throat. “That you knew how it felt, to be deemed worthless for reasons beyond your control. Yet here I am, a pawn in a marriage arrangement, because you and Sir deemed me worthless for anything else. Thank you, Mather. Thank you for finally showing me my place.”

Mather gasps, running a hand through the strands of hair that have fallen free of the ribbon holding the rest back. He shakes his head but doesn’t say anything. Either he can’t or he
doesn’t
, and the tears threatening to spill out of my eyes finally do. I wipe at them furiously, and just as I start to slide into the crowd, Theron appears.

He looks as bedraggled as I feel, only he’s spent the last few minutes dancing as well as being his father’s plaything. His eyes shoot to Mather before he looks back at me and lifts an eyebrow.

I stop myself from looking at Mather. This is my place now. This is where I belong.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Theron. The loud music drowns out my voice, making it look like I’m just mouthing the words into the air.

Theron’s lips tilt in a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “So am I,” he says, and holds out his hand.

I feel when Mather leaves, taking the heavy air of tension with him. My eyes latch onto him when he joins Sir outside the crowd of dancers, and a lump rolls around in my throat and beats down on my heart when he looks back at me. His eyes flick to Theron, back to me, and he pushes Sir out of the way to head for the staircase. Sir grabs his arm and barks something at him, and Mather responds by barking right back.

Then he leaves, vanishing up the stairs and down the hall.

Sir turns away, finds Alysson, and leaves too.

“Lady Meira?” Theron forces a smile, his hand still extended. Something about it feels permanent, like taking it means everyone else I care about will disappear.

They already have. And all I have now, all I’ll ever have, is standing in front of me with a lopsided half smile and narrow eyes from his own stress.

I shake my head. “Just Meira,” I say as I take Theron’s hand and let him pull me into him. My cheek barely reaches his face, my temple stopping just beside the stubble on his chin. A delicate scent of lavender and something like worn book pages emanates from him. We sway back and forth, gentle and steady though the music that pulses from the orchestra is still fast and strong. As if we’re saying,
We make the music here. Not you.

“Just Meira,” Theron echoes. He adjusts his arms around my back and looks across the distance between us, then nods decisively. “We’ll be all right. Together.”

I can’t say anything. I turn my face to the side and close my eyes, fighting against the coolness that swarms me with his words.
Together.
The two of us, just us, while everything around us is swept away.

“Don’t you want more than this?” I breathe, finally looking up at him.

His eyes are soft, relaxed, but my question makes his softness tense. His lips pull apart and the answer that comes sounds so much like the thoughts whirring through my head that, for a moment, I think maybe I said it.

“Every day of my life.”

CHAPTER 12

IT TAKES BOTH
Rose and Mona to get me out of the dress. And when they finally do, instead of meekly accepting another nightgown and crawling into bed, I demand they return my stolen clothes and kidnapped chakram. After a few good minutes of them telling me that’s not what ladies wear and me telling them I’m their future queen so they’d better obey me—it took me several tries before I could say it without crying—they relent and retrieve my things.

“We cleaned them, at least,” Rose says, and hands me my shirt. It does look white now, not brown and crunchy.

“And I had one of the guards tend to this.” Mona lifts my chakram. “It’s sharpened.”

Mona is my favorite.

They leave and I tug on my much more comfortable clothes. That stupid blue stone is in my pocket before I can analyze why I still want it after everything Mather did, why I feel better with it in my possession than leaving it behind. I loop my chakram into its usual place of honor between my shoulder blades and race from the hallway door to the balcony. Moments before my feet leave the bedroom floor, I grab one of the white curtains and propel myself out onto the balcony railing. The speed I picked up from the sprint shoots me out into the air and I bet my life quite literally on the chance that the curtain won’t rip in two.

Somewhere between my being fully airborne and breaking my leg on the ground below, the curtain catches and holds, swinging me back in toward the palace. The familiar surge of adrenaline rushes into me, the same freeing burst I felt on the mission in Lynia. A pure rush that makes me see more clearly, makes my head lighter. I release the curtain and grab for a ledge just above my balcony. It would have been possible to climb out of my room without the curtain theatrics, but not nearly as fun.

Once I’m there, a few easy jumps and pulls get me to the roof. It’s made of the same curved tiles as the rest of Bithai’s roofs, but instead of a steep slope to the ground, it’s flat and walkable. Good for lookouts in times of war—and for a restless future queen who feels like exploring her new home.

My nose curls involuntarily at the word. This isn’t my home. I’ve never even been to my real home, and now here I am with a replacement I never asked for. I should feel grateful, lucky even—most Winterians call a Spring work camp their replacement home. But I can’t feel anything more than frustration.

I start running on the shingles. The palace is huge, wings shooting off at every crossing, occasional domes of glass hinting at skylights. But it’s the tower jutting out of the northernmost wing of the palace that calls my name.

It’s empty and a little dusty, its disuse proof that Bithai hasn’t seen a war in years. I pull myself over the railing and kick aside an overturned table. Finally one place Noam doesn’t keep pristine.

I can see why they built the tower here. It’s open on every side, giving a complete view of the city and the kingdom beyond. To the east, most of Bithai sleeps under a clear sky and a half-moon. To the west, farmlands roll off into the horizon, green and dark in the absence of city light. To the south . . .