Snow Like Ashes (16 page)

Cordell’s training grounds.

Which means . . .
I can shoot things.

A range sits on the far left, at least two dozen targets set up alongside a few tall wooden poles for ax and javelin throwing. Some soldiers hurl daggers, knives, others fire good old-fashioned bows, and still more fire crossbows, gleaming metal things that make me giggle just as excitedly as Rose and Mona did over my ball gown.

I can feel my chakram pressing into my shoulder blades, begging to join the fun. So I step up to the range, pull the chakram out, wind back, and let it sing through the wind. The blade spins down the line, nicks the top part of a wooden pole, and whips back up the row until it thwacks to a stop in my palm. A rush of relief descends over me.

“Meira?”

I turn and my chakram tips to the side, itching in my hand, ready to throw and throw until I hurl away every bit of the past few days. But I just stand there, eyes narrowing to hide the fact that my initial reaction is to gape at Theron’s bare expanse of glistening skin. He’s shirtless—and it’s clear that Cordell subjects its men to rigorous chest exercises.

He leaves a group of soldiers by the barn, their bodies angled slightly toward us and their mouths open mid-conversation. Each of them stands sweaty and armed, swords and knives dangling absently from their hands and belts.

And Theron is no different. He slides a sword into a sheath at his waist, an amused smile making my already warm face heat up even more. All the soldiers around us have stopped shooting, their heads tilted in such a way I can tell they aren’t exactly used to women showing up on their field. Or hitting their targets.

Theron nods at the chakram. “A fine Autumnian creation. My aunt sent us a shipment of them shortly after her wedding. Your weapon of choice?”

Yes, throwing. Something safe to focus on. Safer than, say, the way the Crown Prince of Cordell’s arm flexes as he hefts an ax out of the ground beside me.

In response, I reposition myself in front of the pole and let the chakram loose. It whirls through the air in a beautiful arc and brushes across the target, a hair off from my last hit, before flying back to me.
Sweet snow, that feels good.

I look up at Theron. “And yours?”

Theron sizes up the ax in his hand. He looks around us, taking in all the still-gaping men and the fact that many of them are now pointing at my pole and shaking their heads in wonder.

“Why should I give away my greatest strength so soon?” Theron looks back at me with a teasing grin, and my grip on the chakram’s handle tightens involuntarily, as if that’s the only thing keeping me up under his smile.

“First day as Cordellan royalty, and you’re already terrifying the soldiers.”

Mather’s voice knocks into me from behind. The sudden combination of Theron in front of me with Mather closing in makes me feel like I’m caught weaponless on a battlefield.

Mather.
King
Mather. King Mather who negotiated the deal that makes me look at Theron and feel terrified and nervous and lit up all at once.

I turn on him, mouth full of all kinds of nasty, steaming curses, curses befitting a rugged soldier, not a lady. But everything I want to say dies the instant I see him. Because—
mother of all that is cold
—he’s shirtless too, with only the locket half dangling around his throat and his freckled skin reflecting the sheen of a good workout. Not that I haven’t seen him shirtless before, but it isn’t a sight I’ll ever get used to. He was obviously sparring with some of the men—I must’ve glided right by him, grouping his half-naked body in with all the other half-naked bodies. In my defense, there are a lot of good examples of Cordell’s training rituals here. Mather’s abs and arms, which look like they could snap a cow’s neck, aren’t
that
impressive next to Theron and three dozen soldier bodies.

I force myself to meet Mather’s eyes. And immediately find myself staring at his chest. I swallow and grind my teeth together. All right, clearly the training yard is kept behind a wall of evergreens to keep out gawking girls—like me.

“Did they outlaw shirts in Cordell?” I mumble, and face the target, tipping my head down to my chakram to hide the blush creeping bit by bit up my neck.

Theron chuckles but bites it away when neither Mather nor I say anything else, and he shifts uncomfortably beside me, twirling the ax in his palm. I can feel him eyeing Mather, both of them caught in an awkward web surrounding me. I’m at the center of a weird possessive feud between the Winter king and the Cordellan prince. How in the name of all that is cold did that happen?

But I feel no sympathy for Mather. Not as he steps closer to me, his boots swishing over the grass, his breath exhaling slowly, painfully. I’m all too aware of how much attention is on us when he stops beside me, close enough that I can feel him if I shut my eyes.

“Can we talk?” he murmurs.

The hair on the back of my neck stands up straight.
No. Why should I talk to you ever again?

But I’m not supposed to be mad at him. It’s all Sir’s fault.

I look back at Theron, who isn’t looking at me anymore. His body has pivoted to face the target beside my pole and he pulls his arm behind him, every muscle in his back tensing as he winds the ax around. Winding and winding, tighter and tighter, until all of it breaks in a single thrust that sends the ax flipping end over end through the air. It whacks into the center of the target, the handle wobbling from the force.

Theron turns to me, half his face alight with the beginnings of a smile. “My weapon of choice doesn’t matter,” he says, continuing our conversation like nothing happened. His eyes flash to Mather over my shoulder. “No matter what I use, I always hit my mark.”

My eyebrows launch skyward. Mather sucks in a breath behind me. Every single body in the entire training yard holds still in curiosity, and alongside that curiosity is a tension of warning, the gentle nudge of a fight about to start.

Mather steps closer to my back, his voice low and controlled in my ear. “Meira, please.”

Theron glances to the side, his eyes locking onto mine as he beams, full and bright, and turns to walk down the long line to retrieve his ax. He’ll hit his mark no matter what he uses. No matter what situation he’s thrust into. No matter how little control he has over his life.

I can’t fight my laugh as I turn to Mather and holster my chakram. “What can I do for you, my king?”

Mather blanches. Running a hand over his face, he regroups quickly enough, and a determined stiffness washes over him. He nods to the barn. “Come with me.”

CHAPTER 13

HALF OF THE
barn is made up of stables with horses poking their curious heads out of enclosures, while the other half is a wide room filled with oak tables and cabinets and rusted iron weapon racks. The open barn doors make the place airy and cool, while the light dusting of straw on the stone floor gives it a distinctly masculine feel.

Mather struts determinedly into the room but stops when he comes to the right wall. He stares up at it, arms crossed, and juts his chin out. “I thought maybe when Winter has such a place . . .” His voice fades, his eyes losing a bit of their annoyance from moments ago.

I stop beside him and mimic his arms-crossed stance. A map covers the wall. Detailed and practically life-sized, it shows every part of Primoria from the northernmost Paisel Mountains all the way down to the southernmost Klaryns. The Eldridge Forest and Rania Plains sit in the center, a splotch of green and yellow with the Langstone and Feni Rivers nearly cutting the entire map in half.

What makes this map unique, though, is the way the kingdoms are portrayed: a small illustration of each Royal Conduit shines in the center of its respective kingdom’s territory lines.

I groan. “This is what you want to talk about? Geography?”

Mather shakes his head, his brow pinching. “No, I—” He stops and runs a hand down his face, grappling for the right words. When he starts talking again, he’s angry, his words clipped and tight. “I wanted you to see this. To see everything. I wanted to explain to you—snow above, would you just listen to me?”

I snarl at him. “Because you deserve to have me hear you out?”

“No,” he admits, and I start. “Because you deserve to hear what I have to say.
You
deserve it, Meira. This doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

I roll my eyes but make no move to leave or to speak again, which Mather takes as permission to talk. He looks back up at the map, his eyes lingering on Cordell. In the center of Cordell’s territory lines, a dagger gleams beneath a scripted
M
for male-blooded.

“Paisly’s female-blooded shield,” Mather says, almost to himself, a soft hum of noise as his eyes travel the map. “Ventralli’s male-blooded crown. Yakim’s female-blooded ax, Summer’s male-blooded cuff, Autumn’s female-blooded ring, Spring’s male-blooded staff, and—”

He steps forward and stretches his palm out to rest on Winter. Flanked by Spring to the east, mountains to the south, Autumn to the west, and the Feni River to the north, Winter’s locket dangles over the expansive mass of land, the heart-shaped pendant etched with a single white snowflake in the center. The
F
just above it is mocking. A visual representation of one of our lifelong struggles.

“Between meetings, I’ve hardly had time to breathe,” Mather says. “But a few days ago, I came out here to get some air, and I saw this. Captain Dominick said they put this map here to remind the men of Cordell’s place in the world. So they can look up and always know who they are. A piece in the bigger puzzle of Primoria.”

I frown. “That doesn’t sound like something Noam would encourage.”

Mather’s shoulders tighten. “Noam didn’t commission it.” He glances back, his hand on the picture of the locket. “Theron did.”

The way he says Theron’s name puts a nick in Mather’s otherwise reverent tone. Like that one detail is a black smudge in a beautiful tapestry.

Mather curls his fingers on the map, tugging against the drawing of the locket. The back half of the real one sits around his neck. Next to the palm-sized picture, it looks sad. Empty.

“Noam may like to pretend Cordell is the only kingdom in the world,” he continues, his voice getting progressively harder, “but part of what makes his men so passionately Cordellan is this map. This reminder that they could be Rhythm or Season, Yakimian, Ventrallan, Summerian—but they’re not. They’re Cordellan. And that fact is what pushes them to fight for their land.” Mather smiles in a sad way that isn’t really a smile. “I want Winter to have that.”

He pulls back from the map and steps toward me, close, closer still, until he’s barely a hand’s width away. We’re alone, all the other soldiers out in the training yard.

“I didn’t want this,” he whispers, the words cutting between us. “I want Winter free, but I don’t want—I don’t want him. For you. I don’t want you to think that you’re worthless, that this is the only place for you, because it’s not, Meira—it never could be, not with everything you are.”

My pulse thuds against my ribs, anxiety and anger rolling through me, and I can’t bring myself to look into his eyes.
Just stop talking. Just please stop talking, you giant, stupid—

“I don’t know what else to do.” Mather’s breath blows across my face. “Before we left camp, Sir took me aside and told me what I was going to do. It hollowed me out in a way I’d never felt. It was the first time I truly understood how much we have to sacrifice to overthrow Angra, how much our lives don’t matter in the bigger task at hand. I always thought we would find a way to . . . to overcome this. To be together, and I swear to you”—Mather takes my chin in his thumb and finger and pulls me to look at him—“I swear to you, I will find a way to fix this. I told you I’d restore balance, and I will.”

“No.”

The word hangs in the air. I blink, confused, but I know I’d say it again. Why? I’ve wanted him to say this forever, haven’t I? Why would I feel anything but
Yes!
in the wake of his words?

Mather squints at me. “I will. I
can
. I won’t let Angra destroy even more of our lives. No matter what William says, there has to be another way—”

“No!”

I shove back from him, a part of me tearing off and staying in his hands. Each word hurts. It piles on top of Sir’s words last night, churning together in some great wave of confusion. And all I know is that Mather’s hope for another solution is a taunting, all-consuming temptation that I can’t afford to feel; already I can taste the first waves of relief cresting over his words. But there is no other way. No other hope. Sir spent fourteen years trying to find another path to take. Letting myself believe that Mather might be able to save me, only for me to end up still in this marriage game . . .

I don’t think I’d survive it.

“I’m doing this, Mather,” I say, my voice thin and weary. “For our kingdom, for our people. For
you
. We need Cordell. We need this.”

Mather pulls back like I slapped him. Redness creeps up his neck, sweat glistening on his forehead. “You want to marry Theron?”

My eyes narrow. “What?”

“You want to marry Theron,” he says again, and everything in his body sags. “You don’t—”

Want me.

His unspoken words drape over me, weighing me down and down until I think I might crumple onto the straw-covered floor.

“You’re an idiot,” I spit, though I hear how loudly I didn’t refute his accusation. “This doesn’t have anything to do with that. It’s about allies and saving
our
kingdom. You have to stop—nothing’s changed; nothing’s different between us. It’s just as impossible as it always was, and this is how it has to be.”

“I’ll find a way around it,” Mather returns. He steps toward me, I step back, a weird dance through the barn. “I was always going to find a way. I told you before we left—I told you I would fix this!”

“How was I supposed to know that’s what you meant? All I ever got was Sir’s voice hammering into my head that you were too important to waste on me!”

“I never felt that! You’ve always been
everything
to me. I didn’t know how to handle how much I needed you growing up—snow, I still don’t, all right? I’m trying, though. Do you think I’m that arrogant? That I let William make me believe I was too good for you?”