Hannah waits behind me, the space around us still filled with dancing snowflakes. Like we’re shielded, cupped in invisible arms that will keep the darkness from touching us. Angra can’t touch us here. He didn’t mean for me to leave the cottage. He wanted me to stay inside, where it was comfortable and I would tell him all my secrets. But I left, and Hannah is using her connection to Winter’s conduit to talk to me, like she’s been doing all along.
Her connection to Winter’s conduit, not the blue stone. There was never any magic in the blue stone. Only the Royal Conduits have magic.
I turn, snow crunching under my feet. Hannah stands with her back to me, her hair flailing in the storm. Explanations whirl around me, but not from her—from me. My mind eases here, in this space between asleep and awake, and as it does information pours into the light, sudden bursts of clarity I never would have seen on my own.
“Angra broke your conduit, but magic is more powerful than even he knows.” The words tumble out of me from some delicate area of surrender, a mysterious space in my heart that connects Hannah and me. The magic. It’s known the truth all along. “You were desperate when Winter was falling, so you surrendered to your conduit. You let it tell you everything. The truth behind magic, and that if a Royal Conduit is broken in defense of the kingdom, the king or queen of that kingdom becomes the conduit.”
This knowledge springs into my head, the magic giving me this last piece that lets me put the rest of the puzzle together. The Royal Conduits are connected to the kingdoms’ bloodlines. Magic always needs a host, and with a human host, magic doesn’t have the limitations that come with object hosts. Life and pure magic would have been a beautiful combination, like a fire nursed by endless fuel. So if the rulers had let their conduits be broken when they faced the Decay, they would have become their kingdom’s conduits. The Decay could have been destroyed with all that power, and the world would have glowed with prosperity.
But conduit magic only works if the bearer acknowledges the magic and chooses to use it, and conduits only give answers when people put aside their selfish will and dare to surrender themselves for the good of their kingdom. It’s a magic all about choice, and no one chose to surrender until Hannah.
Hannah shifts in the snow, tipping her head back. “Where is Winter’s magic now?”
“You didn’t know you were pregnant. And then Angra killed you,” I whisper. It’s so cold. Cold seeping through me until I’m sure I’m nothing but ice through and through, just a hollow, glassy sculpture. “Angra broke the conduit and killed you so the magic went to the heir. To—”
My mouth freezes and the cold controls me, pushes me into the scene that Hannah tried to show. The night before Jannuari’s fall, the study in the palace, the heavy aroma of burning coal hanging all around. Those who would escape Angra’s wrath are gathered, Hannah kneeling in front of Alysson, who cradles baby Mather—
In the background. There’s something in the corner, something I didn’t see before.
“I’m so sorry,” Hannah tells Alysson. “You don’t have to obey me. You can still choose not to do this.”
I step around Hannah and Alysson. I walk past Dendera, Finn, Greer, and Henn. Crystalla and Gregg huddle by the fire pit, alive and holding each other. I walk past Sir, his looming body curving protectively around his wife and the baby.
In the corner of the room, forgotten, sits a bassinet. Mather’s bassinet?
No. It’s not empty.
A tiny hand shoots up, grasping at the air. Small, fat fingers curl against a plump little palm, two gleaming blue eyes stare with wide curiosity at the stillness around her. Her. A pale pink blanket is wrapped around her small body, the hem folded down and stitched with pink silk thread. The stitching forms snowflakes all around the hem until those snowflakes form a name, the pink silk bending and twisting into five small letters.
“No, my queen,” Alysson says. “We will do it; of course we will do it. Winter needs us. We will raise our son as yours.”
The name. Those five letters stitched so perfectly.
MEIRA.
CHAPTER 27
THE FLOOR OF Angra’s throne room gleams in the light from above, letting my reflection stare up at me as I cower on my hands and knees at his feet.
I’m Hannah’s daughter.
My eyes flit back and forth, my lungs inhaling and exhaling panic. I can’t be Hannah’s child, because Mather . . . but Hannah asked Alysson and Sir to say Mather was the prince. Angra knew Hannah’s heir escaped that night, so they couldn’t just say the child had died—he would never have believed that. They said it was Mather so Angra wouldn’t care that Winter’s heir was just a boy, not a girl, not a threat even if we got the conduit put back together and the magic returned to it.
But the locket is powerless now, has been powerless since Angra broke it sixteen years ago, because all that power sought a new host. It went into me.
I’m Winter’s conduit.
No one knew it was even possible except Hannah, because she let her conduit tell her what needed to be done to save Winter. Her locket needed to be broken in defense of Winter, a sacrifice so its power couldn’t be taken away, couldn’t be broken or cast off, wasn’t limited by an object. This power is me, is Winter, is unfettered because it’s connected to my life now. . . .
I’m Winter’s queen.
I suck in a breath, forcing the air into my body to keep me alive under all of this, a weight heavier than anything I’ve ever felt.
Sixteen years of everyone keeping this secret. Of Sir training me, treating me like I was some nameless orphan who should be grateful to be free. And Mather . . . no. All this time, his true parents have been right there, until Sir—
There’s my sweet girl.
The cottage. Sir hugging me. That wasn’t real. It was a cruel trick of Angra’s, a horrible toying with my dreams. Everything I want out of life, everything I will never, ever get—a simple, happy family in some cramped little cottage. But Hannah—that was real. That was her attempt to save me from Angra, a desperate ripple of protection urged by her connection to the conduit magic, to her bloodline. My bloodline.
I fall forward, forehead touching the cool obsidian, mouth opening in the beginnings of a sob. Tears stream down my face as I remember Sir’s arms around me, the way he held me in Angra’s evil dream, completely unafraid of loving me.
But he isn’t my father. He’s Mather’s father. My own father is Winter’s dead king, and my mother is Winter’s dead queen. She’s been using her connection to Winter’s conduit to talk to me. Because I—
I’m Winter’s conduit. No matter how many times I push those words through my head, they don’t make sense.
“Herod!”
Angra’s shout, dripping with uncontrolled menace, shakes the palace apart. He’ll kill me, destroy me here and now, rend every piece of me into inconsequential bits and scatter them over Winter’s desolate land. He’ll win.
I fly up, stumble back, not sure where I can go or where I can hide. I can’t just die—not this easily. It can’t end now, just like that—
Angra throws open a door. “Herod! Bring him, NOW!”
I pause, hands out, chest heaving up and down. Him. Has Mather been captured?
Angra turns back to me as footsteps draw closer from the hall. “Winterians, always getting in the way of greater things,” he says, riled into a fantastic desperation. “You may be able to resist me, but there’s another way to get you to talk.”
Resist.
He didn’t hear any of it. He doesn’t know. For him, the image of Jannuari must have dissolved once I left the cottage. Hannah used the conduit magic to keep us hidden because she needed to prepare me; she took the risk to give me a fighting chance to save our kingdom.
My chest gets cold again, a small shiver that darts down to my hands.
Footsteps pound into the throne room, shadows falling on two figures. One is Herod, his looming shoulders recognizable anywhere. The other is smaller. Still strong, still big, but—
Herod throws the other man into the beam of light in front of me. He collapses, clothes ripped and stained with blood, body bruised and decorated with cuts and gashes. When he looks up at me, everything else vanishes.
It’s Theron.
“Tell me everything,” Angra orders, stomping toward me, the black of his staff creating a cloud of shadow around his hand. “Or I’ll break every bone in your prince’s body.”
Theron sits back on his heels. Theron is here. In Spring.
A cut on his forehead trickles blood into his eye, and half of his mouth cocks to one side in a pathetic attempt to look happy to see me, even here. I fall to the ground in front of him, running my hands over his face, his arms, hesitating on his injuries. “How did you get here?”
Theron’s smile falls. “I could ask you the same thing.”
Angra’s staff slams into Theron’s head and sends him sprawling onto the floor. Theron lifts up onto his elbows, draws in a calming breath, and looks back at me.
“Don’t you want to tell her how you handed yourself over to me? Gallantly tried to sneak into Spring to save her, but ended up in the same situation?” Angra sneers at Theron, but his usual smugness is marred now, his control wavering in the face of my resistance to his magic. “Shall I show your prince how visitors are treated in Abril?”
I surge forward as Herod rushes to me, both of us colliding an arm’s length from Theron. “No!” I shout, the word echoing around me. I don’t have time for nausea or revulsion or Herod’s slow leer as he wraps his arms around my body and grunts when I kick against him.
“Do you know what happened to the last refugees we caught?” Herod’s breath brushes my hair, my neck, flowing over my body as he pulls me to him.
Angra steps over Theron and lowers the staff’s orb, pressing it against Theron’s spine. But Theron doesn’t flinch, his eyes on mine, his breathing labored and quick as he gathers determination for whatever might lie ahead. He doesn’t know about Angra’s Decay—he doesn’t know Angra’s magic can affect him—
The first rib snaps and Theron cries out, surprise shattering any chance he might have had at remaining stoic. True, unyielding fear washes away the color on his face as he gasps in the silence after the break, his eyes finding mine in a surge of unasked questions. I can’t explain anything, though, not as Herod presses his face against my ear, not as the second rib cracks in Theron’s chest, an echoing pop of bone grating against bone that makes my own body ache with memory.
“You do, don’t you?” Herod continues. “Because we let one of them go, so he could tell you what your fate would be. The one who died—R-16? She was a fighter, just like you. Determined to resist. But they always come around in the end.”