The words feel wrong, like they don’t belong to me, like I’m not worthy of calling them that. But it doesn’t matter what I call them, what they call me. I have the ability to free them, therefore I have the responsibility to free them. That’s all that matters now.
That’s all that has ever mattered.
I stop parallel to the corner. One more step, Meira. Just one more.
I march onto the road, pulling my chakram out so it dangles like a harmless toy from my hands. Five buildings ahead of me, the gate is madness. Spring soldiers on the outside throw blades and fists against the bending, creaking metal, punching back the swell of Winterians who push against the other side. The Winterians cry and scream, flinching against the blows. They’re confused, jerked out of their routine of work and forced back into their prison in chaos.
The first soldier drops without a fight. My chakram whizzes across the back of his neck, severing the top of his spine from his skull, and thunks back into my palm as the man collapses on the soldier next to him, pulling attention to me. First the dead man’s neighbor, then the man next to him, then every soldier charged with keeping order in the work camp. All eyes are on me, one lone Winterian girl against a whole battalion.
One soldier steps forward, his thick sword dinged with age and use. “Herod’s toy escaped,” he sneers.
“Herod’s toy killed him,” I respond, and a satisfying flash of shock takes over his face.
Another voice cracks out over the street. “Meira, run!”
My eyes flick behind the line of soldiers to the gate. Conall presses against the iron, the wire leaving streaks of blood on his cheeks and arms. He’s panicked, seeing me on the street. There’s a light in his eyes now, a light so different from his usual hatred that I have to be imagining it.
But no—it’s hope. He wants me to live.
Angra senses it too. He knows somehow, this hope they all have, and the Spring soldiers fly at the gate in one organized mass, raising all their weapons at the same moment. A strangled moan pops out of my lungs. Angra’s dark magic. He’s told them to—
They start striking to kill now. Jabbing their blades through the metal, stabbing chests and necks, no longer mere warning blows. I can feel Angra’s order pulsing out of their driven bodies: Slaughter them.
My chest numbs, and for once I know what it is. Cold, icy cold, darting out to my shoulders and rushing down to my fingers. The conduit’s power churns around me, surging in and out of my body like an uncontrollable snowstorm, begging to coat the world in glorious white.
Winter has a conduit now too. And we won’t be weak anymore.
I drop my chakram at my feet and shoot my hands out, fingers stretching to the Winterians in front of me. The cold blasts out of me, an eruption of such perfect chill that I wonder if I’m nothing more than a snowstorm now, a great twirling column of flakes. The cold rushes around the Spring soldiers and plunges through the gate, flooding every frail, white-haired body, every pair of wide blue eyes, every bleeding, tired soul with strength, power, energy, healing their bruises and soothing their cuts and making them stronger, stronger, stronger—
The magic pours until every free space in every body is filled with strength. Their eyes shine brighter, their bodies stand straighter, their fists clench tighter. Cold and frost, so much beautiful power that when the icy sensation stops, I’m left gasping in the aftermath of such wonder. Adrenaline courses through me, blissfully combatting the pull of exhaustion that makes me sway forward under all the power I just exerted.
The Winterians scream, something far beyond their cries of pain and anguish, something breaking out of them in a rush of freedom. The Spring soldiers’ attack pauses in the echoing war cry from their prisoners. And the Winterians, their eyes fiery with life, slam forward, breaking open the gate with a frantic determination.
“Attack!” a Spring soldier cries, and charges at me.
I hook my chakram with my boot and kick it into the air, grabbing it and launching it in a great spin of death into the approaching stampede of Spring soldiers. A few fall as my chakram smacks back into my palm, but the soldiers are too close now, a few seconds from colliding with me. I return the chakram to my back and yank out the sword and dagger I stole from Herod, body coiling down. Four seconds. Three . . .
The farthest soldiers go down as one, their legs falling out from under them. The next row glances back, panicked, and falls just as easily, pulled to the ground by the mad hatred of sixteen years of oppression. The Winterians rise up and over the Spring battalion in a deadly wave of destruction, tearing weapons out of hands and turning those weapons on the shocked faces of soldiers who never thought they would lose.
The last row of Spring soldiers reaches me, caught between fear behind them and fear ahead. My dagger jabs into one’s stomach, my sword through another’s neck. I twirl between the soldiers, my body a machine of slice and stab and duck.
I move around one last dying man, my boots kicking up dust around me, and stop in front of Conall. He’s bloody and wild, his white hair streaked with red, his hands clasped around a pair of short knives. Beside him, Garrigan is just as untamed, a beast inside them unleashed, and behind them are the other Winterians.
Arms clamp around my neck in a storm of white and tears. “I knew you’d free us,” Nessa breathes.
Conall steps forward, his knives glinting with Spring blood. “We’re not free yet. What next, my queen?”
My queen. How does he know?
I pull back from Nessa and stare at them, all of them, every eager face. Every innocent, patient soul, accepting the power from me without question, without hesitation.
And I feel Hannah in me. Her gentle, waiting presence, as connected to the conduit’s power as I am. She’s in all the Winterians too, connecting us in an inexplicable and marvelous world all our own.
She is my daughter, she whispers to them, a voice so quiet they could mistake it for their own thoughts. It’s going to be all right. I’m sorry I lied to you, but your freedom is so close.
The hope on the dirt-smudged faces fills me with a different emotion, one that snuffs out any fear of who I am now. Happiness.
“Cordell and Autumn are at Spring’s gates, but our freedom is not theirs to win,” I shout over the crowd. The next words stick in my throat, building and building alongside all the bubbling anxiety, the years of abuse, the scars and blood and gore. “We are Winter!”
Conall and Garrigan tip their heads back, arms outstretched as they shout to the sky. A battle cry that spreads to every Winterian, their voices creaking, their eyes shining.
“We are Winter!” Nessa echoes, and leaps over the fallen Spring bodies, running up the road with her stolen sword blazing above her head. They follow her, dashing over bodies, waving weapons like banners of victory.
Their strength, conduit-given or not, is invigorating, filling me with my own magic. I want to bask in it forever.
You’re so close now, Hannah says.
I fall into line with them, running just as hard, screaming just as loud, lost in the voices and the power and the lives of the Winterians.