Page 49 of Heart of the Summer Queen

Yet I can’t imagine Elaric any other way. Did he used to have freckles like me? Were his eyes brown or green? Was his hair golden or black?

My thoughts are interrupted when Elaric lowers his head, shame branding itself across his expression.

Sitting straighter, I say, “This is why we came to speak to you. I know I’m Elaric’s Summer Queen, and that he’s spent three centuries searching for me. I’m supposed to break his curse but we’re already married and it’s still unbroken. What else must I do to end the spell?”

“True love,” Belinda says, and all the hope within me shatters. “True love is required to thaw your king’s heart. Until the two of you are both irrecoverably in love with one another, he will remain his frozen self.”

We came all this way just for Belinda to confirm my suspicions: true love is the only remedy.

After everything between us, falling in love is ludicrous. Even more so than coming here and wishing for Belinda to name some other cure—perhaps traveling to the far reaches of the world, slaying a ferocious beast, and using its heart to melt Elaric’s. That would be tangible, achievable. Not like true love.

At this rate, my sister will stay trapped forever.

Despite all this, I can’t help from clinging onto denial. “Are you certain?”

“You don’t believe me?” Belinda says.

“I... I was just wondering how you would know such a thing.” It’s a struggle to keep my voice steady. “Unless you were present the day Elaric was cursed?”

“I was not.” Belinda lifts her bowl of soup and holds it to her lips, tilting it back. She slurps down all of it, yellow rivulets flowing down her chin.

Once the bowl is empty, she stands and potters around the room, searching her shelves for bottles before selecting one which contains a fluorescent pink substance. She pops out the cork and tips the contents into her bowl. Then she retrieves a jar of dried leaves, which are long and pointed like blades. I don’t recognize what plant they belong to. She scrunches three leaves in her fist and scatters them into her bowl.

The third ingredient Belinda retrieves is much more disconcerting: tongues. Her jar contains dozens of them sitting in an oily liquid. The only relief is they look too small to be from people.

She plucks a tongue out of the jar, pinching the tip between her index finger and thumb, and deposits it at the top of her concoction. Then she returns to Elaric and me.

Belinda pauses when she reaches us, and I think she intends to show us the contents of her bowl. But her hand snaps out, and she plucks a silver hair from Elaric’s head, moving faster than a woman of her age should be able to move. Elaric looks as taken aback as me. I wonder if she could best me with a sword—maybe even Elaric—though I doubt she would ever use steel rather than her magic. Not that I have any desire to fight her.

While I very much want to know what she’s doing, especially now she has a lock of Elaric’s hair, I fear I might enrage herif I interrupt her by asking. I watch carefully as she stirs her ingredients, though the severed tongue is impossible to blend with everything else. After several stirs, she holds a palm over the bowl and closes her eyes. When she moves her hand, the goo is no longer pink but green.

All the ingredients are thoroughly blended, with no leaves or hair or tongue in sight.

Belinda lifts the bowl to her lips, and for a terrible moment, I expect she will drink the mixture. Instead, she blows across its surface.

Emerald smoke billows out, filling the entire room. It’s so thick it engulfs the fireplace.

My stomach flips, fearing Belinda is poisoning us. That like with her gloomshrooms, I’ll be rendered unconscious and forced to endure more nightmares.

But then a voice rumbles through the cottage:

“Wherever you go shall forever snow,

“And all you hold will grow cold.

“For eternity this spell will be,

“‘Less your Summer Queen thaws you free.”

The voice has an unearthly quality yet is undeniably female, though it belongs neither to Belinda nor anyone else I know.

It has to be Isidore’s.

The green smoke vanishes as quickly as it appeared. When it clears, my gaze trails across to Elaric.

His face is blood-stricken, as if he has heard a ghost, and his skin is at least several shades paler—if that’s at all possible. He swallows down hard.

My mind replays each line several times, especially the last:

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