Page 114 of The Prince and the Ice King

“Let the spell take hold,” Lombard whispered, hefting Reardon from the table, kicking his sword belt from the nearby chair, and setting him down upon his crumpled cloak. “If you do try to remove it, rest assured, you will bleed out and die in even more agony than you’re feeling now. If you want your suffering lessened, then don’t fight.”

Moving back to the worktable, Lombard left Reardon as a splayed heap, frozen from the pain, arms dangling at his sides, as the dagger he’d loved with such naivete stuck out of his chest. Lombard, meanwhile, acted completely unfazed, not only from having been in a heated embrace with Reardon moments before, but from stabbing him with his own gift.

He didn’t even look at Reardon.

“You’ll be able to move in time, but every step will be excruciating, so I don’t recommend it. That’s why I told you to keep that dagger close. I never knew when the time would be right after you came of age. That time is now.” Lombard lifted one of the vials to inspect and glanced at Reardon finally with a wicked smile. “You’re quite close. You might even have already gotten the answer if you’d trusted Wells instead of falling for my misdirection. I killed that soldier, by the way. Such a pity.

“You knew to test transmutation. Impressive. Would you like a hint?”

The slow advance of Lombard back to Reardon churned his stomach, as he remembered that he’d kissed him and loved him, even if it wasn’t the same love he felt for Jack.

“The correct answer is transmutation into fire, which you would have realized eventually, but what makes any trace of this deadly poison vanish after the person dies is… well, I guess you’ll never know.”

The tears in Reardon’s eyes were from far more than pain, as Lombard dared to stroke his cheek before returning the vial to the table.

“Wh-why…?” Reardon croaked. This man had heard every plea Reardon ever made to his father, begging for magic to not be blamed for his mother’s death, and internally, he must have been laughing all the while.

“Your mother wanted to change things.” Lombard leaned against the worktable, as casually as if they were still talking civilly. “But Iwasn’t ready then. I needed the condemnation of people with magic and the yearly sacrifices in order to quietly siphon their power without anyone caring what happened to them.”

“For… magic?”

“I was born without any, like you. That wouldn’t do, not if I wanted to live forever. When I was younger, centuries ago, I went to the Fairy Queen and pleaded to be given eternal life. She said I was welcome to stay in her lands, and that, there, I would never age. But then I would have had tostay in her lands, giving up my freedom. I wanted immortality I could take with me, and she could grant me that, but she refused.

“I knew there were other ways to get what I desired. Alchemy is so useful for doing what magic can’t.” He turned his sly smile to the worktable. “I started siphoning power from others to add to my life. But killing and having people constantly going missing gets tricky. The first bit of alchemy I learned after I drained the magic from a young elf was how to change my face.”

A ripple came over Lombard’s features, and he was one of the guards, then a wizened merchant Reardon remembered from the square, then the tavern innkeeper, then Reardon’s own father, before he returned to the handsome blond that Reardon couldn’t even say was Lombard’s original face.

If he evenwasLombard.

“Did you… kill the real Bardy?” Reardon asked.

Lombard grinned terribly.

“Y-you… replaced him? When?”

“Does it matter?”

Reardon supposed it didn’t, since the switch had to have happened before his mother’s death. The man he had first thought he loved had never been that man at all.

“The right face can make anything effortless,” Lombard continued. “Start a war here, point fingers there, and everyone turns on each other. It was simple to twist people against magic and those who wielded it. And once those unfortunate souls were in prison, they’d die so easily, I’m afraid, and no one suspected it was because I was sucking the magic from their bodies.

“I couldn’t have your mother interrupting that, or your father in his grief over your disappearance when I was so close to finally being done with all this. You thought you fooled me when you replaced thesacrifice? I knew. You’ve made this all so much easier, because you’ve helped set the stage. Those sacrifices are my true purpose. They’ve been getting fat on the power of their cursed land, enough now that it is time to cull it—through you.”

“What?” The limpness in Reardon’s body started to fade, allowing him to lift his hands into his lap instead of dangling. Even moving that much made him ache with a pulse of the dark power working within him.

Lombard tilted his head, like every cringe of Reardon’s was amusing. “The Fairy Queen never paid much mind to the distant Emerald lands, compared to the Sapphire Kingdom so much closer to her own. She had no idea what I was doing, but I was always watching her. When she cast her curse, I made my move. She’d set things in motion for me perfectly, and I’d gathered enough power over the years that, once she returned home, I erected a shield to lock her away. I wasn’t strong enough to fight her, no, I couldn’t risk that, but I could keep her from interfering and force her to watch.

“Then all I had to do was keep the status quo, fed from the sacrifices ever since the first, when I chased a drunken nobleman’s son to the Ice King’s door.”

Oliver.

“I merely needed to wait for all that power and immortality to reach its pinnacle and for the right vessel to filter it into me. Only someone completely without magic will do. Do you know how rare that is? The people trick themselves into believing magic is gone, but it is never gone. You and I are the rare ones, Reardon.

“But I also needed it to be you, the Emerald Prince, so that when the people see you destroyed by magic after being corrupted by the Ice King, they’ll embrace me as their new ruler without question.”

“You—”

“Shhh,” Lombard shushed Reardon again, pushing from the table to saunter toward him. “You’re staying here, I’m afraid. The dagger will do its job no matter the distance. When it’s over, there will be no dagger or wound remaining, and everyone will assume you died from magic like your parents. All I need now is to pass the Ice King’s gates and complete a simple incantation tied to the alchemy that made that dagger, and it will begin.

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