Page 100 of The Prince and the Ice King

Reardon

“Did you hear us?”

Reardon blinked from gazing down at his bowl of soup. He should be starving. He hadn’t eaten much of anything yesterday while recovering in the alchemist tower. He’d barely slept last night. Now it was lunchtime, his back feeling no more pain and the most scarred parts feeling nothing but numbness, yet he’d still hardly touched any food.

Jack refused to see him. He wouldn’t last night or for their regular audience that morning. He was set on his words to end this and had become a retreating ice trail everywhere Reardon sought him. The only words he’d spoken were to tell Reardon once again to go home.

“Sorry, can you repeat what you were saying?” Reardon smiled somberly at his friends. He, Barclay, and Shayla had all come from the alchemist tower, where Reardon had tried to bury himself in work, but he’d been too distracted to be of much use.

The others had been fruitful, however—more than he’d realized.

“We said,” Barclay explained softly, “that with only a few more ingredients and hard work for another day or two, we should finally have the right combination to identify the potion used on Caitlin’s husband and your mother. We’re almost there, Reardon.” He smiled, but it was so obviously pitying for everything else Reardon was going through.

“That’s wonderful.” Reardon tried to smile back anyway. “Do we have everything we need for the final tests?”

“Some extra hemlock would be useful,” Shayla said. “We’ve narrowed it as one of the last ingredients. I was going to forage for some after lunch.”

“Would you mind if I went to get it?”

“We’ll go together.”

“I’d prefer to go alone.”

Shayla and Barclay exchanged pensive looks.

“I’ll be fine,” Reardon insisted.

“Reardon,” Shayla tried, “you know we don’t usually allow—”

“Please, I need to think, to clear my head, and… I could use the air.” Everywhere in the castle was a suffocating reminder of the king’s avoidance, especially when Reardon found ice. “I’ll have my weapons with me. I’ll be careful, I promise.”

They exchanged more troubled looks, like so many inhabitants of the castle had been acting around Reardon, as if it was his first week all over again.

He was ready to plead his case further when Shayla said, “Okay, but if you’re not back in time for dinner, I’m siccing Liam after you.”

Fragments of a real smile twitched at Reardon’s lips, but fragments couldn’t form a complete picture. “Thank you.” He stood and grabbed his soup to dump it.

“Wait.” Barclay reached across the table. “Maybe I should—”

“No.” Reardon flinched out of reach. “Sorry, but if it’s all the same, right now I don’t want to know what comes next.”

He expected Barclay to follow him, expected every second of his trek to collect his weapons belt and cloak that Barclay would catch up and try to stop him, or suddenly appear and grab his arm to read his future.

Love, death, and blue eyes in a sea of white.

It was all true, it was allhere, but if death was how this ended, no matter how much Barclay had said things didn’t have to turn out the way that sounded, then Reardon didn’t want to see it coming.

He hurried out of the castle. He was rarely ever alone inside its walls, and he hadn’t been alone outside since before Shayla took him on his first forage. It was the end of January now and reaching the bitteresttemperatures. Besides taking his cloak, Reardon had downed an extra resistance draught to protect against the elements.

It had snowed recently, and his boots sank deep into the mounds covering the path he and Shayla took to reach the edge of the wood. He didn’t have to look up to know the way, only down at his feet to keep steady. The bag slung over his shoulder would soon be filled with hemlock and whatever else he found that was deemed worthy to add to the tower stores.

Anywhere but the Frozen Kingdom, hemlock wouldn’t flourish until early spring, but here, within the grounds of the castle, various greenery and flowers could be found all year round, even peeking out of snowdrifts. Reardon knew exactly where the grounds ended, because there was a hard line where that strange mix of life and death stopped. He could see it in the first line of trees, still mossy or budding, only for the second line to be completely barren.

Sometimes Reardon forgot that, technically, his weeks here hadn’t aged him. Nothing here aged, and yet the seasons came and went in their own way like a mockery.

Reaching several sprigs of hemlock, almost hidden with their white flowers so similar to the snow, Reardon began to pick them as he’d been taught and carefully bundled them away. The monotonous action cleared his mind as he’d hoped, but the melancholy he felt only seemed to set in deeper.

How could he prove the king wrong if Jack wouldn’t even speak to him?

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