Page 143 of Moonmarked

Because I wasn’t alone in that silent room like I first thought. The Seelie Queen was there with me.

She sat on the floor with one leg under her, and her arm over her knee, playing with the crystal-clear water at the very edge of the shallow pool behind me. The water that had resembled a mirror when I first came here but somehow didn’t anymore.

She wore white and gold, her long hair done in a braid, her strands threaded with gold here and there, and she didn’t raise her head, though she probably saw me sitting up.

She just continued to stir the water with her fingertips slowly.

“You survived,” she then said, her voice clear and ice-cold—a different cold from the one inside me.

Dragging myself on my hands, I pulled myself farther away from the pool, closer to the dark doorway, as if I had any hope of running when I couldn’t even stand up yet.

A thought occurred to me, one dark and final and so fucking heavy.

If my memory served me right, I was no longer bound to the Seelie Prince. The golden thread had burned, and the ashes fell in this water. We were no longer tied together by magic, Lyall and I, and I felt it. I felt the way the warmth had slipped from me, had left me freezing. A layer of frost was over my heart, and I was honestly surprised that it was still beating, but it did.

I was surprised my breath didn’t come out in white clouds, too.

I tried to speak but I couldn’t, not yet. My throat burned as if I’d swallowed ice.

The queen finally looked up, and her eyes met mine. “Do you know why it hurts so much when something ancient is torn from something young?” She tilted her head to the side. “Because the young weren’t built to carry it.”

What in the actual fuck, lady?!

Every hair on my skin stood at attention as I moved farther back slowly. My body wasn’t frozen like I feared it would be— like itshould havebeen considering the way myinsides felt—but I still wasn’t strong enough to stand. I was trying.

At least when I wet my dry lips and tried to speak again, I could. “What happened?”

The life bond was broken, torn out of me—that much I felt.

And then I’d passed out.

The queen stood up, moving ever so gracefully, and began to walk the edge of the pool. She was barefoot, her feet barely making any sound against the marble.

“Magic doesn’t die, you know. Not truly. When it loses a host, it only waits for a vessel that fits it.”

“I don’t…I don’t understand.”

She stopped on the other side of the pool, right where Lyall had been standing when I first came in here. “That’s okay. You don’t have to. It won’t matter for much longer anyway.”

My limbs were feeling a bit stronger, though my legs were still shaking. I still forced myself to stand up, get as far away from her as I could.

“Why?” I demanded, and I hated that my voice sounded so weak. “Why won’t it matter?” Because the way she said it…

The queen smiled. “You saw it, didn’t you.”

Everything came to a halt. Even my legs were no longer shaking. “What?”

“The painting. You saw it.”

There went my knees again.

There went my thoughts spiraling out of control, my memories of the painting of the Ice Queen, half torn, the plaque underneath with her name on it clean, when others weren’t.

And suddenly my mind made up this detailed image ofthis very woman standing in front of me tonight, crownless, slipping into the Gallery of Time, finding the portrait, ripping the canvas in half…

I swallowed hard. “Was it you? Didyouput that there? Did you hope to trick me with it?”

Suddenly, the queen threw her head back and laughed. “Trickyou?! Oh, no, mortal, no!”

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