Page 14 of Fated to the Frost King

Did he have to give me permission to take it off? Or…no, I wouldn’t consider the idea that it could never be removed or I would go insane. One thing at a time.

My heartbeat thundered in my ears as I crept toward the main door, opening it only to find two guards standing sentry on either side. They both glanced warily in my direction, but didn’t speak. I closed the door without explanation, heading back to the door the king had led me through.

I pulled it open, then immediately slammed it shut.

There were no guards there—at least, no fae guards. But five enormous wolves had turned their luminous gazes to me in the stilted heartbeat before I shut the door.

No secret who those rooms belong to.

The only other exit in the cursed suites spilled out onto a balcony, which was both treacherously windy and several stories off the ground.

Finally, I admitted to myself what I already knew, what I had known from the time I told my sister as much this evening.

There was no escape.

Even if there had been a door, somewhere tucked behind a tapestry or buried beneath stone, I wouldn’t have made it far in the most guarded place in the entire kingdom with a single dagger, even if it was inlaid with crystals that could cut through mana.

I glared at the bed waiting for me like the gaping mouth of a frostbeast. Its pale furs and silver trim gleamed like rows of uneven teeth waiting to devour me.

I didn’t go near it. Lying there felt like tempting fate. Or worse, accepting it.

So I pulled the furs off the bed and returned to the sitting room to curl up in the oversized chair by the tiny fire, trying not to drown in the unrelenting bleakness of the space. My new life.

I swallowed back an unexpected wave of emotion at the foreign nature of everything here. Earlier, I hadn’t been worried about spending much time in this space since I had been fairly certain I wouldn’t survive my wedding night, but somehow, I was still alive.

Still at the palace.

And still surrounded by the endless white and gray walls of my new prison.

My bedroom at home was stuffed with nearly as many books as the estate library, mahogany shelves laden down with tomes of every size and color, stacked haphazardly and in no particular order. My bed was average-sized but overflowing with an assortment of brightly colored pillows and throws I had dredged up from forgotten closets.

There were warm velvet curtains and plants hanging in every window…though admittedly, several of them had suffered from a failure to thrive upon my sister’s departure.

There was life, though, or at least the attempt at it. Here my choices were actual death, or these rooms that felt close to it.

I tucked my legs beneath me, furs still wrapped around my shoulders like a shield, and tried in vain to think my way out of this mess.

Solutions never came to me, but neither did the king, so I considered it a partial win.

Sleep, too, had been hard to find. All night, I imagined phantom footsteps, heard the click of a door, saw any number of ways that the king or his soldiers might come for me.

More than once, something had scratched eerie claws across the frosted window at the balcony.

My stomach twisted. I had been so focused on the monster inside the palace that I hadn’t considered the ones that roamed at night. The frostbeasts that were bound to the darkness who wanted to hunt and haunt and destroy.

I had grown used to seeing them around Eisbarrow and Briarhollow, my father’s village and a neighboring one.

But we only really ever dealt with smaller ones. Not the terrifying ones I had read about from the north mountains—the Wretches who could mimic the sounds of your screams as they devoured you, or the Mirrorbanes who could change their appearances at will to blend into the environment so you never saw them coming.

A shiver raced through my spine as I stared at the window. I was too high up in the tower to worry about them. Right?

And there were guards all around the palace, well-trained to cast their mana into the sky. It wouldn’t be possible for frostbeasts to come so close…so it was probably just the palace phoenixes. Maybe they were given to pranks, or clumsiness.

Every time the scratching sounded again, I repeated the logic, willing myself to believe it.

When I finally did drift off, there were nightmares.

Some were familiar, crystals that refused to glow, searing pain along my skin while my mother’s unearthly scream rent through the air. But some were new.

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