Page 35 of A Frozen Pyre
“You…you love her.”
Her shoulders slumped. She eased her weight off his throat as she sank onto the flats of her feet. Her face continued to flash between conflicting emotions as she tore her eyes from him, staring into the depths of the blue-black stones of Castle Gwydir. She pushed away from him at long last, standing in the middle of the hall.
“What do we do?” she asked.
He knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t asking him. She didn’t give a shit what he thought. She merely talked to hear the sound of her own voice. She rolled the question over in her mind, testing its weight in her hands as she thought through the problems and their outcomes.
“We work together,” he answered with pained reluctance.
If it weren’t for the distant sounds of still-crying servants and the burble of evening, they may have been given over to the belief that they were alone in the world. They stared at one another for a long, long while.
“I won’t share her,” she said quietly.
He knew from her posture, her tone, her demeanor, that she understood.
“You don’t have a choice.”
Thirteen
Ophir turned from the room into the hall. She didn’t knowwhere to start looking for the siren, as they’d spent nearly their entire stay in bed. An orange glow refracted off the sparkling labradorite of the castle, drawing her attention to her hands. They’d lit in her anger, causing the gemstone bricks to glitter. She struggled to calm herself, forcing the flame to evaporate from her fingertips. The reds and yellows disappeared, leaving her alone in the dark hall. She strained for any sign of the siren but could hear nothing beyond the commotion of the rightfully anxious servants in the kitchen.
“Goddess fucking dammit, Dwyn, where are you?”
“Princess!” Ophir turned to see an attendant jog up the corridor. “Your Highness—Majesty—um, what do we call you? Shit. Princess Ophir: Please return to your chambers until Raascot’s military can secure the castle. We’re concerned for your safety and we—whoa, hang on!”
Ophir jostled past the attendant without addressing them.
“Princess Ophir, I’m so sorry, I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist—”
Ophir rose to her full height before turning. “Then do it. Insist it.”
The attendant’s jaw opened a click.
Balls of flame encompassed Ophir’s hands as she said, “Tell me that a servant can protect me better than I can. Can you reduce an enemy to ash in an instant?”
She extinguished her flame at the answering gulp. “Return to whoever issued your command and tell them Iinsistedupon defending myself. You are in no trouble. Go.”
A moment later, she was left to contemplate just how much damage Dwyn’s rampage had done. Not only were six innocent lives lost, but if all foreign ambassadors had been subject to the same attempted quarantine she’d just received, the whole endeavor had to be at risk.
“You ruined the attempt at a conclave, then disappeared? Where the fuck did you go?”
She asked herself what Dwyn would tell her to do if she were here, and suddenly, she had the answer. Dwyn would tell her to make something. She hadn’t been particularly skillful at the art of creation, but so far, they’d all worked…more or less.
Ophir cupped her hands on top of one another and whispered into the small space between her thumbs, “Show me where I need to go.”
She focused on a hummingbird, wanting something quick and lithe to guide her to her destination. She opened her hands and yelped at the strange, fluttering moth that emerged. The sound of its rapidly beating wings was little more than the high-pitched buzz of a hornet. Where she’d expected a beak, a mosquito-like straw with a sharp needlepoint glistened. It looked at her with a honeycomb of glistening eyes, beating its wings expectantly in the middle of the hall.
Ophir shuddered as she looked at it.
“Don’t hurt anyone in the castle,” she said. It darted in a contained space, up, down, left, right, too agitated to stay still.
“Well? What are you waiting for? Take me where I need to go!”
The moth darted down the hall so fast that it had roundedthe corner before Ophir had even started moving.
“Slow down!” she panted.
The moth stopped in the middle of the hall once more. It darted from one corner of the corridor to the other in a dramatic display of discontent. Ophir flashed her annoyance at the moth before it darted down the hall again. This time, it stopped every twenty feet or so until Ophir jogged to catch up. When it reached the door to the garden, it began bopping against the wood as if it were a common insect hitting a fae light in the dead of night. Ophir opened the door for the moth, and it shot into the garden. She’d chased it through the bushes and around the benches, statue, and a fountain that had been drained for the season when she heard a yelp.
