Page 30 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
It was my turn to scoff. “Spoken like the one who sent her off to be kidnapped to begin with. Or are you going to pretend this was all part of some elaborate scheme to keep her safe?”
Nevara squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them on a breath.
“No.” The word fell like the whisper of a noose. “I won’t pretend that. You asked me to keep your kingdom safe, not your wife. That is what I’ve done.” Her lips twisted bitterly. “What Ialwaysdo. What I will spend the rest of my life in my shards-forsaken tower to accomplish, no matter who is sacrificed in the process.”
Sacrificed.The word struck like an arrow to the gut.
“You said she couldn’t die,” I growled, my voice rough with something dangerously close to fear.
“I said you couldn’t kill her,” she corrected, each word deliberate.
My blood froze for reasons I refused to name. The ring on my hand pulsed in time with my thundering heartbeat, rage intertwining with something deeper. Darker.
I opened my mouth, then snapped shut. “So she’s going to die?”
My Visionary lifted her chin. “All roads lead to death eventually.”
“This is not the time to be cryptic with me,” I snarled. Frost split the stone around us in jagged veins, sending the shrapnel hurtling through the air. “Tell me. Where. She. Is.”
She blinked. “Is that an order, My King?”
“Nevara,” I warned, my fists turning to ice beneath the weight of my mana.
Her sightless eyes flared, frost forming along her lashes and brows. Her breath formed a thick cloud as she grimaced at whatever it was she Saw. “I told you not to kill him. You changed things.”
Starlight swirled in her gaze, bright and merciless. Then she gasped, and the next words slipped past her lips in an unfamiliar cadence.
“There are no bonds that can’t be broken. Not even for the Frostgrave King.”
There was only one bond she could be referring to. The Winter Court marriage vows had never been unbound, not in the history of our reign. But neither had the vow been made to an Unseelie.
“She’s going to sever our marriage bond?” The words were harder to say than they should have been.
It should have been a relief. Shards, wasn’t that what I had wanted from the moment Nevara had named her? But even if the ring hadn’t pulsed against my skin, I would have known there was more buried in the warning.
“What else?” I demanded.
“She’s walking into a trap.” I spun toward the wall, mana seeping from my bones and freezing the air in my lungs.
“Draven, wait,” Nevara cried.
But I was done waiting.
The torches guttered and died. Darkness pressed in, pierced only by the violet blaze of the runes glowing behind one of the corpses.
If Nevara would not tell me where to find my wife, I would carve my own path through the Wilds, slaughtering everything that stood in my way, if that’s what it took. I seized the body by the throat and ripped it free. His bones shattered as they hit the ground, scattering across the ice-slick floor to land at my Visionary’s feet.
I focused my mana on the wall, and the runes seared hotter, a white-blue, the color of a star caged in ice. It was similar to the runes in the palace library, but the mana that emanated from it was infinitely older. Older than the ward stones, older than my palace itself, tied to the power of the earth itself.
Not here.
The Wilds.
Shards damn everything.
All this time when I had wondered how they snuck in and out of my kingdom too easily, even accounting for their wings, and they had a frost-blasted portal. Did it allow them to move past the borders without fighting through the Shard Mother’s barriers?
Would it work in either direction?
