After a thorough examination, the guard waved us through. We crossed a stone bridge over a wide moat with chunks of ice floating in the water. Every now and then, a scaly white fin could be seen. I shuddered and trained my eyes forward.
We passed into a wide courtyard dotted with statues carved of ice. We dismounted and grooms rushed forward to take our mounts, all of them careful to keep their distance from me. As we moved on foot toward a tunnel that led to a massive door, there was a commotion from the right.
“Kill the Fireblood!” a voice screamed from the crowd that was watching nearby. A woman in a simple, faded dress hurried toward us, her white hair covered by a kerchief, her eyes wild. Her lined face was twisted into an ugly blend of pain and malice. “She killed my Cam, my only son!”
The captain stepped forward and gently stopped the woman as her long-fingered hands took swipes at me like a cat trying to reach a mouse. She turned her furious stare on the captain.
“How can you protect this murderer?” she shouted.
“I’m no murderer,” I said shakily, disturbed by the intensity of her hatred. Likely, her son had died in battle and I was just the convenient face of her grief. “But your captain is.”
He backhanded me across the face. “Shut your mouth, Firefilth.”
I put a hand to my stinging cheek and blinked away the tears that pricked my eyes at the blow.
He turned back to the woman, his expression smoothing. “She’ll be dead soon enough.”
“Let me do it,” she begged, her hands opening and closing. Seeing the vengeful hatred in her eyes, I had a strange moment of recognition, like I was looking at a grief-crazed version of myself. It chilled my soul.
“The king decides how she’ll be punished,” said the captain, his voice steady and persuasive. “Leave her to him. Leave her to me.”
After a few panting breaths, she nodded, her shoulders slumping. She shot me one last hostile glare.
“Die slowly, murderer,” she said, loud enough that the air echoed with it. “Die in pain.”
I could feel her eyes boring into my back as the guards led me up wide white steps to the castle’s massive iron door. My steps faltered and stopped as we entered, so overtaken with the grandness of the place I’d entered.
The interior of the castle was a monstrous ice cave. Here and there the ice came down to meet the floor in smooth, natural-looking columns. The ceiling was cold blue with repeating curves but with a smooth-looking surface, like a toad’s skin. Light seemed to shine from it and through it, creating thousands of fractal patterns on the walls. In the center, where the ceiling rose up to form a dome, stalactites clustered in a sharp, strangely elegant chandelier.
In a few spots, gray stone walls were visible beneath the blue sheets. The castle must have been built of stone and then augmented and covered with ice.
The massive scale, the intense blues, the delicacy of the stalagmites and stalactites that reached for each other in various corners—the sheer, sweeping boldness of the room—pinned me in place and stole my breath.
“Move,” the captain commanded, shoving me between the shoulder blades. I stumbled and shivered violently, my hands and feet aching with cold as they took me down a series of corridors, some wide, some narrow, all of them a mixture of stone and ice, to a wide archway.
Here the floor was made of colored stones set in an intricate mosaic of shapes that formed pictures. There were birds with berries in their beaks, horses with flying manes, frost wolves chasing a fire fox, fantastical creatures I had never heard of, gods and goddesses and mortals playing out the scenes of every myth I had ever read and many I hadn’t. I was so immersed in it all that I barely noticed we had stopped.
I pulled my attention from the floor. About twenty paces away sat a massive throne of ice, its back soaring almost to the ceiling. Ice spread out from its base and up the walls like veins connected to a heart. It was a hulking monstrosity of thick, jagged ice that thrust upward like sharpened swords. Though the ends of the icicles were sharp, the texture of each was smooth, as if they’d been polished with merciless attention until no bumps or snags remained, all of it blindingly bright in the setting sun, which entered through a large window behind the throne.
Shadows cavorted inside the ice like wisps of black smoke.
This was no simple block of ice. It was the throne, crafted by Fors and pulsing with dark power.
Excitement surged through my body. I was in the presence of the throne. If Brother Thistle was right, its destruction would mean the healing of the kingdom. My people, whoever still lived, could return or come out of hiding. Perhaps a new ruler would take a new throne untainted by the curse.
But that depended on the imposing man currently seated on it. His robes were midnight blue, his hair and skin so pale they almost blended with the ice. His eyes were polished onyx. His hands rested on either side of him, a large sapphire glinting on the ring finger of one hand.