Page 143 of Winter Gods & Serpents

The rest of the visit had been mostly in silence except the light conversation Nia and Amerie exchanged with each other about her new house and the baby's needs, needs that Snow had fulfilled beyond what she’d promised when exiling her to Isjord.

We stood to leave after the baby woke and needed feeding. Before we left I approached Amerie. “Is everything well, how are you settling in these lands? If there is anything you need.”

“I am more than well,” she interrupted, but I could see that her words only half meant what she felt. “I miss my husband and little Serene needs her father, but I will soon make peace with it no need for worry. This was for the best, I know. I trust her, it was for the better,” she added lastly with a wistful smile.

I finally understood it—the reason why Snow had exiled her here, alone.

* * *

She walked along the castle corridors in all the terrible silence she’d been coated from before. Amerie’s decision had affected her more than what she’d expressed. Nia fiddled nervously at my side with her cloak, trying several times to step forward and say something, but each time she had held back.

Just as Snow opened the door to enter her bedroom, I grabbed onto her cold wrist. For a moment she did not turn but didn’t push me away either. And when she did, I wished she hadn’t. Her face wore a wistful withered expression. I searched for them—I searched for the lively burning eyes of hers, yet I found but deep shadows of a faded sun. They weren’t warm, they weren’t cold, only an in-between sorrowful.

“Rest well,” I said, lost at anything else to say, lost at words I’d gathered to ask before. Are you alright? Please be alright. It is all alright, it will be all alright. Don’t be anything but alright. Don’t hurt, it will be…alright. Don’t hurt, no you, not ever.

“I will.” She might have murmured or whispered the words, somewhere in the weak middle. Her cold hand slipped from my grip and over my own warm one. I felt the lingering touch she brushed over, the kiss of calamity and then…I cursed all cruel gods and guardians that watched as my heart rolled, sunk, and drowned, lift and swell, longed and searched…for her. What was I doing? When had I become so selfish and unreasonable?

“Probably too stuffed from all those ginger biscuits she had,” Nia joked to break gloom in the air.

I settled beside her. “She brought Amerie here afraid of what they were going to do to her in Adriata since she was carrying a mixed blood child. She thought if the two were together the child would suffer, that they would do the same thing they had done to her. That is why Snow separated them to different kingdoms where no one knew who they were, a new start.”

Nia nodded and looked over her friends door chamber behind where she was probably looming restless. Her shadows fluttered in a silent truth. “Yes.”

“Why is she looking to take Isjord?”

Nia froze. “You know?”

I nodded. “Does she not understand Silas will catch onto what she is doing, that many will hurt in the process, her too. Heavens, her more than any.”

She swallowed, her stare dropping to the floor. “She does not care.”

“But you do, Caiden does.”

“We are here because we do.”

“Then you agree to her plans.” Her shadows didn’t.

“I understand what you mean, the killing, I feel it too. What it does to those that die and what it does to her, but it is her solace. I cannot deny her solace even though I have wanted to.” She faced me. “Do not tell her that, she cannot know.”

“What have they done to her, Nia?”

She exhaled heavy. “Alaric, our guardian, he used to describe it in a way for me and Cai to understand what she went through during her panic. When you try to forge steel into weapon and it won’t take shape, you break and melt it all over again, don’t you? It was impossible to make her a weapon, but they still broke and melted her a thousand times. Sometimes just for the fun of it.”

Chapter 27

Bargains and Monsters

Snowlin

The castle corridors had gone completely dark inside, barely able to see where my feet were stepping. A dimmed soft woman's voice called in my direction and I followed till it grew so loud my feet tingled above the ground and heart thumped at its echo. Surrounded by it, continuously shouting and yelling my name. I made my body move forward till I reached the back winter gardens. The sky lit in thunder and lightning, thorns and leaves blew in swirls of air, bushes swayed as sails in a livid sea, and my mother stood at the middle of it. Her long dark hair waved at the touch of wind and her eyes turned the colour of the void and lifeless. Blood pooled beneath her feet and coating her white gown and face. Tears streamed down my own endlessly. The muted screams crawling out of my mouth assaulted my throat till it ached and throbbed as wounds of nails. I could not move toward her and she could not hear me.

“Run, Snow,” she called to me, her voice carried by the wind, “as quick as lightning, as quick as Nubil. Do not turn, do not stop, and do not fear. Run till all you hear is nothing, till all you see is nothing, till you are so alone, your thoughts echo in your ears. Promise me Snow, you will run and you will live, promise me.”

Her last words to me, the last words my mother had made me promise to oblige. I ran and ran, just like she had told me, as they burned the castle, as they killed her, Thora and Eren. I ran and ran, till my feet bled, till my skin cracked from the cold, till my wound had festered, till it took my father days to find me, tucked deep in the woods.

“Serene, Serene, I will call her Serene,” another voice repeated in the air as I crunched tight to my knees.

Shouts and screams, orders and death circled me. “Kill the queen, kill her children.” Tears sprawled out of my eyes at hearing those words again and the shiver was no longer a shiver, but a tremble that ached. Day turned to night, blue turned to black. Wind, storms, and frost blew as I hid and lived.