Page 6 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

And power…strange power.

The raven-haired woman turned halfway and I stumbled back. Yellow eyes, porcelain skin, rosy scar. The only thing foreign on the face that I knew so well were streaks of black tattoos creeping over her features.

No.

No.

“Snow?”

She was alive?

She was alive.

Snow was alive.

“Keep the ground, I’ll shut the gates,” she said to Cai before taking the form of a lightning bolt and disappearing from sight. A thud of lightning assured she’d landed somewhere nearby and the smell of char and electricity assured me that I’d not imagined all that had happened.

The thunderbird of lightning risen from the cold white ash.

Impossible. It had to be impossible.

She was alive. She was more than alive.

I looked around. Where was my damned brother? He had to see this. He needed to see this.

No. No. No. The Snow I knew was human.

The Snow I knew could not emit not a gram of magic. I would have felt it. Sensed it. I would have known. That can’t be her. It had to be someone else.

A grip tightened around my arm when I tried to move toward the Highwall. “Don’t even think about it,” Cai growled and then let me go, disappearing into the crowd.

Sounds returned crashing all at once, a battle still ensued around us. The men and women who’d dropped from the skies had joined the fight alongside us, keeping the Isjordians back. Wind howling and ice splintering against their shield of air.

I moved forward, the dead making a circle of protection around me while I hurried for the wall. The more fell dead, the more my army distended. While their battalions shrunk, mine swell.

Once I neared, I climbed the tower stairs to the top. I could hear the humming of lightning and feel the density of the magic she was emitting weighing over the flow of the spiritual that surrounded us.

Then I saw her again. Someone was in her grasp as she slowly moved toward them. Once I got closer, I recognised the man engulfed to his neck in ice, begging and weeping. Prince Aryan.

Something he said made her body seize, the thunder halted too, the air quelled from heavy magic. Her uncle’s mouth moved fast and her hold on him dropped all of a sudden, ice crawling away from his body. The voices were muffled as I approached, but I caught the end of the conversation before she swung her sword, impaling his head from the shoulders.

“You cannot find them, not without me. You will have to turn this realm upside down and inside out,” her uncle threatened.

She scoffed. “Upside down and inside out it is.”

The impaled head rolled to the ground and I could swear that her shoulders rose as if they had been under heavy weight the whole time.

“Snow?” She didn’t have the time to fully turn to me because I had her in my arms, holding her tight. Tight enough to feel her slow-paced pulse over my own and then the tip of a blade pushing through the leather over my stomach.

Laughter poured out of me. Gods, it was her.

“Hello to you too, Princeling.” It wasn’t the threat of the blade that made me pull back, but the cold, molten lava pouring from her voice. One I’d never heard her use before. The same icy stare greeted me, the stare of a carcass that didn’t resemble the woman I’d known to wear it before. The smirk that drew up her face from my stunned silence made this new exterior even more terrifying. “I’ve always liked you. Always wondered how long it would take you to realise just how much you should really fear me.” She sheathed her dagger back and threw a glance at the battle beside us. “Eldritch Commander. The prince of night. The man who can raise the dead finally fears me.”

“I don’t fear you.”

“And he lies. You’ve always been the funny one.”

“Why did you save us?”