Ice Country(73)

I smile, my lips dry and chapped. “Yah. We will,” I say, clasping his outstretched palm. “Raising chill and kicking arse. Like always.”

“Like always,” he says.

“No,” says a voice from behind him. Buff moves aside to reveal Skye, who’s moved within a few steps of my bed. In my mind flashes memories: we strain through the bars, touching each other’s arms, desperately trying to lock lips; she brushes past me in the dungeons, so close I could touch her, if I’d only reached out; her warmth against me, her arm around me, providing an alternative to my grief. “You need to come with us,” she says, and the memories come crashing down like a fallen star.

“We’re going after my sister,” I say, my voice strengthening. I sit up, swing my feet over the side, plant them firmly on the floor. “With or without you.”

Our eyes lock and we’re both fighting it. The need we felt in the dungeon. Amidst everything—all the turmoil, the strife, the death—still there, pulling, pulling, banging, crashing through everything we say, everything we do, everything we want, like an avalanche, an unstoppable force of nature. But I fight it and I can see in her fathomless brown eyes, she’s doing the same. Me with thoughts of saving my sister and avenging my brother’s death, and her with doing right by her people, both of her sisters, one who’s alive and one who might be.

“Don’t,” she says.

I want to give her the option to come with us, but I can’t. I can’t ask that of her when it’s suicide, when it’s crazy. When it’s what I have to do.

“I can’t,” I say.

She turns and walks back to her people.





~~~





Buff and I know as well as anyone that we need to let things cool down a little before we go back to the palace.

So that leaves us to escort the others to the border, where we’ll bid them farewell. Each of them—save for Feve—has already promised me multiple times that they’ll return with many warriors. Wilde even offered her own promise, and I almost believe it coming from her. I thank them and smile, when in my heart I know that by then it’ll probably be too late.

Abe and Hightower have the worst injuries and will stay at Maddy’s for a while longer. Before we leave, I stand between their beds. “Thank you,” I say to both of them, my head bouncing back and forth. “For doing what you did.”

Abe sighs, opens his mouth, says something I’d never expect him to say in a million years. “I hate that bastard, King Goff.”

“But you’re his—”

“Slave?” Not what I was going to say. “Look, kid,” Abe says, “I know you think we’re the king’s evil little helpers and all that, but that’s not really us. We do what we’re told because the king’s had leverage over us from the start. He had my wife, Dazz.”

I can’t help raising my eyebrows, both because Abe called me by my real name and because he’s not who I thought he was. Not even close. Then I realize: He had my wife.

“What happened to her?” I ask, dread creeping into my cracking voice.

He just shakes his head. “Kid, you must think I’m a monster. Taking all those kids, giving them to the king.” I did think him monster-like, but not anymore. “Was my wife’s life more important than theirs? I could only hope the king wasn’t hurting them, was treating them okay, was using them as servants. He said he’d kill my wife if I didn’t help him.” There’s sadness in his voice, laced with shreds of remorse. But he still didn’t answer my question. I don’t ask again.

Abe continues anyway. “I always said I’d make up for the many wrongs I’d caused, but I never really believed I would. It’s just what I told myself so I could sleep at night. But then…” His eyes cloud and his voice turns whisper soft. “Then, last night, when I showed up for my weekly visitation, part of my agreement with the king, she was gone, my Liza, her chains left in a pile in her cell, which was in one of the towers. The guard passed along the king’s regrets, how they’d tried to save her, but that her self-inflicted wounds were too serious to reverse. I grabbed Tower and Brock and marched straight to the dungeons.”

I tilt my head to the side, bite my lip. Abe could’ve fallen into a dark pit of sorrow, left us to rot in the dungeons. But he didn’t. He didn’t. He came for us.

I grasp his hand. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “You have more than made up for the sins of your past.”

He squeezes back. “Kill that bastard king,” he says. “If it’s the last thing you do.”