Snow Like Ashes(75)

They make decisions; they mold your future. The trick is to find a way to still be you through it all.

Theron’s words run through my head, his smile, his gentle surety. I cling to that image, to anything that will help me remember that I am Meira, and they cannot take that away from me.

Angra stops beside me. I can feel him there, a warm presence just beside my huddled body. He bends down, his staff making a heavy clunk as he adjusts it on the floor.

“She’s hurt,” he says. The booming echo is gone from his voice, reduced to a whisper that rolls over me.

I open my eyes and a desperate, throaty wail bubbles in my throat.

This man doesn’t just look like the king who bonded with the Decay in Hannah’s vision—this man is that king. The same translucent green eyes, the same pale skin, the same gleam on his face when he tips his head and adjusts his grip on his staff, black through and through, with a hollow ebony orb on its tip. This is the same king.

How is that possible? Could Hannah’s visions have been more recent than I thought? No, I felt how long ago it was. But Angra doesn’t look any older than the man in his twenties he was in Hannah’s vision.

I know Angra was the one who led the charge against Winter when it fell sixteen years ago, but this man couldn’t have been old enough to ransack our kingdom. Now that I think about it … I don’t know who was king before Angra. Sir’s lessons never touched on Spring’s history beyond our war with them. Is this mystery that cloaks him part of the Decay? He never leaves Spring. He never shows himself in public. It would be all-too easy to hide this power, this immortality, from the world.

I pinch my mouth shut to hold in the wail, my need to scream fighting me like a wild horse pinned inside a gate. If this is all true … what else is he capable of?

Angra stares at me, unconcerned. His pale green irises flicker and his yellow curls bounce when he moves—the same wild, untamed locks of the boy in the paintings. Was that him too? He painted portraits of himself—and a woman?

He tips his head, his mouth lifting as he surveys me. He looks young, calm, filled with something that terrifies me more than Herod’s malice—an ancient determination and patience. And around his neck, dangling above a black tunic, hangs the front half of Hannah’s locket.

I gasp. It’s here. So close. The silver heart etched with a snowflake, its shine muted and dull on Angra’s skin.

“Would you like to be healed?” he whispers suddenly.

I frown, tearing my eyes away from the locket. He wanted me to see it. He wanted me to know he has it just like he has me, dangling and useless. But I hear his question, and my ribs scream out Yes! while the rest of me quivers in the dark, waiting for this all to shatter around me.

Angra leans closer. Madness dances behind his eyes now as he revels in me writhing at his feet. “You are in pain. Don’t you want me to heal you?”

“Go heal the Winterian girl,” I manage. “The one your soldier whipped.”

Angra smiles. He takes pleasure in me fighting back too.

I don’t have a chance to add anything else. Angra’s fingers curl around his staff and I’m thrown into a world of searing red, everything collapsing behind a single shriek that echoes off the walls. It’s me. I’m screaming, arching on the ground in breathless pain. My chest caves in, every rib cracking and bending under an invisible force that crushes me, presses me into dust. I scream again and every bone pops back out, realigning and knitting back together. I can feel them healing, the bones itching and tingling, telling me exactly where they run through my torso.

It stops and I roll to the side, mouth open, unable to say anything, do anything. On top of the pain, more certainty makes me hum with fear. If Angra was just a monarch like all the others, and his staff was nothing more than a Royal Conduit, he wouldn’t be able to affect me, someone not of his kingdom’s bloodline. But he can use his magic to break me, to heal me—so he must have something helping him. Something more powerful.

Something like the Decay.

That thought is like the final blow of a fight, the one that makes me waver toward unconsciousness. Everything Hannah showed me—Angra’s true power—his agelessness—

It’s real.

“You still wish me to heal the girl?” Angra asks.

I shake my head, a spiraling migraine making the world shift.

Angra leans the staff down so I can peer into its black orb. “You are one of the few who escaped me,” he says. “You couldn’t have been more than an infant.”

He twists his hand and the pressure returns, collapsing on me like a boot pressing on a bug. I draw in a few quick breaths and focus on the light filtering through the ceiling. Focus, Meira. Don’t—