Snow Like Ashes(77)

Hannah’s hands move beneath her cloak, clutching her stomach as her lips part in confusion. “We have an agreement, Angra. We can end this!”

Angra pulls himself back onto his horse. “We do have a deal.”

“Then kill me. Break my locket and kill me. End this!” Hannah is pleading now, her red cloak rippling around her as she steps toward Angra across the snow.

“Don’t worry, Your Highness.” Angra glares down at her, his green eyes flashing. “I agree to this deal. But I will destroy you when I see fit, when it causes you the most pain.”

Hannah’s face collapses. “What do you mean?”

Angra smirks. “You aren’t the last of your line.” And he’s gone, plunging his horse across the snow with his soldiers riding hard behind him.



21


HANNAH SURRENDERED.

The truth makes it painful to breathe. Hannah handed herself over to Angra. In Bithai’s garden the night of the ball, Noam had been so certain that Hannah had yielded, and Mather had been just as certain that she had fought against Angra until the end. Noam was right, though. She did surrender—but not in the way he meant. It was a sacrifice, not helpless submission. A sacrifice like the one Mather tried to make for us.

Tell me how to save them….

In my dream, Hannah asked her conduit to show her how to save her people. Is that what it told her? That the only way to protect them would be to die? But she didn’t know she was pregnant, and that the end to Winter’s royal line meant murdering her son too.

Angra’s staff barrels through the air and slams into my cheek, making my head smack into the floor and roar with electric fingers of pain.

“You brought magic into my palace, general.” His voice cracks through the air like his soldier’s whip.

Magic? Terror lances through me—terror that Angra will take away whatever magic source I have, terror that I could actually have a magic source at all. The stone? Hannah? Whatever it is, how am I using it? Hannah said she couldn’t speak to me once I got into Spring, that it was too much of a risk. Was it really the lapis lazuli then?

Herod coughs a laugh. “Magic? She’s harmless.”

Angra swings his staff at Herod and knocks him to the ground before whirling on me. “Whatever remnant of magic you have, you’re out of luck, girl.” Angra stomps forward and pulls me roughly to my feet. He makes sure to only touch my armor, not allowing skin-to-skin contact again. “Your weakened magic cannot win here.”

Angra would never have been satisfied with ending Winter’s line, with breaking the locket, killing Hannah and Mather and letting us go about our lives. He wouldn’t have been satisfied until we are where we are now, his slaves, Spring standing on the fading carcass of Winter. Even Hannah’s sacrifice, something so much larger than anything I could ever do, wouldn’t have changed anything. But why? What was all of this for?

“What do you want from us?” The question spills out of my mouth, shaking and feeble.

Angra releases me, takes a step back. “Power,” he says like that explains everything.

I shake my head, fighting the urge to collapse in gasping sobs. “Winter isn’t powerful! We’re nothing now.”

Angra purses his lips like I’m a toddler throwing a tantrum. “Winter will not stand in my way,” he whispers half to himself. He nods at Herod before I can decode his senseless explanation. How are we standing in the way of anything?

He’s insane. There is no reason for what he’s done, nothing we can do to satisfy him. And knowing that makes everything so much more terrifying, because it means there is no end to his horror. There is no box it can be contained in, no way to predict what he’ll do.

He just wants to watch us bleed.

“Strip her armor,” Angra tells Herod. “Rid her of anything she has.”

I lurch back as Herod stands, grabs my arm, his face reddening, spit flying from his mouth. A rabid dog leashed to Angra’s wrist. He shoves his face into my hair, his breath warm and heavy from the battle and the long march to Spring.

“I’ll teach you your place,” Herod growls as he undoes the straps on my armor, the mess of padding and dented metal clattering to Angra’s floor. I’m left in a stained cotton undershirt, tattered pants held up by a fraying leather belt, and my worn boots. I hadn’t realized how much of my strength lay in having a layer of metal between Herod and me. My knees buckle, my insides rolling over like a whirlpool.

He’ll find the stone. He’ll take it away. Then he’ll destroy me.

Herod’s fingers grope across my neck, my arms, trailing down my body as he searches for objects. His fingers leave numbness in their wake—until he brushes over the lapis lazuli.