Into
tiny
pieces.
I am the refracting glass of an enormous chandelier. I am every cut, every facet, every knife-sharp edge of each suspended crystal. I fall—
And I break.
My voice is swallowed whole by the earsplitting scream of ice and glass. I am nowhere, everywhere. I am everything, nothing. Wind sweeps each of my pieces into a tornado, a billowing column of shards to tear into flesh, ripping, rending.
I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. I cannot cry for help, cannot fling out a hand to catch hold of something. There is nothing to be done but be the ice, be the coldness seeping into my skin.
Death. Destruction. Despair.
Then, the screams stop. The winds stop. The breaking stops.
My ears ring.
Everything is so cold. I shiver, clutching my arms around my torso. My hands meet with the bloodstained garments I wore in captivity and the braces around my bare arms.
I open my eyes.
I blink. Close my eyes again—and open. But no, the scene before me doesn’t change.
There is no night-filled ballroom. I lie open and exposed in the middle of . . . a frozen lake? As far as I can see: ice. Ice like glass, a window into the world below where I lay, shivering. An overcast sky stretches to the ends of the world in either direction.
Where am I?
Where is the Neverseen King?
Something sharp and hot burns through me at the thought of him. He’s not here, not anywhere near me.
He’s gone.
The air turns colder around me. My teeth chatter, my breath puffing like a cloud in the air before me. It’s so, so, so cold. I’ve never known cold like this. When I glance down, my fingers are blue.
I’m going to die.
It won’t be a blade through my heart after all.
But where am I?
I need to get up. I need to start walking.
There’s no strength left in my body. Whatever just happened drained me dry. Frozen teardrops stud my lashes, and I blink, hoping beyond hope with each blink that this nightmare will end.
Did I fall through some portal? Did I accidentally open one? If I did, how in the world do I get back? Will the Neverseen King come for me?
I will never let go again, Nadira.
That voice inside me promised I wouldn’t be afraid anymore. But I’m afraid now—more afraid than I’ve been in a very long time. Afraid I will die out here alone, afraid no one will ever find me. Afraid that I could vanish, and no one would notice or care.
Afraid that the world would be better if I was gone.
I will never let go again. I refuse to lose this hope.
The Neverseen King would care. Eshe would care.
I may have given up on myself, but they never did. They have seen the worst in me, and yet Eshe stayed by my side. Defended me, fought for our friendship. The Neverseen King held me, kissed me, and no matter his own burdens and scars, there is one truth I can anchor my soul on.
He cares about me.
He cares. Enough to keep extending his hand. Enough to fight with me, to fight for me.
Perhaps all this time I wanted him to give himself to me, he actually was. The times he didn’t leave, the times he held me, left me notes. Each scrawl of ink, each tray of food, each time he fought me—
All tokens of him. Of his heart.
Laid before me.
Perhaps it’s time I got to my feet and fought for him.
Each movement is agony. My bones are so brittle with cold that they threaten to break beneath my weight. But I pull a knife from my belt, slam it into the ice, and use it to get to my unsteady feet.
I turn around.
That is when I freeze. When the whole world freezes, and my heart stops beating.
Standing not five paces from me is a form I know better than the weight of a knife in my hand. Small, beady eyes cut straight through me, and a wide, dark smirk splits a bearded face.
“There you are,” says Jabir.
I must be dreaming. This must be some strange nightmare—some something. Whatever it is, it’s not real. I move to take a step back, and nearly slip on the ice.
“You’ll freeze to death standing there.” He holds out a garment to me. A cloak? “Come, I’ll get you some place warm.”
My jaw aches with the memory of his spiked gloves. My back throbs with the pounding of phantom lashes. Every instinct in me shouts to run, to hide, to flee. I tamp down on each of them. I learned the hard way that running and fighting only made it worse.
“Come, come child. You’ll catch your death.” He smiles at me, holding out that cloak that will do almost nothing against this bone-penetrating cold.
“Wh-wh-where are w-w-w-we?” I stutter.
His smile widens into a grin. “You don’t know?”
I only stare at him in mute response. If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked, now would I?
“Come. I’ll tell you once you’re not freezing to death.”
“Where are we?” I demand, louder this time.
Jabir’s eyes glitter like crystals of ice. “Inside you.”
The cold bites into every inch of my skin, leaking into my marrow. I’ll freeze solid soon. I probably only have minutes left to live. It turns my mind sluggish, making it nearly impossible to think. I’m not sure I could make sense of this even if my body wasn’t slowly shutting down.
I still hold my knife in my hand.
There’s only one thing that makes sense to do.
My hand shakes with each movement, but I manage to turn my left hand up—
And with my right, I use my knife to slice my wrist open. Blood wells, freezing solid as it drips onto the ice. I look up at Jabir, my blood the one stark color in this frozen wasteland of gray. He tries to say something, but the sound is lost. His eyes go wide—
I’m still cold. Still lying on ice.
But this time, I’m not alone. Something warm wraps around me, holding me. There’s a voice above me. Not Jabir’s. It’s deep and rich, but frantic.
“Nadira, wake up, girl! Wake up!”
“I’m awake,” I croak, shivering.
“Oh, Great Kings!” comes the gasp, and then a forehead presses against mine.
I close my eyes, reveling in that touch, that scrap of warmth. “Why is it so c-cold? What happened?”
Silence is my answer. I try to sit up, only to discover I’m arranged in the Neverseen King’s lap. There’s no time to blush because a strange light is cast over the previously dark ballroom. The whole room is reflective, catching shreds of light and multiplying them until I can clearly see the entire room.
It’s covered in . . . ice?
Sharp crystals jut out of the wall, the ground. Lethal points ready to impale anything that steps too close.
A shiver slides down my spine. My voice grows frantic. I grab the Neverseen King’s shirt—find it torn and wet in my grip. “What happened?”
His answer is pained. “You did this.”
I’m already shaking my head. “No. No—no. I didn’t do this. I don’t . . .”
The panic starts to close in again, that cold seeking to devour me. It builds in my stomach. Oh sands. It’s like the floodgates have opened, and now I cannot shut them.
“It’s coming again!” I gasp, fighting the panic, but with that cold running like icy water to my fingertips, the panic only redoubles. “What is happening? What is happening to me?”
“Breathe!”
Pressure builds in my gut, my chest, my hands. I fight it, trying to shove it down with every scrap of strength in me. The effort wrenches a scream from me, my back arching. “Get away from me! I’m going to hurt you!”
“Nadira!”
“I can’t!” I scream. I’m about to explode again—about to break into tiny shards of ice. About to tear him apart. Oh stars, I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him, and I cannot stop it. “Get away! Let me go!”
A growl bursts from him, and he flips me onto my back, out of his lap. I can barely think about anything except the fragmented control I have over the avalanche about to break free—but I have enough awareness to be relieved. Maybe now we’ll finally let go of each other, once and for all. He will continue his fight, and I will destroy myself as I was always destined to do.
Then an enormous, solid body flings itself over mine, two powerful hands grabbing my wrists and pinning them wide so my palms face either wall.
“Sultani!” I gasp, and then I scream again as my body arches with the strain.
“Release it,” he growls in my ear. “Stop fighting it.”
“I can’t!” It comes out as a sob. “I’ll kill you!”
“Release it!”
“I can’t!” The tears leaking out of my eyes freeze solid against my cheek, my fingers turning to ice, buzzing. My ribs will break open if I keep fighting this. I’m sobbing. I don’t want to go back to that lake, to Jabir. To myself. “Help me, Sultani! Help me!”
His hands squeeze my wrists, his body the only warmth in this freezing world. His low voice anchors me in the midst of the storm as he brings his mouth to my ear and snarls, “Let go, Nadira.”
I clench my teeth, gripping my restrained hands into fists, my spine arching off the ground. The storm churns harder, faster, darker inside me. My awareness narrows to the ice, to my gut.
But this time it isn’t Jabir’s voice speaking to me.
It’s low and deep and steady. Let go, Nadira. Let go.
With a sob, I loosen my fists.
The world explodes into shadow black and ice blue.
mind is fogged, my body limp. But there is one thing I am very aware of, and that is the heavy weight on my torso, the hands pinning mine, long hair tangling with my own dark strands.
Weakness runs like water through my limbs.
“Sultani?” I croak.
“I’m here.”
“You’re not dead?”
“Don’t think so.”
We stay there for a moment longer, breathing heavily. I’m not sure either of us know what is happening, but there’s no denying the sheer relief pouring down my spine, flowing down to my toes and fingertips.
“What was that?” I ask, terrified of the answer.
“That was magic, Nadira.”
“I . . . I don’t know what you mean.”
“That was your magic.”
It’s like that sentence hits my brain—and my brain immediately rejects it. That’s not possible. I’m not a spellcaster. I’m not a djinn. Wherever this ice came from, whatever I just experienced—it’s not real.
Abruptly, I shove up on my elbow. “Why are you wet? Are you bleeding?”
He grunts as he pushes himself up on his hands, the weight of his gaze almost pinning me in place. Almost. But then his silence twines between us, echoing off the blasted sheets of ice on either side of us.
I scramble up gracelessly, grip his shoulders, and push him back so he sits against the wall. “I hurt you,” I say, the pitch of my voice rising with panic. I run my hands over his tunic, his arms, feeling for injury, following the telltale wetness. “You’re bleeding. I—”
He grabs my wrist. His voice is low, urgent. “You need to listen carefully to me.”
“I’ll listen while I bind your wounds. Tell me where it hurts!”
“Nadira—”
“Is this it?” I’m searching just beneath his ribs. “Did I cut you with ice—”
“Nadira!” He grabs my face with both hands. I freeze, my eyes shooting to his. “We don’t have time. I’m cut, but not badly. Nothing serious, so forget it. What is serious is that your blasts decimated my wards on the palace. Including a few wards binding portals.”
“Some portals opened?” I breathe, my hair falling in my face. My gut sinks.
“Yes, and there are more that might break soon. Listen closely to me because I don’t have time to repeat myself.”
I nod, and his hands don’t move from holding my head.
“I can feel that three portals are open. If one more opens, the House’s defenses will activate, as they do at night. I need you to find Eshe, Safya, and Gaya, and get them into your room as quickly as you can. Bolt the door. Whatever you do, do not step foot outside your room. Understand?”
A thousand questions burst across my mind. I nod again, my gut sinking further and further toward the floor as I rein in those questions. Now isn’t the time for a meticulous plan.
“If you encounter anything, run. Don’t fight unless it’s the only option.”
He’s going to attempt to fight all of tonight’s battles and close every portal by himself. I don’t like it—not one bit. But what is there for me to do when I’ve suddenly become so volatile, and I know nothing about the enemies we face?
I’ll do what he asks. I give a quick nod to show him my agreement.
He pulls me toward him, resting our foreheads together as the breath mingles from our open mouths. “Nadira.”
He says my name like it’s a goodbye.
It isn’t. I won’t let this be goodbye.
“Neverseen King,” I growl in return. A fiery challenge.
He gives one dry, half-hearted chuckle. “My little assassin bride.” It’s an answer to my challenge—a promise that he will return to me whole.
If we survive this, I’ll marry you. The words are on the tip of my tongue.
But then his touch melts away as a warm wind rustles my hair.
He’s gone.
