A heaviness settles in my stomach, filling me with a choking mix of guilt and anxiety—wanting to help Mather, but knowing it’s as out of my power as using Winter’s conduit is out of his.
Thankfully at that moment, the tent flap opens to reveal Sir. He takes in the absent food, my wet hair. I hold my breath, remembering why I’m really here—to tell Sir what happened.
Sir sits next to me, silent. He doesn’t reprimand me for being so casual with our future king, doesn’t berate me up and down for my informality and poo-covered entrance.
Uh-oh.
He withdraws the box from his pocket. “So,” he begins. “Would you care to explain?”
Suddenly I feel like the misbehaving child who first begged Sir to let me help out with the resistance. The child who waved swords around like awkward steel wings and showed absolutely no promise in fighting until I tried ranged weapons like my chakram, and it turned out I could be deadly too. The child he always sees when he looks at me.
The chakram. My heart drops. Snow above, I have to tell Sir I lost another throwing disc. With the decline in Primoria’s iron production due to the disuse of Winter’s mines, weapons have become expensive. And being a Winterian refugee isn’t exactly a lucrative career.
I grab a berry, avoiding Sir’s eyes. “Isn’t anyone else coming? Finn maybe?”
He shakes his head. “Just us. Now talk.”
It’s an order. He’s angry about something, but I have no idea what.
My stomach starts to burn, churning around all the food I’ve shoved into it. Sir has no right to be angry or disappointed. I retrieved half of the locket. I did what he couldn’t do, even after he doubted me. The only thing he should be feeling is awe.
Is that why he’s upset? Because I finally proved that he needs me?
I glare up at him. “It was exactly where you said it was. In the Keep. That’s all.”
“You’re telling me,” Sir begins, “that you were able to waltz into Lynia’s stronghold and retrieve this locket piece with no arrows fired, no men killed, no bloodshed? Because that bruise on your cheek and the lingering stench in here say otherwise. What happened, Meira?”
The wrinkles in Sir’s face deepen. He wears his age more heavily all of a sudden, his naturally white hair ivory from his fifty-some years, not his Winterian heritage. He fingers the box before popping it open and showing me the locket half.
It’s the first time I’ve seen it. A silver chain snakes around the back half of a heart-shaped locket, gleaming though it’s more than a few centuries old. Half of Winter’s conduit. I exhale, my shoulders slouching. I still can’t believe it’s here, a hand’s breadth from me.
The moment Sir opens the box, Mather’s whole body stiffens. My eyes swing to him, and I want to continue our conversation from moments ago. I want to apologize for earlier, for bringing up the biggest weakness in his life like it was nothing more than a discussion of the weather.
My breath catches against those questions again, the things no one ever dares ask aloud.
Will this be enough? Will reuniting our conduit halves restore our magic, or will Winter forever be the only kingdom in Primoria without magic to make it whole? If so, how will we defeat Spring, a kingdom steeped in magically induced strength, when all we have are eight refugees and a pretty necklace? Will another kingdom even ally with us once we have the locket whole again, if our only heir is unable to use it?
It’s possible to live without magic. We’ve been doing it for sixteen years—barely, but we have. We grew a small garden in the Rania Plains. We train our bodies to be strong. But those things will never be enough when all the other kingdoms in the world have something that transcends human limitations, when Spring is able to wipe through our strongest soldiers, when the Rhythms are able to do the same.
Mather was right: Primoria may seem balanced, but . . . it’s not.
Sir closes the box with an abrupt click and I flinch. I was quiet too long. He stands, shaking his head, and a gut-wrenching certainty forces me to stand too.
“It was too dangerous,” he says. “When we start looking for the other locket half, you’re not to argue your assignments, do you hear me? You’re back on food-scouting missions.”
“No!” I shout. Sir turns but I grab his arm. I’m starting to feel the effects of traveling—legs wavering, head spinning. But I will not let him take this from me. I earned my keep today, a hundred times over, and I’ll be damned if he casts me aside so easily again.
“I brought you half of the locket!” I shout. “What else do I have to do?”
Please, tell me what I have to do to feel like I belong.
Sir looks at me so severely that I drop my eyes from his face and my hands from his arm, blood roaring through my head. I’m so tired, exhausted to the point where I’m not certain this is happening. I can’t deal with this right now. I need sleep; I need to collect myself and stop feeling like what I did wasn’t significant.
I stomp out of the meeting tent, ignoring whatever Sir or Mather calls after me, and run to my own tent. The size of our camp doesn’t allow for dramatic stomping sessions, though, and I fly into it in less than a few seconds. But my tent isn’t only my tent, so when I shove inside, Finn and Dendera look up at me with wide eyes.
Dendera refocuses on patching a hole in one of her boots. “Just once I’d like to see you leave a meeting with William like a lady instead of a panting bull.”
I snarl and flop onto my bedroll. Finn retorts something about me not being a lady, which makes me smile, but it makes Dendera rant about how there’s still hope for me. I bury my face in my pillow and tune them out.
Dendera once told me that she had been a member of Queen Hannah’s court. She was respected for her opinion and her mind, and no woman under Hannah’s rule was allowed to feel small. I’ve asked her, and everyone, about Winter so often and heard so many tales that their memories are my memories now, and I can trick myself into feeling like I remember. The frozen berries and iron fire pits. The mines in the Klaryn Mountains. The thick, earthy aroma of refining coal hanging over every city.
If I close my eyes and cover my ears and block out everything else, I can see the court Dendera described. I can see the city Sir told me about. Jannuari’s great white palace stands above me, its sprawling courtyard filled with ice fountains. It’s so cold that foreigners have to wrap in layers of fur to walk from building to building, while our natural Winterian blood keeps us warm even in the worst conditions. And snow is everywhere, always, so much that the grass beneath it is white from lack of sun. An entire kingdom wrapped in an orb of eternal winter.