Ambrosia (Frost and Nectar Book 2)

From a leafy alcove, hidden from view, I peered into the hall. Queen Mab had a small army guarding his body, at least two dozen.

I could easily hang each one of them, except my magic was no longer working.

Shielded from view, I’d been trying to gain control of the dark, purplish vines that hung from every column and wall in the great hall. But it was as if another, sinister mind already controlled them. When I tried to seep into the consciousness of the plants, I felt a dark and unsettling power already there, a feeling that set my teeth on edge.

But I supposed I didn’t have to stick to the easy plants. Every stone here was alive with the magic of the forest, with the power of the life-giving tree. And maybe there was another, less obvious way to get these soldiers out of my way.

I glanced down at the flagstones, my gaze landing on the tiny sprigs of weeds growing between the cracks, fragile, with delicate leaves. I compelled them to grow—taller, larger, winding around the feet of the soldiers. They slithered upward like hands rising from a grave, grasping to drag the living beneath the soil with the dead.

My gaze moved to a man with long silver hair. His white wings beat the air wildly. My weeds crawled up him, a tourniquet of roots, and pulled him to the floor, trapping him. They slipped around his belly, his ribs, and his wings, restraining them. The fallen soldier called out for his queen.

Swords clanged to the ground as the weeds dragged soldiers to their knees. Every time they hacked through a plant with their swords, another would grow in its place, a cocoon of vegetation wrapping around their thighs, pulling their swords from their hands.

My concentration was broken by an attack on one of them, hands that gripped a soldier’s skull, snapping his neck with a sickening crack.

As the soldier fell to the ground, my gaze lifted to the face of the most beautiful fae I’d ever seen, and the world went still.

It was Torin, moving and breathing, looking for all the world like a god of vengeance with his blazing blue eyes and battle-battered body. Ribbons of blood streaked his arms and his torn white shirt. My heart clenched tightly.

Was I drunk on ambrosia?

For a moment, I couldn’t move. From the shadows, I stood immobile, hardly breathing, while he wreaked his vengeance on Mab’s soldiers. Molten heat cracked through the ice beneath my ribs.

Dimly, I was aware that I was shouting his name as I burst free from my hiding spot, gripping his sword. And as I ran toward him, Torin turned to see me, and our gazes met.

The smile on his lips was heartbreaking in its beauty. With his deep blue eyes locked on mine, he staggered back, away from the soldiers trapped by my weeds. My blood throbbed in my veins, pounding in my head. I leaped over the soldiers, slamming into Torin’s iron chest.

Gently, he pulled his sword from my hand, then wrapped his arms around me, holding me tightly. I pressed against his blood-soaked chest, feeling the thunder of his heart under the thin white material of his shirt. I slid my hand up, feeling that beautiful heartbeat, his warmth.

His voice rumbled through his chest. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you.”

“Morgant healed you.” It came out as hardly a cracked whisper. There were, of course, a million other things I wanted to say, the powers I’d developed and the havoc I’d wreaked. The plan to get out of this place, to find the mirror in the abandoned temple. But my thoughts were a wild tangle of words that I couldn’t quite unravel, not when I was lost in the euphoria of his perfect, living scent. The feel of his body against mine made the rest of the world melt away, his muscles moving against me as he tightened his arms around me.

He kissed the top of my head. “I’ve been trying to get to you.”

I was clinging to him as tightly as the tree branches around the castle walls. He seemed so amazingly tangible and concrete, and I never wanted to pull my arms from him.

And even as I melted into him, a dreadful thought slithered its way into my mind…

Why did the queen want him alive? Why order Morgant to heal him?

Grim ice crept over my heart. Nothing happens here without the queen’s consent…

As if hearing my thoughts, Torin’s muscles went rigid, and he pulled away from me, his gaze flicking over my shoulder.

He held out his hand to me protectively in a signal to stay back.

Did I need protecting now? I’d left a trail of gore in my wake.

Slowly, I turned to see the queen.

On the other side of the trapped soldiers, Queen Mab waltzed through the hall. A crown of ivy and jewels rested on her head, and her white hair draped over a fur cape. She arched an eyebrow as she looked down at the weeds that trapped her blue-uniformed soldiers.

“I see you didn’t let Ava go, as you promised.” A quiet threat laced Torin’s voice.

The queen stopped walking just on the other side of the line of soldiers. “I didn’t say when I would let her go. Or whether or not I’d throw her off the tower first. And I believe I made another promise, didn’t I? That if you went to see the Lost Unseelie the night before the tournament, there would be consequences.”

My gaze flicked up to the vines above her, but I couldn’t entwine my magic with their life force, not when another magic already possessed them.

“You see, Lost One?” She radiated light. “You’re not the only one who can control the vegetation around us.” Mab smiled, her teeth white as bleached bones. “Of course I wouldn’t kill Torin swiftly. I did mention castrating him, I believe, and slowly crushing what remains of him in a tree? Isavell, do you know what he did to my son?”

I swallowed hard. This wasn’t a question I wanted to answer, but Torin did.

“I never sent my assassins after your sons. I sent them to kill you.”

“My sons would give their lives to protect me, and I them. That is the burden of love, I suppose. But you haven’t known the exquisite pain of losing a child. You’ve never known the pain of feeling another’s death like it was worse than your own. I’ve done it twice.”

She started to step gingerly closer to her trapped soldiers, and as she did, one of the thick, purplish vines from the walls shot out, straining for Torin’s sword.

He swung his blade through it, then the next, and the next. A new horror was dawning in my mind. The queen’s magic mirrored my own.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on this connection between us because she was sending her thorny weapons after me now. Torin pivoted, and the Sword of Whispers hacked through them, one by one. He wouldn’t be able to keep up this relentless attack forever.

I still felt as if frostbitten stones encased an infernal power in my chest. If only I could unleash a torrent of power, I could wrest control from her.

I took a step back from Torin, trying to think clearly with my heart slamming against my ribs.

In almost every living thing around me, I felt the stain of her poisonous magic. It tinged the living fibers, except those strong, thorny weeds wrapped around the soldiers. Mentally, I still controlled them, and I could compel them to stretch toward her. Long, grasping hands that reached for the queen.

She sauntered further into the hall, turning back to look at us. “Oh, I’m afraid that isn’t enough. But Isavell? I wanted to tell you about what his parents did. They promised our families would meet. They promised we’d trade between kingdoms, after all these years. That we’d share magic and food, unite against the growing threat of mortals. And I never assumed a fae royal would lie. We don’t lie here. But it was an ambush. When I saw them bring in the severed bull’s head, I knew I’d been betrayed. They demanded that I lift the curse of frost. Except it wasn’t the Unseelie who cursed them, was it?” Her voice grew louder. The smile faded from her face, and fury contorted her features. “The Unseelie aren’t responsible for the frost in Faerie,” she roared. “That is your own fault, Torin.”

Her fury was like a toxic fog in the room, making my legs shake. A wrath that could be matched only by my own.

I cocked my head, tuning out the noise and the chaos around me, until all I felt was the flagstones beneath my feet and the phantom breeze rustling the leaves of my weeds.

I closed my eyes and commanded them to grow, to burst from the cracks. A raw, primal power tumbled from my body, magic so ferocious that it sent molten cracks racing through the ice in my chest. Beneath me, the stone floor itself burst open with the force of the unfurling plants. The weeds ripped through the flagstones, tearing through the floor beneath our feet.

I felt myself plunging, stones and dust raining around me, until I landed hard on the wooded floor below. Beneath my back, the gnarled roots of the tree pressed against my spine, and above me, steely muscles wrapped in a ripped and blood-soaked shirt. Torin arched his body, covering me like a shield, taking the brunt of the falling stones that tumbled around us. Enormous, sinuous plants surrounded us.

Warmth streamed through the dust, which covered his dark hair, his eyebrows, his eyelashes. When I looked over his shoulder, I could see the hole my plants had ripped in the floor, at least twenty feet across.

The queen and I agreed on one thing: we would give everything we had to protect those we loved.

I reached up to touch the side of his face for a moment, and the corner of his mouth curled in a faint smile.

But this was our chance to escape. Torin reached past me, grabbed hold of the sword nearby, and pulled me up from the floor. Around us, soldiers were starting to shift and push off the fallen stones.

Torin started to run in one direction, but I grabbed his hand to still him for just a moment.

I quickly surveyed the network of oaky tunnels around us. Through the tree’s living network, I knew which tunnel led to a moonlit night.

“This way,” I whispered, breaking into a jog. The dusty air clouded my lungs. Down here, shadows devoured the dark tunnel.

“Was that you?” Torin asked quietly. “Controlling those plants?”

My breath was ragged in my throat, but I tried to answer anyway. “It seems I have magic after all.”

We let the unspoken question hang in the air, the one about my magic being disturbingly similar to Queen Mab’s.

If we got close enough to the exterior walls, I could try to shift the enormous roots around, making an opening for us, though it wouldn’t be the subtlest way to escape.

“Why did you jump in front of my sword?” I asked sharply.

“She promised to let you go.”

“She doesn’t lie, but that doesn’t make her trustworthy, does it? She has workarounds.”

“Ava.” His deep voice rose just a little too loud. “We didn’t have many options.”

He was, of course, right, but I found that I still carried a hot flame of anger for him. As though he’d abandoned me out of malice and not to save my life. The hollow, lonely part of me didn’t seem to know or care about the difference, only that I’d been left behind.

“Torin, I think I can get us out of here. I found Cala, the Veiled One. There’s an abandoned temple to the ash god by the river. East of the castle, she said. There’s a mirror in there, and it can take you wherever you want.”

The words were tumbling out of my mouth now, and I knew the effort to speak was costing me speed, but I had to tell him anyway. For some reason, if I didn’t make it out of the Court of Sorrows alive, maybe he could make it home.

“They love the ash goddess here,” he muttered. “Love is a forge,” he said in a mocking tone.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he looked behind us.

He lifted a finger to his lips, and I felt it—the vibrations of the soldiers running for us. I whipped my gaze back over my shoulder, and my stomach twisted at the sight of torches bobbing in the air, running for us at a speed I could no longer match. Months in captivity hadn’t exactly made me strong.

But what I did have was the power to hide.

I grabbed Torin by the arm and pulled him into a crevice behind me, an opening formed from several large roots intertwined. With my magic skimming over my skin, I widened the gap in the roots, forming an archway large enough for both of us.

I pushed Torin into it, catching a surprised glint in his eye. Then I backed against him and summoned a curtain of vines to hide us. Torin’s hand slid around my waist, a powerful forearm around my abs, his fingers just above one of my hipbones. This close to him, I could feel his muscles flexing with tension behind me. Clearly, some of that ambrosia was still pounding hot in my veins, because Torin’s closeness was wildly distracting, and his earthy scent wrapped around me like a caress. Through the fabric of his shirt, his heart beat against my back. As the soldiers ran closer, I let my head rest back against him, just in the crook of his neck.

He lowered his head a little, as if to whisper something, but the soldiers were close, and he didn’t say a thing. Still, his breath warmed the side of my face like sunlight on the tree’s canopy. When his thumb swept over my hip in a slow, absent caress, I closed my eyes and melted into him.

Bloody hell. How could he be so sexy at a time like this? I never wanted to let him go, never wanted an inch of space between us again.

I had to let him go, though. When he returned to Faerie and found a new wife—

An icy crack spread over the embers in my chest.

Best not to think about that now.

Best to simply think about trying to live. Best to think about getting out of the Court of Sorrows with our bodies and our minds intact.

When the soldiers’ footfalls went quiet, I felt Torin’s muscles flexing behind me. He leaned down and whispered, “I missed you, changeling.”

“I’m going to get you out of here, Torin,” I whispered back.

“Are you saving me?” A hint of amusement laced his deep tone.

The thing was, yes, I was saving him.

I pushed out past the veil of vines and led Torin into the dark corridor.

We walked for a few more minutes until I could feel the tree’s roots bathed in moonlight. Freedom lay just on the other side of these roots.

“Here,” I whispered to Torin. “Watch for falling debris.”

My body buzzed from ambrosia as I brushed my fingertips over the gnarled roots. With my hand against the bark, I felt the wind rushing through the leaves of its boughs.

The world around us rumbled, and soil and dust shook from the ceiling until the roots shifted and parted, and a vault of stars spread out in the world outside.

As soon as a large enough gap opened in the roots, Torin grabbed my hand, and we ran out into the night. I breathed in the fresh, sultry air of the Court of Shadows.

Euphoria and Torin’s blinding smile lit me up.

Out here, the air rushed over my skin. We only had to get to the river, to find the ruined temple.

My gaze landed on the paddock, where the horses stood, still and calm under the moonlight, oblivious to the chaos in the castle.

In the distance, a red glow lit the sky, a spark of ruby against shadows. It took me a moment to understand. The volcano was erupting. Tonight, the goddess of ash was alive with fury.

We made it about twenty feet in the grass before I heard the groan of the tree shifting behind me. My stomach flipped.

With rising dread, I turned to see the queen’s dark vines snaking out from the stone walls.

The breath left my lungs.

I had only enough time to call out a brief warning to Torin before the vines wrapped around my waist, tight as a noose, and yanked me off the ground and into the sky.