Ambrosia (Frost and Nectar Book 2)

he portal ejected me onto a cold stone floor. Icy light filtered through a mullioned window, and a marrow-deep chill was in the air. I was back in my castle, for some reason, in Orla’s room. The mirror had sent me here.

Orla herself was not here.

As my eyes scanned my sister’s room, a shiver of dread snaked up my spine. It was even colder than it had been when I’d left, and the air carried a faint scent of smoke and sulfur. Was the desolation of this place because of my forced separation from Ava?

No, that wasn’t it. Screams pierced the stone walls from outside. The normally serene stillness of the castle was replaced with a sharp tension coiling through the atmosphere, dragging cold claws over my skin.

I went still. A voice wended through the air, one I recognized.

Orla’s voice.

From somewhere, she was calling my name. Had she felt my return? If she’d left the kingdom, nearly died, and come back again, I thought I would feel it in my blood.

But her screams…

Up here, the castle felt empty, haunted. My breath misted around my head in a frozen fog. I crossed into the corridor. Darkness crept over the walls, even though it was day. Deep gray shadows writhed over the stones.

I gripped the hilt of my sword. Today, the castle felt like a tomb of rock.

The Sword of Whispers sang to me. You are death. You are the frigid isolation that comes with the last breath.

The walls exuded a malign presence, and I didn’t feel welcome here anymore. My magic hadn’t returned to my body, which meant my throne was still shattered. Here in Faerie, I felt like a hollow king walking through these corridors, divested of the power that had once coursed through my veins.

When I heard the distant pounding of soldiers’ heels on the stones, I slipped back into the shadows of an empty bed chamber. I needed to see who the soldiers served before I engaged them, to find out if I was an enemy in my own kingdom. With the Sword of Whispers, I could cut them down in a fight, one by one. The blade sang in my skull with every breath I took, hungry for blood.

But this wasn’t the Unseelie fortress. These were my soldiers, part of an army I’d commanded. I probably knew half of them by name, even if I was now an interloper here. I couldn’t just murder everyone.

As I stood behind the door, I thought of how I’d felt with Ava pressed into me as we’d hidden in that alcove, her hips moving back…the only spark of warmth in this nightmarish atmosphere was the idea of Ava at home, safe from the ruthless world of the fae into which I’d dragged her. Right now, she was probably curling up in a comfortable bed, her belly full of warm food.

From behind the crack of the door, I watched the soldiers troop past. My heart skipped a beat as my gaze landed on the sigil of the Dearg Due royalty: white, spiky whorls over venous red.

Moria? Had she wrested control from Orla? But if she had control, it didn’t explain the icy chill of winter that spilled through the kingdom. A queen could bring spring just by sitting on the throne.

So what the fuck had been happening here while I’d been gone?

When the soldiers marched around a corner, out of view, I stalked out once more.

I heard it again—Orla calling for me, her voice traveling through the glass windows from the east. I broke into a run until I reached the east wing, and the sounds of screams from outside pierced the narrow windows. Worry clawed at my thoughts.

This place was ancient, built long before anyone had developed the concept of windows that swung open, so I used the Sword of Whispers to smash through the glass. Leaning out into the gnawing cold, I peered at the sheer black drop-off of castle walls below me.

Horror and revulsion hit me like a fist to my throat. Chains shot down the side of the wall, holding up icy cages that dangled just above the snowy ground. They swayed a little in the glacial winds. I remembered reading that King Caerleon had done this to some of his enemies.

I counted ten cages in all.

From far below, Orla’s voice floated in the wind.

I clenched my jaw, making fast mental calculations. I could try to fix my throne and regain my power, or I could run through the castle and approach the cages from below. But the castle was enormous. Moving around inside for long periods of time risked my imprisonment and death at the hands of the new monarch. And then, Orla would live out her last moments freezing to death in the cage.

The other option…the other option was simply to crawl down the chains with the Sword of Whispers and get to Orla directly. They hung on the eastern wing, which had no portcullis or gate. I didn’t see any soldiers patrolling below. Why patrol a locked cage?

I let out a long breath, and it formed a cloud around my head, freezing in the air. The safest option for Orla’s survival was for me to go straight for her. Right here. Right now.

A gust of frozen wind whipped over me, and I crawled through the shattered glass, my sword in my hand.

A few shards lacerated my palms and legs, but I ignored it. Just like I ignored the frostbitten wind that whipped at me.

Snow whipped at the skin exposed through my tattered clothes. I didn’t have a sheath for my sword, so I carried it in one hand and used my legs and my other arm to crawl down the chain. The icy stone walls stung my bare feet. The frozen chains stuck to my fingers, so every minute or so, I switched hands. I rappelled down the side of my own castle, slammed by snowy winds.

When a roar rumbled behind me, dread made my stomach tighten. Slowly, I turned to see a black and red dragon swooping through the skies.

On the dragon’s back was a woman in red, her burgundy hair streaming behind her like a bloody banner.

Moria. Ava had warned me she was terrible…I just didn’t think it would be quite this bad.

The creature unleashed a gout of fire, hot orange against a sky the color of cinders.

A new horrific thought took hold.

In the old days of King Caerleon, he’d dabbled in evil magic. Specifically, he’d used a black and red dragon called the Sinach to light his enemies on fire. And here she was, a reincarnation of Faerie’s worst tyrant—King Caerleon in a dress.

I moved faster down the chains. At any moment, the Sinach could turn on this wall of cages, melting the chains, melting me, broiling the prisoners alive. My muscles had started to freeze up, but I forced myself to move as fast as physically possible.

In the biting cold, I thought I was losing skin from my fingers as I scaled down the frozen chain. I’d made it a few stories now, and I looked below me. From this distance, when I looked at the cages, I could actually see an arm jutting from one of them. This was an arm that I recognized, so thin and delicate, the pale skin turned blue with the cold.

Anger flooded me.

Orla called my name again, sounding agonized. This time, I shouted back to her, “I’m coming, Orla.” I couldn’t help it. I needed her to know I was trying to get her out of this hell.

When I glanced over my shoulder again, Moria and the Sinach were soaring closer.

Orla’s cage was just to the right of the chain I’d climbed down, and I was desperate to get to her first.

When I was twenty feet above the nearest cage, I let go of the chain and jumped. I landed hard, the shock of it sending a judder through my legs. The cage rocked with the force of my fall, but I steadied myself on top of it. From there, I leaped another ten feet through the frozen air to Orla’s cage.

I glanced down at the ground below us. It was only about fifteen feet to the snow. “Hold on,” I shouted into the wind.

I leaned over the metal edge, peering in. Orla lay huddled and frozen, without even the small mercy of a cloak. Snow dusted her eyelashes and clung to her hair. Her lips had turned blue.

“Torin,” she said, “Moria has gone mad. She’s using the dragons, she’s using Modron. She’s trying to kill us all. She’s convinced the army that you’re working with Mab.”

It wasn’t as if I needed to hear anymore.

I swung the Sword of Whispers to carve through the lock. The rusted door swung open, creaking on its hinge. “Can you jump out?” I shouted against the wind.

She nodded, shifting to the entrance of the cage, her body shivering violently.

“It’s about fifteen feet below you, Orla. You will land in the snow, and then you need to find your way to the woods. I’ll help you as soon as I can.”

For Orla, this leap would be more difficult than for the others. She couldn’t see the ground. But Orla always did what she had to without complaining.

She threw herself from the cage and landed hard in the snow, tumbling. In moments, she was on her feet and running for the forest, the wind whipping at her dress.

I leaped to the next cage, where I recognized the deep voice of Aeron.

“Torin,” he shouted, “they will kill you.”

I leaned over the side of the cage, the frozen metal stinging my body through my clothes.

My blade carved through his lock. I barked at him to go after my sister. He jumped from the cage, whirling to face me, and pointed to another cage to my right.

“Shalini,” he shouted.

And with a sharp pang of horror, I realized that Moria had trapped a human in one of these cages, someone who could easily die from frostbite.

With a thundering heart, I leaped to her cage and hacked through the metal of her lock. Her door groaned open, and Aeron called her name again and again, his voice wild. I peered into her cage to see her shuffling, half crawling toward the open door. Her body looked rigid with the cold under her cloak. She practically fell out of the cage and into Aeron’s open arms. He carried her like a bride toward the forest, following after Orla’s footsteps.

I crouched, ready to jump to the next cage, but something stopped me. From around the corner, a line of red-clad soldiers marched, archers among them. My heart pounded like a war drum as I watched them kneel in the snow, arrows aimed at me.

I wasn’t sure of many things at this point except that I’d been shot with arrows far too many times recently. Of that, I was completely certain.

One of the soldiers barked out an order to shoot. I braced, waiting for the arrows to fly.

Only the punishing wind hit me. Maybe, in this hellish landscape, they understood that their new queen did not have their best interests at heart.

“You know me!” I shouted into the snowy wind. “I am your king. And whatever has happened while I was trapped in the enemy lands, whatever they said about me, you must know who I really am. That I have always done my best to protect Faerie, to keep you all safe. Some of you served with me for years. And it was never like this when I was king, was it?”

My gaze landed on a man with blue hair and bronze skin whom I recognized. “Lonan! Your family joined me for dinner to celebrate the birth of your youngest sister.” I pulled my gaze to another, one with golden curls whose family owned a cattle farm. “Malo, I helped negotiate the conflict between your family’s farm and the neighbor’s when their fence was crumbling in your fields.”

Overhead, the Sinach swooped lower with Moria on its back. She was maybe a hundred feet above us in the air.

The creature unleashed a flaming stream beneath iron-gray clouds. The soldiers looked over their shoulders at the burst of flame, and the tension in them sharpened into talons.

I raised my sword. “I still hold the Sword of Whispers. The old gods have still blessed me as their chosen king. The Unseelie Queen Mab trapped me in her kingdom against my will, and I fought tooth and nail to return to you.”

On top of the Sinach, Moria’s crown gleamed like brutal shards of ice. She bellowed into the storm.

The dragon whipped back around, arcing even closer, and the poisonous miasma of fear spilled through the air. The Sinach pounded his wings, now only twenty feet behind the soldiers. From its mouth, a scorching burst of flame blasted the snow behind them.

One of the archers loosed an arrow, and I blocked it with my blade. The second arrow, too. The soldiers were terrified of the dragon and doing as their queen commanded, and how could I blame them? No one wanted to burn to death.

My blood roared in my ears.

With a reign of terror, Moria had an iron grip on this kingdom. As the dragon unleashed its flames, the arrows kept flying until I could no longer block all of them. One of them slammed into my gut, another into my bicep. The pain ripped through me, and the force of the second arrow knocked me off the cage.

I slammed down hard into the snow, my spine jolted by the force of the fall onto ice. And as my soldiers clamped chains around my wrists and my throat, they whispered apologies to me. They whispered that they didn’t know the truth, that I could be a demon lover, for all they knew, but I could hear the doubt in their voices.

It had always been cold, but this—the Sinach, the cages, the palpable terror—this was a living nightmare.

They dragged me across the icy snow, hoisting me into a cart. I grimaced at the arrowheads ripping at my flesh.

As the cart took off, bouncing over the frozen earth, I felt every jolt. Not exactly the welcome I’d hoped for.

Where the fuck were they taking me?