“Repeat after me, Your Majesty.”
So I do.
“I am Queen Malina Colier of the Colier royal bloodline, and I willingly give my blood to restore what was lost and to gain what is new.”
I’m not sure what magic feels like.
I never felt anything with Midas, and aside from feeling watched, I didn’t sense the assassin.
Yet I feel magic now.
Fassa and Friano slam their palms against mine, threading their fingers in, turning my hands so that my blood coats their skin and then drips into the snow.
And magic roars.
Like we’ve awoken a slumbering beast from the belly of the earth, and it’s come to claw its way out. Every drop of blood that seems to paint the ground pulls something from the center of my gut.
The world spins.
The magic bays like a wolf at the moonless sky.
Then comes the wind and the quakes.
The earth begins to shake so hard that I get my prior wish and go crashing down to the ground. My knees smack painfully into the ice, the splatters of blood blotched into the snow where it’s dripped.
Everything shakes so violently, the wolf now sounding like it’s grinding its teeth against the bones of its prey, gnashing and smashing.
I have no idea where the twins or Pruinn are. There’s too much noise to call for them, and the world is rocking like a ship on turbulent waves, so my eyes cannot search for them either.
I clutch the ground like a safety net, the snowy mesh dissolving between my fingers. I get tossed aside, rolling until my back crashes into the pillar that I noticed before, the single stone post pitted but still standing.
Pain shoots down my back and shoulder, but then there’s a new ache. Something not from the hit but in my veins. As if the pain is traveling through my very blood, from ankle to temple, freezing it in place.
My heart goes gluey, my pulse sluggish.
And the heat from the torches no longer bothers me, because I am blessedly, thoroughly cold. As if ice now pumps from my heart and frosts down my veins.
I’m not sure when the ground stops shaking. When this pain ebbs. But I pull myself up, hands gripping the pillar for support, and when I stumble to a stand, I turn around to look at the land.
But…Seventh Kingdom hasn’t been restored.
The snowy land hasn’t been pulled back together, healing the rifts or filling the cleaves. From what I can see lit up by the hundreds of torches, it looks exactly the same as before.
“It worked.”
I spin around at the twins’ voice to see both of them and Pruinn standing just beside me. Yet instead of looking at the land, they’re looking at the endless chasm behind.
I realize right then that what I’m holding isn’t some broken pillar. It’s a banister. And it now has another identical one, both caught between a strip of gray, endless land stretching like a bridge. I stare down its length as far as my vision takes me, to where the mist now clings to the roped railing along the drooping path that stretches across the eternal abyss.
Clarity, sharp and cold, pierces through my mind.
Like I was asleep and then, suddenly dropped into the middle of an icy lake, I wake up.
Wake up, and don’t smell the flowers, Cold Queen. Before it’s too late.
The kingdom isn’t restored to its former glory. The light of the torches shows me it’s just as crumbling and ruined as I thought when I first got here. And there is no scent of flowers in my nose or music in my ears.
There’s blood and something that seems to drum from the bridge.
Like the pulse of a beast.
As my hands clutch the banister, ice frosts beneath my fingertips, spreading down the restored stone pillar. I snatch my hands up, staring at the shards of ice stuck to my palm.
And that sound keeps pulsating from the ground.
I look up at the twins, fear freezing my heart. “What did you do?” I whisper.
The twins turn to me, and they seem more frightening somehow. The angles of their faces more severe, their eyes holding no kindness. Even Pruinn, whose gaze has always drawn me in, seems to somehow deter me now, especially when he accompanies it with a flash of a grin revealing sharp canines caught in his gums.
“You mean what did we do?” They and their mingled voices sound like a razor dragged across glass. But it’s their ears. Their ears—
“With your blood and our magic, we restored what was broken.”
My eyes cast down the bridge. To that drumming that travels down its length in a steady beat. Because I know the tale of this bridge. Every single Orean knows about it.
This is the Bridge of Lemuria.
My mouth goes dry. Gaze drags back to their sharpened faces, to the points of their ears.