Winter

“All right, Winter. Calm down,” he said, smoothing back Winter’s hair. “Scarlet is strong. She’ll be all right.”

She whimpered. “It isn’t just Scarlet. Everyone is going to die, and nobody knows, nobody sees it but me—” Her voice cracked and she started sobbing. Hysterical. She started to collapse, but Jacin caught her and held her against him, letting her cry against his chest. “I’m going to lose them all. They’ll be drowned in their own blood.”

The sounds of fighting were distant and muffled now within the palace walls, replaced in the streets and courtyard with the moans of death and bloodied coughing. Winter’s vision was blurred as she peered over Jacin’s shoulder. Mostly bodies and blood, but also some stragglers. A few dozen people picking their way through the destruction. Trying to tend to those who were still alive. Pulling bodies off other bodies. A girl in an apron—surprisingly clean—pulled the buttons off one of the thaumaturges’ black coats.

“I should have left you with the lumberjacks,” Jacin muttered.

The girl in the apron noticed them, startled, then scampered off to the other side of the courtyard to rifle through some other victims’ pockets. A servant from the city, Winter guessed, though she didn’t recognize her.

“I could have been you,” Winter whispered after her. Jacin’s fingers dug into her back. “The lowly daughter of a guard and a seamstress. I should have been her, scavenging for scraps. Not royalty. Not this.”

Sandwiching Winter’s face in both hands, Jacin forced her gaze up to his. “Hey,” he said, somehow stern and gentle at the same time. “You’re my princess, right? You were always going to be my princess, no matter what you were born, no matter who your dad married.”

Her eyes misted. Reaching up, she folded her fingers over Jacin’s forearms. “And you are always my guard.”

“That’s right.” The faintest touch. His calloused thumb against her temple. Winter’s whole body quivered. “Come on. I’m getting you out of here.”

He started to pull away, but she dug her fingertips into his arms. “You need to help Selene and Scarlet and the others.”

“No. Either she’s winning or she’s losing. My presence won’t sway it at this point. But you—I can take care of you. For once.”

“You always take care of me.”

His lips tightened and his attention dipped toward her scars, before he looked away altogether. He was about to speak again when Winter’s eye caught on movement.

The servant in her apron had sneaked up on them and now had an empty look in her face. She raised a bloodied knife over her head.

Winter gasped and yanked Jacin to the side. The tip of the knife slashed through the back of his arm, ripping through his shirt. Snarling, he spun to face the attacker and grabbed her wrist before she could swipe at him again.

“Don’t hurt her!” Winter screamed. “She’s being manipulated!”

“I noticed,” he growled, prying the woman’s fingers back until she dropped the knife. It landed with a clatter on the stone ground. Jacin shoved her away and she fell, collapsing on her side.

In the same movement, Jacin yanked the shoulder straps that held his gun and knife over his head and threw them as hard as he could toward the obstacle course of fallen bodies. Before they could be used against him. Before his own hands could turn the weapons against him.

“I hope you don’t think that will make a difference.”

Whimpering, Winter pressed herself back into the doorway.

Aimery. He was standing in the street—not smiling. For once, not even pretending to smile. Not smug or cruel or taunting.

He looked unhinged.

The servant girl, released from his control, scrambled away on her hands and knees and escaped as fast as she could into an alleyway. Winter heard her crawling turn into the hurried beat of running. Aimery let her go. He didn’t even look at her.

Jacin placed himself between Winter and Aimery, though she didn’t know why. Aimery could have forced Jacin to move aside with a tiny little thought. Aimery could toy with them as easily as pawns on the queen’s game board.

“As you are useless with your own gift,” Aimery drawled, dark eyes burning, “perhaps you do not understand that we do not require guns and knives to do damage. When you have been given the power that I have, all the world is an armory, and everything in it a weapon.”

Aimery tucked his hands into his sleeves, although he was lacking his normal composure. His expression was frazzled and angry.

“You could be strangled with your own belt,” he continued, still speaking slowly. “You could impale yourself with a serving fork. You could plunge your own thumbs into your eye sockets.”

“You think I don’t know the sort of things you can do?” Jacin’s body was taut, but Winter didn’t think Aimery had taken control of him.

Not yet.

But he would.

There was Aimery’s nightmare smile, but it was crossed with a snarl. “You are as inferior to me as a rat.” His attention switched to Winter. His lip curled in disgust. “Yet she still made her choice, didn’t she?”

Winter’s heart pummeled against her rib cage, Aimery’s words echoing inside her frazzled skull. Strangle. Impale. Plunge.

He would. Not yet. But he would.

A chill crawled over her skin from the pure hatred she saw in Aimery’s face.

“You should have accepted me when you had the chance,” he said.

She tried to swallow, but her saliva felt like paste. “I could have,” she said, “but it would have been no more real than the visions that plague me.”

“So you chose a pathetic guard.”

Her lips quivered. “You don’t understand. He is the only thing that is real.”

Aimery’s expression darkened. “And soon he will be dead, little princess.” He spat the title like an insult. “Real or not, I will have you. If not as a wife or a willing mistress, then as a possession to be displayed in a pretty bejeweled case.” His eyes took on a hint of madness. “I have waited too many years to let you go now.”

Jacin’s back was to Winter, his shoulders knotted. A line of blood curled down his elbow and dripped along his wrist. Splattered to the ground below. He was powerless to do anything but stand there and say cold and callous things and hope no one detected how afraid and frustrated he really was.

But Winter knew. She had lived her life with that fear too.

Aimery looked pleased as he focused again on Jacin. “I have been waiting for this since you were brought before the court. I should have watched you bleed on the throne room floor that day.”

Winter convulsed.

“That must have been such a disappointment for you,” said Jacin.

“It was,” agreed Aimery, “but I do think I will enjoy this moment even more.” His cheek twitched. “How shall it be done? By my hand? By your own?” His eyes glistened. “By hers? Ah—how inconsolable she would be then, to be the instrument of her own beloved’s death. Perhaps I will have her bash in your skull with a rock. Perhaps I will have her choke you with her pretty fingers.”

Nausea rolled over her.

Jacin—