Chapter One: The Envoy of Ashwind

The city of Virelle burned gold in the dying light, its spires catching fire the way they did every evening, when the sun sank low enough to turn glass to flame. From the high terrace of the Frostmere embassy, Princess Isolde Varn watched the light die and thought, not for the first time, that she hated beautiful things. Beautiful things had a way of ending.

"You're scowling at the sunset again," said a voice behind her. "It hasn't done anything to you."

"It's setting," Isolde said, without turning. "That's enough."

Her handmaid, Wren, made a small sound of exasperation and did not press further. She knew better, after eleven years, than to ask the princess of the Frostmere why sunsets troubled her. Everyone in the Nine Courts knew the story, or thought they did: the ice-realm princess who did not feel things the way ordinary people did, whose blood ran cold enough to still a heart with a touch, who had never once been seen to cry.

They were wrong, of course. Isolde felt everything. She simply did not let it show, because in her family, showing was the same as bleeding, and bleeding was the same as dying.

Below, in the embassy courtyard, a commotion rose — hooves on stone, a herald's horn, the particular hush that fell over a crowd when someone important arrived. Isolde leaned over the balustrade, more from habit than curiosity, and saw him.

He rode a horse the color of dried blood, and he wore no crown, no circlet, nothing to mark rank — only a coat the deep red of banked coals, and a manner of sitting a horse like he owned every road it had ever walked. When he dismounted, he moved like heat rising off summer stone: unhurried, certain, faintly dangerous.

"Who," Isolde asked, "is that?"

Wren followed her gaze and went very still. "That," she said slowly, "is Kaelan Draven. Third son of the Ashwind throne. They're saying he's here to negotiate the water-rights treaty."

"They're wrong," Isolde said. She didn't know how she knew. She simply did.

She was right, though it would be three days before she learned why.

The negotiations were tedious, as negotiations about rivers and borders always were, full of men twice her age arguing about things that would outlive them all. Isolde sat at her father's right hand, silent as she had been trained to be, and watched Kaelan Draven watch everyone else.

He was good at it — better than good. He let the Ashwind delegation's chief minister do the talking about grain tariffs and grazing rights, and simply observed, his dark eyes moving from face to face like he was reading a book everyone else pretended wasn't open. Twice, Isolde caught him looking at her, and both times he did not look away, only held her gaze a moment longer than propriety allowed before returning, unhurried, to the matter at hand.

It was insolent. It was thrilling. She hated that it was thrilling.

On the third evening, she found him alone on the east terrace, uninvited, drinking wine that was not his to drink, looking out over the frost gardens that grew nowhere else in the world but here, where Frostmere magic kept the air cold enough for silver ferns and ice-roses to bloom year-round.

"You're not supposed to be here," she said.

"Neither are you, technically." He didn't turn. "Isn't this your father's private garden?"

"I am his daughter. I'm allowed."

"And I'm a guest who got lost." He finally looked at her, and there was something warm and amused in his face that made her want to simultaneously step closer and set something on fire. "Though I confess I wasn't lost. I wanted to see if the ice-roses were real. We don't have anything like them, where I'm from."

"Where you're from, I imagine, everything grows too fast and burns too bright and dies within the season."

"Now you're just guessing."

"I'm not." She came to stand beside him, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off him — actual warmth, not metaphor, the particular heat that Ashwind blood carried in it like banked fire. It should have made her uncomfortable. Instead, absurdly, it made her want to lean into it, the way you lean toward a hearth on a winter night. "Fire realm. Everything urgent. Everything now. Your people don't plan for winters that never come."

"And your people," he said, "plan so carefully for winter that you forget to have summers at all."

She turned to look at him properly then, and found he was already looking at her, and something in her chest did an unfamiliar, unwelcome thing — a lurch, a warmth, a crack in ice she had spent twenty-three years keeping whole.

"You're not here for the water treaty," she said.

"No," he admitted. "I'm here because my father is dying, and when he dies, the throne of Ashwind falls to me, and I intend to make sure that when it does, there is no war between our two houses. Your father has been making noises about the southern trade routes for a decade. I came to see for myself whether Frostmere actually wants peace, or only the appearance of it."

"And what have you decided?"

"I've decided," he said, "that I don't much care what Frostmere wants. I care what you want. You're the one who'll rule here one day. Not your father. Not some minister. You."

No one spoke to her like that. No one dared to see her as anything other than a piece on a board, a treaty waiting to be signed in the shape of a woman. She should have been furious. She should have called for the guards.

Instead she said, "I want the ice-roses to survive. I want my people to stop being afraid of everything that isn't cold. And I want—" She stopped herself.

"What do you want?" His voice had gone quiet, low, close.

"I want," she said, "to feel something that isn't duty, just once, before I die."

He didn't touch her. That was the strange thing she would remember later — that first night, standing so close she could count the small scar above his left eyebrow, he did not touch her at all. He only said, "Then let's start there," and somehow that was worse, and better, than any touch could have been.

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