“If you want me to become your next bride, you do,” she said, refusing to back down. I could feel the heat coming off her in waves, could feel my brother’s touch on her, and I pushed off the balcony railing, turning away from her, needing space. She only followed me into the hall, refusing to let it go. “Abner!” she called after me, her voice cutting the chilly air as I started down the hall.
I stopped, finding it unusually difficult to breathe just then.
“Do not walk away from me,” Morana said, her feet gliding until she was at my side once again.
I looked at her, and I meant I really looked at her—the fury burning behind her gaze, the intense frown on her lips, the way she held herself in my presence, refusing to back down even though she should be the one kneeling to me. Morana was righteously angry, although I did not know why. Somehow, I had the feeling I was about to find out.
She held my stare, narrowing those beautiful eyes somewhat, as if she hated me. “Tell me the truth, Abner.” Again, she said my name, and it made me wonder if she spoke it purposefully, knowing I did not like being called that.
I was Winter. I was a god. I was not simply a man with a name; to claim I was would be to lie about everything.
“What happens to your brides?” Morana asked, leveling the question at me with an unblinking glare, the fury only seeming to grow behind that stare. The way she spoke, how angry she was… it all made me think she already knew, she knew what happened to every single one of my old brides.
But, no, that was impossible. They were locked behind a wall of ice only I controlled. Morana, a mere human, could never get through it on her own, let alone touch it; to do so would be to turn her hand to ice.
And then, as I stared at her, trying to stick to my silence, to will myself to turn around and walk away, for surely I owed this girl nothing, it came to me. Oh, the possibility dawned on me and made me frown.
Brother, I thought bitterly, did you show her the room? Did you try to convince her to leave with you?
If this was some hairbrained attempt at trying to get Morana to leave me for him, if indeed this girl had seen every single one of my old brides… why in the world was she still here? Why did she bother to demand answers from me? Perhaps Morana was afraid I would go back for her sister if she left with Ishan.
Would I? Would I be so vengeful? I couldn’t say. These days… I hardly recognized myself.
My shoulders slumped, and I turned my head away, though I could not muster up the strength to actually leave. She was still here. She hadn’t left. If she’d seen the truth, she was only asking me to confess. The problem was I did not know what to confess; it wasn’t as if I purposefully turned my wives to ice. It merely happened. Every single time they froze, unable to take the cold.
Unable to take me.
“You saw them, didn’t you?” I whispered, my voice almost inaudible. I could not look at her; I had to stare at the floor beside us, the light emanating from the icy candelabras dim. Outside, a world of night had encased the land, a world that was foreign to me in every way. I could not say why, but the thought of staring at her, knowing she had seen them, wasn’t a thought that filled me with pleasure.
I hated it. I hated what happened to them, hated I could not change it. I’d tried, in the beginning, when it first started happening, to undo the magic that had changed them, to unfreeze them. After all, I was Winter. I held the power over snow and ice and cold. Alas, I could not. Regardless of how much I tried, how many days I stood before them, I could not. They remained frozen, and I knew they would remain frozen until the end of time itself.
The end. There were many days now when I eagerly anticipated the end. The end of all of this, of me, of this castle and its frozen wonders. The end could not come soon enough—it’s why I didn’t know why I still tried to find someone to fill the ache in my soul. After all, any bride of mine would only end up like the others.
Perpetually frozen in their unhappiness, because they were not enough for me and I was not enough for them.
“Does it matter?” Morana asked, her response breaking the silence of the hall.
My eyes closed, and I heaved a sigh. Never before did a single breath weigh so heavily on me. I was upset with her for taking such a tone with me, for approaching me as furiously as she did, and yet I knew she had every right to be angry with me, to ask me these things. Her future was on the line. Her life.
“No,” I was slow in saying, “I suppose it does not. Whether you’ve seen them or not, they’re still here. They’re all still here, frozen in time.” As you will surely be, if you marry me. For some reason, I could not force myself to say that last part aloud, for I did not want her to call for my brother, did not want her to leave.
Though Morana was anything but meek and subservient, though she constantly pushed my buttons and demanded things of me—things which she had no right to—I did not want her to go. I wanted her to stay. With me.
As I opened my eyes, I measuredly met her stare. Still furious, but less so. Now Morana waited to hear my side of things, but I knew my side would not make her see. She could never truly understand how awful it was to be in this castle, to desperately want something I knew I’d never have.
“You asked me once if this castle was a lonely place to be,” I started, the hollowness in my chest only growing as I spoke. “It is. No one out there knows what it’s like. Not you, not Summer, not anyone or anything. I am not like my brother—” The first time I’d brought him up to her, though she didn’t act surprised. “—I am not loved and adored out there. I’m hated, just as much as the cold and the snow. The winter storms, the freezing of the fields… no one sings for me. No one celebrates me as they do Summer when the warmth returns for the season.”
Shaking my head, I went on, “I feel… I feel as if fate, whatever monstrous thing it is, gave me the worst hand of all. I am eternal, and I cannot change, no matter how hard I try—and I have tried. I have. I’ve given things my all, and in the end, it doesn’t matter. I search for something to make me feel whole, even if it’s futile, even if all I end up doing is sentencing each and every bride to the same icy fate—”
Morana cut in, “Why don’t you try not turning them to ice, then?”
“I don’t do it,” I muttered, a frown pulling at my lips. “It’s not me. I don’t purposefully turn my wives to ice. No matter what you may think of me, I am not that kind of man.”
“Right,” she said. “Because you are no man. You’re Winter. You’re a god.”
I took a step toward her, watching her back straighten, but she did not move away. I towered over her, and though there was less than an arm’s reach between us, the distance still felt like kingdoms stretched between her and I. “It is my curse,” I whispered, my voice panged with regret, with pain, with sorrow, “to want the one thing I will never have.”
“And what’s that?”
The answer was a lone word, one single word and yet it caught on the back of my tongue, taking entirely too long to be said, “Love.”
Morana was speechless for once, gazing up at me with an expression I could not read. Not fury, not anymore. It was something else, but I dared not believe it to be any form of sympathy.