I shook my head. If he thought I could manage to sleep…
He caught my hand and squeezed it. “Ekata, I know it’s bad. These are the kinds of days you’ll have as grand duke sometimes. But I’ll stand behind you. This will pass.”
The problem was, this wouldn’t pass. The council would swing favor toward Sigis, and he’d win the coronation trials. Then it wouldn’t matter what I’d been trying to do.
Footsteps clicked down the hall. The bottom of Aino’s dress came into view, and Farhod led her away, murmuring. I put my head back on my knees and tried to forget it all.
Gentle arms tugged me upright. Aino kissed me, featherlight, on the cheek. “Poor Ekata,” she murmured. “Come sleep.”
Aino led me to bed and made me drink a soporific, and Inkar pulled my quilt up to my shoulders. For once, they didn’t snipe at each other, but I couldn’t care enough to be grateful. I slept unwillingly, and the dark that pulled me down seemed deep and hopeless.
I was suspended, with darkness below me and light somewhere far above. It filtered through to me, white to blue to gray.
I couldn’t breathe. My heart pounded, and my lungs spasmed. As I flailed and choked, I spotted my hands—corpse-gray, speckled with shadow from something far above. Frost burst over my skin in sharp crystals, all thorns. It wound about my wrists, binding me. Dragging me down.
I screamed. Water filled my mouth, salty-sweet. The thorns tightened. Frost crept up my arms, blooming into my shoulders. It dug into my skin. I couldn’t make a sound. I thrashed; I wouldn’t go quietly—
I woke up just as I spat a mouthful of water onto Inkar’s face.
She held me by my shoulders, her dark eyes wide in shock. Her hair was wet. “Aino!” she screamed.
I was wet, too—every single part of me. My nightgown was as soaked as if I’d tossed it into the moat. Water dripped from my hair, and the inside of my mouth felt slimy. My legs slicked against each other. Aino burst in and shoved Inkar aside, grabbing me by the shoulders, then leaning me forward and slapping my back hard enough to leave a handprint. I choked on fluid and indignation. Warmth and pain burst inside me. But the next breath I took was free. “What happened?” I gasped.
“I thought you were having a fit,” Inkar said. Her carefree smile was gone. Her mouth was dark in the light of the stars, surrounded by the pale moon of her face.
“Are you all right? Are you well? What happened?” Aino said.
“How should I know?” I looked from Aino’s serious face to Inkar’s petrified one. My face burned. All I remembered was fear, but now that I was awake, things didn’t seem nearly so real. “It must have been a bad dream.” I wiped at my soaking front, feeling foolish.
Aino looked at me for a long moment. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Let’s get you into something dry.” She rubbed at my still-wet arms. “Inkar, won’t you excuse us?”
“No.” Inkar slid off the bed to stand on the bearskin rug at the foot of it. She knelt before the fire, and I heard steel on flint.
I needed to calm down. I wanted to forget the frost blooming all over me, the depths dragging me down.
I coughed. Water sluiced over my chin, and I put a hand up to my mouth. Inkar and Aino stared at me. I felt small, suddenly, childish and immature and repulsive. “I’m sorry,” I said, bringing my knees up and tugging my sodden nightgown away from my chest. “I must have… I don’t know.”
Inkar returned to the bed and ran a finger down my bare arm. She brought it up to her nose. “It does not smell like sweat.” Her tongue darted out. “It does not taste like sweat.” Her hands went to the hem of my nightshirt, squeezing. “It did not look like a nightmare. Not the kind I have seen. It looked like…”
She frowned, but it wasn’t the disgusted frown I’d expected. It was a puzzled one. I was a mystery she needed to solve. “When I woke up, I thought you were drowning,” she said.
Drowning.
Aino trembled as she pulled the soggy gown over my head. I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth again, tasting this time. I’d smelled this sweetness once before. And the salt of the water—it wasn’t sweat.
It was lake water.
Inkar was right. I had been drowning, like the rest of my family. Which meant that whoever cursed them was trying to curse me, too. A flash of memory ignited, the sense of cold and damp, the image of frost in my mind. Three nights ago, I’d had this same nightmare. Only it wasn’t a nightmare.
I’d already made so many mistakes in my young reign, but this might be the biggest. I was the mistake. My ascension to the dukedom was a mistake. I should be lying next to my father, slowly drowning.
Aino and Inkar bundled me into a new nightgown and robe and set me before the fire. Aino fetched new bedclothes, and she and Inkar fitted them while I sat and shivered. Aino moved as if her joints had aged ten years in the night. But she worked without complaint, and in silence.
“You may go,” Inkar said when they were done.
“Excuse me?” Aino said in a voice like cut glass.
“We are finished. You may sleep.” Inkar’s voice was brisk and neutral. As though Aino were beneath her anger.
“Someone just tried to kill her. I’m not about to leave.”
“I will watch her.” Inkar sat cross-legged on the bed. “I have kept watch before. On campaign. You and I will take three-hour shifts to ensure one of us is always wakeful.”
Aino glared, thin-lipped. “She has a point,” I said, and nearly recoiled when that glare turned on me. “I mean—wouldn’t taking shifts be better?” If I could sleep at all. “We all have things to do tomorrow.”
“We can’t trust her,” Aino said in Kylmian.
Poor Aino, always so worried for me. I took her hand. “No matter what she wants, she won’t get it if I die. Let her take a watch. You can rest.” She needed it. Her eyes still swam with tears, and she looked as if she hadn’t slept since I’d become grand duke.
“Don’t be a fool for her,” Aino warned me softly. Then she stepped back, straightening. “Wake me when it’s my turn. And call for me if anything happens,” she said in Drysian, in a tone that indicated Inkar would pay if she didn’t.
Inkar only nodded. Aino shut the servants’ door, but not quietly enough for a graceful exit. “Why does she dislike me so?” Inkar asked.
“You treat her like a servant,” I said.
A line appeared between Inkar’s brows. “She is a servant. And if she were a servant in my father’s court, she would be executed for the way she speaks to her betters.”
“You’re not better than her,” I snapped.
Inkar raised a brow. “I am sorry,” she said. “I did not know you would be angry.”
“That’s because you don’t know me. Aino does.” I walked over to my side of the bed and flopped without taking off my robe.
Inkar did not lie down. She still sat, upright, cross-legged, regarding me. Her dark eyes blinked, shuttering away thoughts that I could not fathom. And I was strangely sorry for that.
I pulled the covers up to my chin and lay still with my hands folded over my belly. But sleep refused to come. My skin tingled, and my blood rushed. All the coffee in the world didn’t help me in the daytime, but now I couldn’t even close my eyes. My lungs heaved without my permission. “Forget it,” I said finally. I sat up and adjusted my robe. “I can’t sleep, anyway. You might as well rest while I get some work done.” Maybe I could use my experience to make a few notes on the curse.