I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even think.
“We demand respect.” His hand made lazy figure eights in the bowl. “If you will not give it to us, then we will stop extending our protection to you. We will find another Avenko—the little one, perhaps. He is young enough to be molded for many uses.”
Two figures swam between us. My body flushed with electric fear. “You cannot touch me,” I said automatically.
But they didn’t need to touch me. One raised his hand, and I felt the magic drawing out of me, the tightening of my lungs, the rising tide of panic.
I flailed, gripping my pearl, grabbing for the little black petals until their tips bit into my palm. I sliced up out of desperation, hoping that if I distracted him, I might buy my lungs a moment more. But what did it matter? I was so far away from the surface I’d never make it.
The blade of the petal caught his arm as he threw it up to deflect me. It scraped off his scales to bite into a soft, unprotected piece of forearm. Blood ribboned out.
Around the wound, magic began to coalesce. My hand brushed it, and I felt the tug, deep in my belly. The weight on my chest loosened. I no longer needed to breathe. Around my fingers, the water flashed, taking on shape, putting a barrier between me and my enemy.
It was doing what I needed. It was doing what I wanted.
The secret to magic was inside us, Meire had said. I’d assumed she meant in a more general sense. That if I dug deep enough, I’d find it for myself. But that wasn’t true at all. The secret was literally in their blood.
The guard started toward me, fingers clamped around his arm. The water wall between us shattered. My arm darted out to grab his. I closed my eyes, pulled for the magic all around me, focused my thoughts. My fingers lengthened, growing bluer and extra-jointed. Webbing stretched between them. I shot away from him, through the arch of the Stonemount and toward the surface, swimming too fast and too desperately. Lanterns and fishmen blurred around me. Still I pushed for more speed, more power. Magic was temporary. How long did I have? The water churned behind me as the guards followed. But true to the laws of the trial, they did not touch me.
I swam up in the gloom, past fish that hid behind arrangements of flora. I swam until the glow of the lanterns shone against the dark of the ice sheet, illuminating the jagged hole in the moat. My limbs ached. My fingers took on a pink tinge, growing nails. The magic was wearing off. But the ice was only a few strokes away—
A long body joined mine. Meire’s green crest was flat, her pupils wide. She couldn’t touch me, but I reached for her. If anyone would help me here, she would.
Between her fingers she held a single, glowing pearl. She kicked past me and pressed it to the bottom of the ice. More citizens Below joined her. Magic broke in glittering clouds around their fingers.
Winter roses burst from the underside of the ice. Blooms erupted, sprouting vines and thorns and new buds that became flowers. They covered the hole, wilting and disappearing seamlessly into a smooth sheet.
I kicked frantically. My legs were on fire. Black spots exploded around the edge of my vision as my lungs convulsed, remembering they needed air. Warmth leeched out of the water around me. I swam for my life, cutting with my pale, small, human hands toward the white sheet above, toward the hole that withered as the darkness in my eyes grew. My fingers reached, splayed, for the last open water.
Frost grew over it like leaves. Icy thorns pricked my fingers, drawing blood. I gasped, and the water rushed in.
This was my end. Drifting to eternal sleep in a place I’d loved without respect. Free of all my problems at last. A drop of blood uncurled in the water. I stared at it, red against blue against white.
Against steel.
A sharp edge sliced into my vision. Far away I heard a dim cracking sound, but I couldn’t understand it. I was lost to the vastness of Below.
Gold and silver slashed down. The blade wiggled into the crack of the ice, broke free, then chopped again. And again. Ice grew back, fast, stitching the pieces together—but not fast enough. The blades were a whirl, one after the other, relentless. And at last, they revealed what I’d been seeking.
A leather-clad arm plunged into the water, and a hand tanned by days in the sun wrapped around my wrist and pulled. My brain had enough self-preservation instinct to tell my feet to kick. I fluttered my blue toes.
My head broke the surface, and I coughed and choked, spitting lake water all over Inkar. She braced one knee against the ice and pulled me up.
I gulped air. My body shivered uncontrollably. I fell to my hands and knees, and my skin instantly fused to the ice.
“It will be all right,” Inkar whispered as she worked me free, peeling me off the ice minus one layer of skin. I was too cold to feel the pain. She draped one of my arms over her shoulder, then the other. “I have you now.”
Black boots creaked against white snow as Inkar staggered to her feet. Even my eyes seemed to glaze over with frost. It didn’t matter, I realized, my thoughts as slow as milk in the morning. I would die of hypothermia anyway.
“You can’t do this,” warned a voice I ought to recognize. “You cannot interfere in the coronation trials.”
“Try to stop me, old man,” Inkar growled back.
The trip up to the palace was a haze. My mind was mercifully blank for the first time in a long time. When the fog finally lifted, I was in a bathtub in my antechamber, stripped naked, staring at a blazing fire. My fingers and toes burned. I brought up a shaking arm to inspect my fingertips. They were blue, but light blue. Frostnip, but not frostbite. I would recover. The skin of my palms had been tightly wrapped, and the linen was soaked. My knees and the tops of my feet were the same.
Inkar sat in a chair next to the fire. She turned at the sound of splashing water and her body sagged in relief. “Are you with me?”
“Yes. I mean, I think so.” My voice sounded like the rasping of ice. I drew my knees up, conscious of my nakedness.
Inkar stared intently at the floor. “I am sorry,” she said. “I thought it would be best. I will fetch your robe.”
I smiled. It is not odd in my country to be naked in front of other women, I almost said. But that would imply things—not bad things, but things I wasn’t ready for. Not to mention that I could barely move my arms. I tried to hoist myself out of the tub and hardly rose an inch. “Where’s Aino?”
“I do not know,” Inkar called back. I heard the creak of my wardrobe door. “She told me what to do and disappeared.” Inkar came back in with my robe over one shoulder and a towel over the other, and a small wound kit in her hands. She draped my robe over the chair, near enough to the fire that it might get some warmth. Then she pulled the bearskin rug over to the edge of the tub and gripped my arm, steadying me as I struggled to my feet.
Her hand was so warm. I wanted to wrap myself in that warmth until the trembling stopped.
“Can you stand alone?” she asked.
I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth.
Inkar draped the towel around me and began to dry. She worked precisely, saying, “arm,” or “leg,” when I needed to lift, careful never to touch her skin to mine. All the same, her touch left a warm trail wherever it had been, and my tired heart pattered furiously as she moved from limb to limb. Soon she set the towel aside and pulled my robe around me.