Annie Philaxis's Arc

Chapter 121 of 6

Amber had been gone three days. Annie stayed bound to the throne, unable to chase her heir into the safe garden below. So she sent word to her sister. Zev knew the earth. Zev could track a girl by the warmth of her footprints in cold ground. Zev came dirt-handed to the throne room. "She's past the seam," Zev said. "In the low garden. She isn't alone." Annie's chest tightened. "Who's with her?" Zev pressed her palm to the ice floor and shut her eyes. "A small one. Frozen half through. Alive, but barely." Marigold rose from the hearth, still weak. "A lost child," she said. "Amber found a lost child." She looked at Annie. The same road Annie once walked, luring the lost into the cold. But Amber was not Annie. Annie unbound herself from the seat only in her mind, sending the one person who could go. "Zev. Bring them both back. Please." Zev found them by the old boundary stones. Young Amber knelt over a girl no bigger than a lamb, chafing her blue hands. "She wandered in," Amber said flatly. "I couldn't leave her. I'm not the book. But I'm not that either." The frozen child's eyes fluttered. She had touched true death and it had not taken her. Amber had held her back from it. Zev knelt and read the child through the soil beneath her. "Her name is not in any ledger," Zev said. "She belongs to no one up here. If she dies now, she dies unnamed." Amber's jaw set. "Then she won't die." She wrapped her cloak around the small body and lifted her. They carried the child up past the seam, into the warmth of the sheltered haven at the glacier's foot. Marigold met them at the door. She built a fire while Zev pressed the earth-heat back into the girl's chest. Slowly the blue left the child's lips. She breathed. She lived. Amber stood apart, watching the small chest rise and fall. "I ran because I didn't want to be spent," she said. "Then I found her freezing and I spent myself anyway. Nobody made me." Annie's voice reached her from the throne through the bond they shared. Amber felt it, warm, not cold. "That's the difference," Annie's thought pressed. "You chose it. That's not the book taking you. That's you." Amber looked at the child she had saved. "I know who I am now," she said. "I'm the one who doesn't let them freeze." She did not come home to the peak. Not yet. But she stayed at the haven with the rescued girl, no longer running, choosing her own place. Annie sat the throne with a steadier heart. Her heir had walked her mother's old road and turned it warm. The crown held. But now an unnamed child breathed below, one more soul the ledger did not hold, one more weight pulling at the wall.