Kristian Frostborne's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

The guards dragged the duchess out. The hall emptied. But Kristian's victory tasted like nothing. Eira stood beside him, her hand cold in his. She had helped him break their enemy. Yet she had not once looked at him with anything warmer than duty. She had married him as a bargain, not as a bride. He held a queen who did not want him. He found her the next morning in the frozen grotto. Steam rose from the hidden hot spring at its center. Blue and violet plants glowed along the crystal walls. Eira sat at the water's edge, the winged snow leopard cub curled in her lap. She stroked its wings and did not turn when he entered. "You saved my father's life," she said. "You saved mine. I owe you a crown. That is all I owe you." Kristian had planned a hundred arguments. He set them all aside. "I know what you think of me," he said. "A cold man who bought you with a testimony. You are not wrong." She looked up then. The mist softened her face. "So you admit it." "I do." He knelt at the spring's edge, close but not touching. "For seven years I let no one near. I forgot how to want a person instead of a plan. When I saw you, I made you a piece in my game. That was the only way I knew." The cub stirred, opened its wings, and hopped from her lap. It padded to Kristian and pressed its head to his hand. Eira watched it choose him a second time. Her breath caught. "It trusts you," she said. "It should not. Nothing in this keep trusts easily." "Then let me earn what it already gives." He pulled the ice-crystal lily from his coat, the one she had placed in his hand at their betrothal. The bell-shaped blossoms still shimmered, unmelted. "You gave me this as a bargain. I kept it because I could not stop looking at it." Eira reached out. Her fingers closed over his around the flower. Her hand was still cold. But she did not pull away. For the first time she held on. "I have been guarding my heart since I could walk," she said. "My father's face turns to ice. I thought mine would too." She swallowed. "Show me it will not." "Every day," Kristian said. "Until you believe it." She leaned her forehead to his. The cub purred between them. The queen in name only had begun to become his wife in truth. But warmth had made him careless. He had let the lily distract him. He had not yet hunted the greybeard, and the old conspirator still moved free in Snowhaven, and now he knew Kristian's new weakness had a name and a face: Eira.