Princess Phillipi's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Phillipi stayed at the tower window until the frost on the glass grew thick enough to hide the yard below. She had counted three days since Alaric rode south. She had counted the guards at her door, the elders in their hall, the lord who waited to call a blade against a man who did not come back. She had no signature on the marriage contract. She had no vote in the chamber. The council would keep sending Alaric out until one task killed him. She pressed her palm flat to the door and felt the iron lock go cold under her hand. The bolt cracked. She pulled her hand back before the wood could split. She had been treating her touch like a curse for so long she had forgotten it was also a tool. She knelt by the keyhole and shaped the cold in her fingers the way she shaped breath. Water beaded on her skin and hardened. She drew it out into a shaft, a bow, a set of teeth cut to the shape she could feel inside the lock. The key came out of her hand pale blue and edged with small stars. She turned it. The bolt slid. She wrapped a cloak over her nightdress and went down the servants' stair with the key still cold in her fist. Two guards stood at the side gate. She laid one finger on the first man's wrist and he sat down against the wall without a sound. The second one ran. She let him go. She walked out of the ice castle her family had held for eight generations and did not look back at its frozen spires. She took a horse from the outer stable and rode south. On the second night she found Alaric's fire in a stand of pines above the pit road. He was sharpening the serpent staff's shaft against a stone. He stood up when he saw her. She got down from the horse and told him she was not going back. She told him the council would never sign, and that she would not watch him die for a paper she could tear up herself. She held out the ice key on her palm. It had not melted. Alaric closed his hand around hers, key and all, and did not flinch. He said the pit was still a day's ride south. He said if she came with him past it, there was a port on the far coast where no elder's seal meant anything. She mounted again. They rode south together before dawn, away from the citadel and away from the pit both. Behind them, in the hall of twelve thrones, the elders would wake to an empty tower and a broken lock, and no bride to bargain over at all.