Arie's POV

  I immediately withdrew the spell. I can't handle that weird feeling.

  "Why are you even telling me Laura's dirty deeds?"

  "You asked for your mother, and I gave you the truth, Arie. I don't give white lies." He presented a malicious smile.

  "But she would never want me dead. No, she won't. She's my mother."

  "Bet your father didn't even have the balls to tell you the truth. Domestan really is an untruthful man. What a coward."

  I felt my emotions exploding. "You don't have a right to mock him in his grave. You don't understand that some things are better not to be said, Felipe. He was able to regain his footing and manage the kingdom despite knowing that I had been bewitched. RAHHHHH..." I shot an ice blast at him, numb from my burns and scratches. "Don't talk about him. You could never talk about him when he's already in the afterlife."

  "Oh ho, there's no afterlife, Arie. Only me and my flames." He lit up one hand and held it like a crystal.

  I didn't retreat. I'm not backing down.

  Felipe had slashed the back of my purple tunic. I'm not even wearing my thick coat anymore. It's gone somewhere in the ashes behind me, shredded or burned. I stopped tracking when.

  "You killed my brother, you monster!" I slammed the ice to the ground, and gigantic spikes erupted from it, sharp and deadly.

  "Oh, who's the monster you're talking about, Arie? You or me?"

  "It's no other than you!"

  "Have you forgotten all the good things that you have done? I've been gaining intel about you all this time with my Wolfmen servants. And you grilled them as though they're meat for sale? I'm nothing like you, Arie."

  "You're a monster," he said. "Monsterrr."

  He said it softly. Almost tenderly. The way you say something to a child who has just insisted the sky is green—not angry, not even condescending, just patient and faintly pitying and absolutely certain.

  Something in my chest clenched.

  "I am not..."

  He summoned a large sphere of flames and threw it.

  "NO!" I blocked it with a massive ice wall. Still, the momentum dragged me toward the ground, and a rock wounded me again.

  I gripped my head. The sky above was spinning, or I was spinning, or both. "No, no, no, no, no, no, where am I?!"

  "Bring me back to Glacia," I cried.

  I flailed my arms on the warm ashes and threw tiny rocks at the Wolf King helplessly. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely aim. My vision kept narrowing at the edges. Not from the wounds, but from everything else. The revelation about my mother. Laura's face. The word dead applied to me before I ever learned to fight.

  He took steps toward me, his crimson red eyes glinting. "Awww, our sweet little princess is crying..."

  The ashes reminded me of my brother.

  He burned in ashes like these. He screamed in ashes like these. I wasn't there. I wasn't there and I have been together with a man that would betray me.

  "Keep your distance! YOU KILLED MY BROTHER!"

  "Bring us somewhere safe in Glacia," I stated.

  Suddenly, we were on an ice landscape. The surface beneath me felt like home. It was cold and cozy. The stars looked at me from the dark sky.

  Then I saw the moon. It reminded me of the midnights.

  The cold seeped under my skin.

  Am I... still me? I let out a dry chuckle while blood was dripping from my forehead.

  "What are you laughing about?" Felipe asked, opening his arms.

  "Silence," I stated.

  "Your time's running. Give me the magic now. Right now."

  "I said silence!" I yelled. "I can't hear my thoughts."

  He stood with his arms crossed and emitted hot fumes from his nose.

  I felt like drowning. Why is this Wolfman who massacred my family so annoying? I have to kill him, tear him up into pieces, stuff him in a toy, or perhaps make him burn himself. The thought was a delight, but that would end way too fast and be boring.

  He ruined my family. Of course he needs to be...

  Tortured.

  I felt dizzy by just thinking of that word. Not disgusted. Dizzy. Like the thought had value and my body recognized it before my mind could object.

  That scared me more than him.

  I have to be rational. I can't let my impulses win.

  Ice Princess.

  I reminded myself of my royalty. I'm a decent person unlike them. Hurting Felipe would just be repeating the cycle of violence. He's too far gone to be persuaded. I have no choice but to use my magic to end his ruthless iron glove.

  My ice drone hovered behind his back.

  "Felipe. Do you wonder what it's like to sleep for a long time?"

  "Well, well, well, do I look like sleeping handsome to you?" He raised his chin. "There's one thing I'm certain though, you wouldn't use your magic..."

  Ice crept from his eyes and traveled quickly all over him, paralyzing him in place. My ice drone hovered above my shoulder, and we watched the Wolf King become a statue together.

  He froze in the middle of his declaration.

  No matter how huge the enemy is, their huge ego leads them to defeat. It is a universal truth I have now confirmed twice.

  "I'm not done yet, Arie!" His body emitted flames, preventing the ice from taking his autonomy. He broke through and hammered his axe. My eyes widened, leaping backward barely in time.

  The sight of that gigantic axe was enough to send my sanity skidding.

  I trembled. I didn't want him to see my fear. I wasn't sure anymore if my mask was still intact. It cracked the ice in front of me, and a fountain erupted from it.

  I froze it quickly to neutralize his weapon in place, but he was faster. He took back his axe and lunged it into the air. My heartbeat ran like a wild animal.

  "Please stop!" I shouted.

  I took hold of his axe and froze him completely. This time he had a fearsome look on his face.

  "The kingdom..."

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  "Is ours... Not yours."

  My blood was boiling. My muscles ragged from fatigue and overexertion. My bones burned with a deep ache that had no end. I'm angry. I'm so angry at him.

  I can no longer contain my rage.

  The first swing was involuntary.

  I don't know how to explain that. My arms moved before I decided to move them, before I consciously understood what I was doing. The axe was in my hands and then it was swinging and then...

  The sound it made was horrible.

  I swung again.

  And again.

  The ice splintered around him. The frozen blood turned to powder and then to red mist. My arms kept moving with a rhythm I couldn't stop, couldn't slow, every swing landing with the full weight of Aerol's death and my father's funeral and Caron's face and Laura's voice telling me I had already died once and this second life wasn't even properly mine.

  I was sobbing. I didn't realize it until I tasted salt mixing with blood on my lips.

  I swung until my shoulders screamed and my grip slipped and the axe skidded across the ice and I stood there, chest heaving, looking at what I had done.

  The silence afterward was immense.

  My hands were shaking. They were completely red, past the wrist, up toward the elbow. The ice around me was no longer white. Chunks of frozen armor scattered in a wide radius. Pieces of what had been the Wolf King lay distributed across the Glacian ice like a grotesque mosaic.

  I had meant to only freeze him. I had not meant to do that.

  I stood in the wreckage of it for a long time.

  Then, with a steadiness that frightened me more than the rage had, I began to reassemble him.

  It was easier than it should have been. He was still frozen. The pieces fit back together the way ice always fits: cold and precise, no mess if you're careful, no evidence if you do it correctly. I worked methodically, fitting him back into the shape he'd been. I sealed the pieces with a binding spell, slow and careful, the same patience I'd use mending cracked ice on a palace wall. Telling myself I was doing it because I hadn't meant to, because it was the right thing, because the Ice Princess does not leave bodies in pieces on the ice.

  By the end he looked almost peaceful.

  I stepped back and looked at my hands. Still red. The cold wasn't cleaning them. Nothing was cleaning them.

  I carried his iceberg to the water's edge with my adrenaline still running hot, the same way I'd been running hot since the palace burned, since Aerol screamed, since I woke up and understood what I had lost. I lowered him into the Glacia Trench the way Skadar had once lowered me: deep and cold and final, where the dark closes over everything and asks no further questions.

  I stood at the edge and watched him sink.

  Then I dove in after the blood on my hands.

  The water was black and shocking and I let myself sink into it without fighting, arms out, eyes open, watching the surface recede above me. The blood dispersed in clouds around my wrists. I floated in it for a moment, in the cold, in the dark, in the silence that the ocean provides and nowhere else does.

  You already died once, Laura's voice said in the nothing.

  First of all... are you even Arie?

  I pushed upward and broke the surface gasping.

  As I reached the shallows of the Glacia Trench, I felt thankful to Megaverse for the strength to defeat the tyrant. That's what I told myself. That I felt thankful. That this was a victory. That the sick hollowness in my chest was exhaustion and nothing else.

  ***

  Snowflakes fell on my face. It had been a long way across the Polarmen Islands.

  I found him by the shore.

  He was lying on the snow at the edge of the sedimentary rocks, facing the sky. His arms were spread loosely at his sides, his head tilted slightly, the particular stillness of someone who had simply stopped mid-breath and hadn't had time to arrange himself into anything more deliberate than this.

  Something was wrong with his stillness.

  I stood at the tree line for a moment before I understood what it was.

  He wasn't breathing.

  I walked toward him the way you walk when you already know but your body won't accept the information yet: one foot, then the other, very slow, like if I moved carefully enough the conclusion at the end of this walk would change.

  It didn't change.

  Up close, his face was peaceful. White curls falling across his forehead the way they always did, the way that used to irritate him when he was focused. His eyes were closed.

  The sword was still in his chest.

  Standing straight up from the wound, planted clean through him into the frozen ground beneath, the way you'd stake something down to make sure it didn't move. Ice-forged blade, Skadar's craftsmanship, and I could see from where I stood what had been done to it: the faint residue along the edge, the particular dullness of steel that had been treated with ability cleanser before it was driven in. His hardness, that density that had deflected a hundred attacks across a hundred impossible situations, had felt nothing coming. Had been stripped of his passive ability before the blade arrived.

  The snow around him was red. Had been red for a while.

  Skadar.

  The name arrived in my mind without drama, without surprise, slotting into place like a piece of ice fitting into a wall. Of course. Of course it was Skadar. Of course the thing that killed him wasn't a battle or a monster or the prophecy or anything worth his life. Of course it was something small and petty and human: a nobleman's jealousy, a blade prepared in advance, a wound delivered to someone who had never once considered that Skadar would.

  I sat down beside him in the snow.

  I don't know how long I sat there. The stars moved. The cold settled into my wet clothes and I didn't move to fix it because he would have noticed and made some quiet comment about it, and now he was never going to make a quiet comment again about anything.

  He had been going to tell me something. I knew it the way I knew the specific face he made when he was building up to saying something true: that particular patience, that almost-smile. He'd been waiting to say it until I got back. He'd decided to wait until I was here.

  I was here.

  I put my hand over his.

  It was cold. It had been cold for a while.

  I thought about the flask. I thought about the pendant breaking and how I had thrown it at him like I could throw away the part of myself that needed someone to stay. I thought about every time I had called him bear-boy as a shield. Every time I had made it easier to push him away than to admit I was terrified of exactly this, this specific outcome, this particular silence where his voice used to be.

  He had known about Ellie the whole time. He had watched me be her and stayed anyway and never once looked at me like I was ruined.

  There is no one left now who knows what I am and stays.

  The thought arrived without inflection, without grief, just as a statement of fact. A door closing. I heard it close.

  I waited for tears. None came.

  I waited for rage. That didn't come either.

  What came instead was a feeling like clarity. Like something that had been straining for a very long time finally going slack. Like a rope, cut.

  I looked at his face for a long time. I memorized it the way you memorize something you will not need to remember because you will never be the person who needed it again.

  Then I looked at the ocean.

  Then I looked at my hands, still faintly red despite the ocean, the cold, the dark.

  And then, from somewhere I couldn't locate, somewhere below where feelings usually live, something rose up through my chest, past my throat, and out of my mouth.

  I laughed.

  It wasn't Ellie's laugh. It was worse than Ellie's laugh. Ellie's laugh had been theatrical, had known it was being heard, had wanted to be heard. This was something else entirely. This was the sound of a person recognizing the punchline to a joke that has been running for their entire life, a joke told at their expense, a joke whose setup included a dead father and a missing mother and a brother who burned and a curse that turned out to be herself all along and a boy who waited in the snow because of her.

  "Of course. Of course he's dead." The words came out between the laughter, and I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. "How poetic. HAHAHA!"

  I laughed until my ribs hurt. I laughed until my eyes were streaming, not with grief, just with the sheer physical pressure of it, the body needing to release what the mind had stopped processing. I laughed at the snow and the sun and the ocean and the wound in his chest and the fact that I had just put a Wolfman back together piece by piece two hours ago and felt nothing, nothing at all, and now I couldn't stop laughing at a boy lying down quietly in the snow.

  "HAHAHA! Oh, look at him. HAHAHA!"

  I wiped my face with the back of my hand, and the red smeared across my cheek.

  "Ah... HAHAHA..."

  The laugh tapered. Stuttered. Stopped.

  The silence after it was total.

  I became aware, slowly, that I was not alone.

  Three Glacian soldiers stood at the tree line, the ones who must have been patrolling the shore. They were staring at me with the particular expression of people who have witnessed something they do not have words for and are not certain they want words for. Their hands were near their weapons but not on them. Their faces said they weren't sure weapons would help.

  I looked at them.

  They looked at me: at the blood on my hands, on my face, on what remained of my tunic. At the tears drying on my cheeks. At the smile that was apparently still on my face, because I could feel it there, sitting wrong, not reaching anything.

  At the boy on the trunk beside me, very still, very cold.

  One of them, young, probably his first posting, took an involuntary step backward.

  The oldest of the three found his voice first. It came out careful and very quiet, the tone a person uses around something that might startle. "Your Highness..."

  "The Wolf King is dead," I said pleasantly. "You're welcome."

  None of them moved.

  I stood up from the snow. My legs held. My hands had stopped shaking somewhere between the ocean and here, and they were not going to start again. I smoothed what remained of my tunic with the automatic gesture of someone who has been straightening their appearance before entering rooms since childhood, blood and all.

  "Is there a problem?" I asked.

  The young soldier's mouth opened. Closed.

  The oldest one was still watching my face with the expression of a man recalculating something fundamental. He had probably last seen me at six years old in the palace corridors, rosy-cheeked and trailing after Aerol. He was looking at me now and trying to find that girl somewhere in what was in front of him.

  She wasn't there to find.

  "No, Your Highness," he said finally.

  "Good." I looked back at Skymint one last time.

  Peaceful. Patient. Waiting for someone who got there too late, the way I had always been too late, the way the people I loved had always ended up waiting for me in forms I couldn't answer anymore.

  I turned away from the shore.

  "Take me to the palace," I said to no one in particular, to all of them, to the cold Glacian air. My voice came out even and clear and entirely untroubled. "There's quite a lot to be done."

  I walked past them without looking back.

  They followed, because what else do you do when a dead princess rises from the ocean covered in someone else's blood and laughing at the shore?

  You follow.

  You don't ask questions.

  You follow.