Fidemi's POV

  Everything had gone according to plan.

  I dusted off my hands and looked at Frazilo's body one last time before stuffing him inside the cell. He had been a useful variable while he lasted: a revolutionary with a cause and a following and absolutely no suspicion that the woman funding his operation had never once cared about the Polarmen.

  "Laura had died. Felipe had died." I said it out loud because it deserved to be said out loud, deserved to be heard by someone even if that someone was currently incapable of appreciating the elegance of it. "Which means I succeeded."

  I walked the length of the cell slowly, hands clasped behind my back, the way my father walked when he was pleased with himself. I had always hated that walk. I had practiced it in private for years and now it was mine.

  "But really, Ellie was intelligent." I paused at the window. The night sky sat heavy outside, still and cold and entirely unaware of the shift that had just occurred in its power structure. "She had gotten rid of all the vials here. I just have to get on her good side, and other kingdoms will be depleted of their resources, and Finnian will continue to rise to the top."

  The beauty of it was that Ellie, Arie, whichever she was calling herself now, would never know she was being managed. She would think she had won. She would sit on her ice throne and believe herself to be the architect of everything, and I would stand two steps behind her and build Finnian into an empire on the foundation of her chaos. A happy villain was a useful villain. Predictable in her appetites. Easy to feed.

  I turned from the window.

  "And thanks to my doves, I had gotten the scroll of General Dicester's, and so I was able to give him a heart attack." I addressed this to Frazilo through the cell door, as a courtesy, while my hungry doves feasted on him. He had been a decent listener in life. Death hadn't changed that. "It was like a stack of dominoes, and Dicester was the catalyst. I had calculated that if Dicester had lived, he would have suspected that Sterling was a werewolf. Felipe's invasion could have been evaded, and without Dicester, they had no direction for combat."

  I smiled at the ceiling.

  "Sterling knew what he was doing, helping Felipe kill the Fruit Masters as soon as the weak visitors left the palace."

  Every piece in its correct position. Every variable accounted for. My father had always said I was too meticulous, that I calculated when I should have acted, that my greatest weakness was my need to understand the entire board before I moved. He had said this while losing wars I had warned him about. He had said this while watching kingdoms fall that I had mapped three moves in advance. He was currently alive only because I needed him to be, and he would never know that either.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  "I knew it," I said, and the satisfaction of it was warm and total, the satisfaction of a decade of work arriving at its correct conclusion. "By giving Skymint the curse cleanser, I had officially become Laura's successor. By uniting Arie's memories of being Ellie, there's no escape from the monster that she'll be."

  Laura had wanted a puppet. Laura had been sentimental about it, had made it personal, had let a dead man's marriage make her stupid and vindictive and ultimately killable. I had simply inherited her tools and removed her errors. The curse was never about vengeance. The curse was infrastructure. And now the infrastructure was complete, and the Eldritch Queen sat on the ice throne, and everything that followed would flow through Finnian like water through a channel I had spent ten years digging.

  I was still smiling at the ceiling when the temperature in the room dropped.

  Not gradually. Not the way cold moves through stone at night, creeping and slow. All at once, like a door had opened somewhere that led directly to the bottom of the Glacia Trench, and whatever lived down there had decided to come up.

  The lights on the ceiling went out.

  "What... are... you... talking... about?"

  I froze.

  The voice came from my left. Close. Closer than anyone should have been able to get without my hearing them, without the door opening, without any of the seventeen things I monitored automatically in any room I occupied giving me any warning at all. It came from directly beside my ear, soft and interested and wrong in a way I felt in my spine before my mind caught up.

  I turned my head slowly.

  She was there.

  I had built her. I had planned her. I had fed every variable into the equation that produced her and watched the result with the detachment of a woman who deals in outcomes rather than people. I had known what she would become. I had designed what she would become.

  I had not expected what it would feel like to be standing in a small dark room with what she had become.

  Her eyes were bright. That was the first thing—too bright, the brightness of someone who is feeling several things at once and finding all of them interesting. Her hair had darkened, no longer the sky-blue I had catalogued in every report, but a deep teal that swallowed the dim light rather than catching it. The hood shadowed the upper half of her face, and what remained visible beneath it was worse than what it hid: the jaw, the throat, the smile. That smile. I had read Laura's descriptions of it a dozen times and filed them under exaggeration.

  I was revising that assessment.

  It was the smile of someone for whom the situation had just become entertaining.

  She was looking at me the way a cat looks at something small that has just stopped running.

  Every calculation I had made about managing her, about standing two steps behind her, about feeding her chaos and harvesting Finnian's empire from the wreckage—every single one of them was reorganizing itself rapidly in the back of my mind and arriving at new conclusions I did not like.

  "I'm gonna kill you too." She said it with a grin. Conversational. The way you confirm an appointment.

  I opened my mouth.

  I felt something lodge in my throat. Not a spell, nothing so formal. Just cold, precise, personal. The kind of thing that doesn't announce itself.

  I let out a gasp. And I...

  ...had underestimated her.

  Late 2024 drawing of Ellie, Dorsey, and Celestia. The pixelated blur is to censor the text that was no longer canon about them, and it shows how much Frostbound Blood evolved.

  Latest sketch of all characters I'm able to draw. They're definitely gonna kill me if I were teleported inside my novel.

  Skymint is still the best Polarman. But I don't like Clinton.

  Along with Aria Windcore to be one of my favorite characters, even though she had less screentime: Sorry not sorry, Aria...

  Fuck Blood