She stepped back and really looked at her little brother.
In a few short months he seemed to have aged. It wasn’t something obvious. Anyone else would say he was still the same lanky adolescent, definitely thinner. Maybe a little taller. But there was a maturity in his face that shouldn’t be there. A knowing look that said he’d seen too much. And it made her blood chill.
Elvatians rarely had more than one or two children over their very long lives. Some lived for ten thousand years or more and never had any. But her mother had been blessed with two, mirror images of each other: Siobhan in her youth, and Bosco merely one hundred years later, the gap between them making her a young adult by the time he’d been born. She’d loved every minute of helping her mother raise him. Until this year’s Winter Solstice, when the queen had come to town and chosen her beautiful baby brother out of all the young boys competing at the festival.
“Not now. I’ll tell you everything later.” He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. “We should go.” He took her hand and pulled her back the way she’d come.
“Wait. This is serious. What do you think would happen to the village if I steal the Winter King?” Visions of a furious White Queen and her soldiers rampaging through the quiet streets searching for Bosco made her cringe. “No one leaves the queen’s service, Bosco.” She squeezed his hand. “I can’t take you home. You know that.”
“Oh gods.” He let her go and stepped back, betrayal written all over his face. “Then why did you even bother to come?”
“To understand. This is what you’ve always wanted. You were so happy to come here. Why would you want to leave all this?” She waved her hand, indicating the fancy embroidered vest he wore over bare chest and arms and on down, to his low-slung leather pants, all the way to his velvet slippers. “I mean, they aren’t very practical clothes for winter, but they are pretty and I assume the queen keeps the fires hot.”
Bosco barked out a short, bitter laugh. “You have no idea.”
“Then tell me. She’s already given you riches and I can smell the extra power on you. If you stay, by the time you reach manhood you’ll be powerful enough to be a Tuathan lord yourself. You’ll be rich. Powerful. Why would you go?”
His face changed, the soft, baby cheeks of adolescence shifting into something suddenly hard and adult. “You don’t know. You can’t.” His voice dropped low. “It started off...nice. She was...affectionate.” Even in the pale light cast by the fairies, she could see his face turn red.
“Do you mean she—” she swallowed hard “—touched you?”
Her baby brother. The one she’d diapered and taught to walk. Taught to run and climb. The one who now had a look in his black eyes that made them deep pools of shame.
She barely heard his next words.
“That’s not the bad part.”
She couldn’t keep the horror out of her voice. “What could possibly be worse than having a woman more than two thousand years older than you making you her bedmate?”
“Making you her bed slave.” A loud mocking voice behind her shattered the quiet of their hushed conversation.
She turned quickly, the whiplash of her braids nearly smacking Freelana out of the air. Standing in front of her was a man who had been a boy when she’d last seen him. Now the jump in her heart froze at his cutting look.
His face had sharpened, and so had everything about him. Once, she’d thought they’d be married but now the ice of the court was in his gaze, making the silver of his eyes unfamiliar.
“Ardan?”
“Don’t you recognize your childhood sweetheart?” He gave her a mocking bow. “Go home, Siobhan. Leave Bosco to serve out his term.”
“You were Winter King. You must have known what the queen was like. You’re older and stronger. You were always the leader when we were young. Couldn’t you protect him?”
“Protect him?” Ardan laughed, his laugh an icy cold seeping into her heart. “That’s rich. You’re just as innocent as when we were children. I’ll tell you who I am and what I do—I’m not his protector, I’m part of his training.”
She couldn’t keep the disgust from her face and his face turned bitter.
“Don’t look at me like that, Siobhan, judging what you don’t understand. You have no idea. You people in the villages, buying your safety from the queen with our young bodies. None of you question what goes on in here.” His lips twisted and he shook his head. “None of you. As long as she stays away from the villages, none of you care.”
Bosco edged closer. He twined icy fingers into hers and whispered, “Can we go now?”
Siobhan nodded and together they edged away from the mocking face of the man she once thought she’d loved.
“Leaving us, are you? Good luck with that, Siobhan.” Bright light flooded the courtyard, reflecting off of the snow. Siobhan threw her hand in front of her, her vision suddenly night blinded.
Four of the Queen’s Guard blocked their escape route, each one holding a sword or pike. She pulled her sword. On the wall a row of archers materialized. Ardan melted back into the shadows, leaving the two of them isolated in the glare. “The queen is on her way.”
She felt Bosco quake all along her side.
“Don’t worry.” She held her sword in her right hand and palmed her escape bubble with her left. She didn’t know how she was going to fight off four of the toughest fighters in the region, but she’d go down in a bloody heap before letting her baby brother go back to a woman he feared this much.
But Bosco stepped up to her side. “No, she’ll kill you. Let me.” And her skinny adolescent brother, without a weapon in his hand, moved in front of her, just as the Winter Queen came into view on the far side of the courtyard.
Dressed in long white furs, Maeve glowed, her power so strong it illuminated the air around her. Tall and slender, like all Tuatha De Dannan, she was almost fragile looking, the bones of her face sharply protruding around her penetrating gaze. There was a rumor that once her hair at been as pure white as Bosco and Siobhan’s own, but now it was streaked with the deep blue of her power and she looked as if she lived on nothing but snow, and ice, and magic.
“Come to me, my fine Winter King. My bed is cold and lonely without you.” The queen reached out to Bosco and beckoned.
Siobhan looked right and left and knew they were out of choices. There was no time and too many foes. The queen herself could blow them to pieces with a snap of one of her fingers, even from far across the courtyard. She had to act now, or Bosco would be lost.
She raised the bubble to her mouth, the ice touching her lips a reassuring cold. She couldn’t compete with the queen or her guards, but she knew the frost. And this one small piece of magic had taken her months to get just right. It would work. It had to.
She blew on the surface and activated the globe. It began to grow as the guards drew closer. She blew harder until the bubble lifted off of her palm. It floated toward Bosco, growing larger and larger until it touched his back, just as the first of the guards reached them. He startled, but it was too late. The bubble wrapped around him, enveloping him in its protective sheet of ice.
He turned as the ball lifted into the air, pressing his hands to the surface and pounding on the ice, his mouth a soundless shout of her name. Siobhan!