Two years.
I spent those two years in the Northern Wastes. Kaelen had found me half-dead at the foot of his Ice Wall, still bleeding from the severed mark.
He gave me a room, a healer, and the choice to stay or go once I could walk. No guard waited outside my door, and no command followed the offer.
I stayed. As my wound closed, the land around me began to change.
The cold woke the ancient ice-wolf blood that had slept in my family for generations. What began as frost around my boots spread into the permafrost.
Silver frost ferns, thought extinct, opened in the thawed ground. The starving pack harvested the first crop and gave me a new title: Winter Queen.
From the balcony of Kaelen's citadel, I could see silver ferns covering the valley. A snow-fox fur cloak kept the wind off my sho
