Turns out yelling at ice all day is not a sustainable battle plan.
By the time the sun finally dragged itself down behind Everfrost’s mountains, my throat hurt, my head pounded, and I was pretty sure I’d invented three new ways to swear at inanimate objects.
We’d spent the whole day in the wardroom.
Maera and Soren had set up this very official series of tests: shards of Hollow-touched ice in warded basins, maps with glowing markers, chalkboards full of symbols that looked like a toddler had gone feral with geometry.
My job: “Do what you did in the hall. Feel what you felt. Speak to it.”
Very scientific.
Sometimes it worked. I’d focus on the memory of the statue’s whisper, on Aaric’s face, on the way it felt to stand at the Yule fire and let him go, and when I told the black frost to
