Chapter 2 The Ice Dragon Heir

Zeph,

By morning the frost on the window had melted, and I almost managed to believe I had dreamed that part too.

Almost. I stood in front of the glass for a full minute, checking it like a suspicious landlady, and found nothing: no ferns, no letters, only a wet streak where the sun was already climbing the glacier. The mark on my collarbone was warm again and perfectly ordinary. I buttoned my new grey uniform up to the throat until the collar scratched.

"You look like you're about to be hanged," Nysselle said from her bed, with one eye open.

"I didn't sleep."

"Nobody sleeps the night before he comes back." She rolled over and stared at the ceiling. "The torches went out last night. Did you see? Everyone thinks it was him."

I stopped with my hand on the top button. "Who?"

She sat up so fast her pencil fell out of her hair. "Zeph. Please tell me you're joking. Vaelor Drakthane."

I knew the name. Everyone in the kingdom did, the way you know the name of a storm that has flattened the next town over. House Drakthane was the oldest family left in the realm, and the only one that still carried true dragon blood. Ice dragons, the stories said, the kind that once froze whole armies where they stood. The heir had been at Frostveil since he was twelve. I had read about him in a pamphlet, in one dry sentence that somehow sounded frightened.

"I thought he was away," I said.

"He was. The Crown sent him north three months ago on some royal mission. It's very secret, and nobody's supposed to talk about it, so naturally everyone does." She pulled on her boots, talking fast. "Harrowmere, they say. There was a rebellion in a village, and he went in alone, and when the king's soldiers got there a day later" She made a flat gesture with her hand. "Quiet. Very quiet, and very cold."

"That's just a rumour."

"Maybe." She didn't look as though she thought so. "But Thaerion Valcrest's father sits on the royal council, and Thaerion told me with a straight face that the heir came back with his coat soaked to the elbows. And it wasn't his own blood."

I wanted to say that was nonsense. Instead I said nothing, and we went down to breakfast.

I didn't tell her that my collarbone had felt cold since I woke up, or that I had spent ten minutes in front of the window checking it for frost like a madwoman. I only pulled my sleeves down and followed her out. I told myself that a girl who couldn't light a candle had no business being afraid of a boy she had never met.

I tried to eat. The porridge was grey and lukewarm and tasted of the pot it had been boiled in. I pushed it around my bowl while Nysselle named every table for me in a low voice, like a general explaining a battle to a very small army. Voss money over there. Old mining families there. The twins who once set a dormitory on fire and were forgiven because their grandfather paid for the chapel roof. I nodded in the right places. Even Lysander Voss only glanced at me once across the hall before turning back to his friends, which would have been a relief if it hadn't felt so much like the quiet before something fell.

At noon the bells began.

They rang from the main tower, twelve slow strokes, and by the third one every student in the building was heading for the courtyard. Nobody had told us to go. It was just that kind of bell. I got swept along with a stack of library books pressed to my chest, three heavy volumes on elemental theory I had been desperate to read, since reading was the only magic I had.

Nysselle pulled me up onto the low wall by the east arcade. "Best view," she whispered. "Trust me, I've done this before."

The crowd packed in behind us, rows of blue coats with silver glinting at the cuffs. The teachers stood on the steps in long black robes, and at the top was a tall woman with iron-grey hair, the Headmistress, whom everyone seemed careful not to look at directly. She held her hands together in front of her and looked like someone waiting for a verdict.

Then the gates opened.

I have thought about that moment many times since, and how slowly it happened. The noise didn't stop all at once. It drained away from the front to the back, like water running out of a basin. Students at the edges stopped laughing mid-sentence. A boy near me dropped his apple and didn't pick it up.

Three riders in black cloaks came through the gate, and behind them, on foot, came one man.

He was taller than I expected, which was my first stupid thought. He walked without hurry, the way a person walks when he has never needed to be anywhere sooner than he chose. His black coat was torn at one shoulder, and a dark stain across the front had dried to the colour of rust. His hair was white, not grey and not blond but truly white, like snow that no one has touched yet, and cut short and a little wild from the road. Wherever his boots touched the cobblestones, frost bloomed.

It spread from each step in fine branching lines, racing across the stones and up the base of the fountain, creeping up the legs of the nearest students, who stepped back without seeming to notice. The worst part was the sound, a faint, steady crackle, like thousands of tiny bones breaking.

Nobody spoke, and nobody seemed to breathe. Even Lysander Voss, ten feet away, had gone white around the mouth.

"That's him," Nysselle whispered, barely moving her lips. "That's Vaelor."

I couldn't look at his face properly. It was sharp and beautiful in a way that felt like an accusation, as pale as the stone around us, and his eyes were the lightest blue I had ever seen, nearly colourless. They moved over the crowd without stopping on anyone, as if nobody in it mattered. As if he was counting the exits.

I realised I was holding my breath. My mark had gone cold again.

It wasn't a gentle cool this time. It was a bite. The cold sank under my collar and spread across my chest as if I had swallowed a mouthful of snow, and my fingers clenched so hard on the books that the corners dug into my ribs. I told myself it was nerves. I told myself a lot of things.

What happened next was an accident, and I have gone over it a hundred times since, looking for the place where I could have stopped it.

The frost reached the wall where we stood. It slid across the stone under my hands, cold enough to burn, and I flinched. That was all, one small flinch. But the stack in my arms tipped, and the top book slid free and hit the cobblestones with a flat, enormous slap that echoed off every wall in that silent yard.

Everyone turned to look at me.

The book spun once and came to rest against the toe of a black boot.

"Zeph," Nysselle breathed. "Don't."

I jumped down anyway. I didn't decide to. It simply seemed worse to stay frozen on that wall while the whole academy watched my book lie at his feet. My legs carried me through the gap in the crowd and onto ice that crunched under my shoes, and I bent to pick it up. My collar, loosened by the climb and my pounding pulse, slid sideways.

I felt the air touch my skin, and then I felt him go still.

When I looked up, he was staring at my collarbone.

His face showed nothing at all, and that was what frightened me. It was the cold, sudden attention of a hunting animal that had finally heard the sound it had been waiting for. The black centres of his pale eyes narrowed to thin vertical slits.

Frost raced up the toes of my boots.

I heard a hundred people take a breath at once.

"Where," Vaelor Drakthane said, "did you get that?"

His voice was quiet, lower than I had imagined and rough from the road, but clear. He didn't ask it the way people ask questions. He asked it the way a judge does.

My mouth had gone dry. "It's a birthmark."

"Your name."

"Zephyrine. Vaelthora." My voice cracked on the second word, and I hated it.

Something crossed his face. It was gone almost before I saw it, but I have never forgotten it, because it was the last thing I expected to see there. It looked like pain. It wasn't anger or curiosity, but a flinch, as if I had touched an old wound with a cold finger. Then his face shut again like a door.

Behind me, Lysander Voss, who apparently wanted to die, said in a thin voice, "Heir Drakthane, she's only a scholarship"

Vaelor didn't look at him. He only turned his head a little, and the frost on the ground jumped forward three feet and stopped a hair's width from Lysander's expensive boots. Lysander shut his mouth with a click.

"Pick up your book," Vaelor said to me.

I picked it up. My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped it again.

He stood over me a moment longer, and I felt the cold coming off him in waves, the way heat comes off a forge. I could see a thin scratch along his jaw, half healed. Up close, he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

Then he stepped around me and kept walking, and the crowd opened for him like a wound.

I thought it was over, and my knees began to go loose with relief. He stopped three paces past me. He didn't turn around. He spoke so quietly that I think only I heard.

"Cover it."

I barely managed to speak. "I'm sorry?"

"That mark. Keep it hidden. Don't let anyone else see it." The frost around his boots crackled once. "If they do, they will kill you for it."

He said it like a fact. It wasn't a threat or even a warning. It was more like a weather report, and somehow that was worse than anything he could have shouted.

Then he was gone, up the steps and through the great doors with the three riders behind him. The silence broke slowly, one whisper, then another, then the whole courtyard rushing back into noise.

My collar was still open. I fixed it with fingers that wouldn't work properly, one button at a time, while the noise rose around me like floodwater. The mark was still cold, and I couldn't stop thinking about that. He had walked away, but a small circle of winter stayed behind under my skin, as though he had left something of himself there by mistake and hadn't noticed.

"Interesting," said a soft voice on my shoulder.

A young man stood beside me, tall and elegantly dressed, with dark hair swept back and a smile that arrived a moment before his eyes did. He held a pair of grey gloves lightly in one hand, like someone who had strolled over to enjoy a play.

"Thaerion Valcrest," he said, with a small bow. "We haven't been introduced, though I think, after that, you'll find a great many people want to be."

"I didn't do anything," I said.

"No." His smile widened, and something under it was measuring me. "That's the remarkable part. In four years I have never seen Vaelor Drakthane stop walking for anyone."

He glanced down at the silver on my collarbone, then back up at my face.

"Whatever you are, Miss Vaelthora," he said pleasantly, "I would be very careful who sees that."

He walked away. I turned, slowly, and found that every single person in the courtyard was still looking at me.

I had just done exactly what Vaelor told me not to do, and I had done it in front of hundreds of people.