The room chilled.
He knew too much. The shell infanticide had been in place since the rule of Levana’s sister, Queen Channary, after a shell sneaked into the palace and killed their parents. No one would be pleased to know their babies had not been killed at all, but instead locked away and used as tiny blood-platelet-manufacturing plants.
Winter blinked, imagining her own body as a blood-platelet-manufacturing plant.
Her gaze dropped again. The ice had extended to her wrists now.
That would not be beneficial for the platelet conveyor belts.
“Does the accused have a family?” asked the queen.
Aimery bobbed his head. “Records indicate a daughter, age nine. He also has two sisters and a nephew. All live in Sector GM-12.”
“No wife?”
“Dead five months past of regolith poisoning.”
The prisoner watched the queen, desperation pooling around his knees.
The court began to stir, their vibrant clothes fluttering. This trial had gone on too long. They were growing bored.
Levana leaned against the back of her throne. “You are hereby found guilty of trespassing and attempted theft against the crown. This crime is punishable by immediate death.”
The man shuddered, but his face remained pleading. It always took them a few seconds to comprehend such a sentence.
“Your family members will each receive a dozen public lashings as a reminder to your sector that I do not tolerate my decisions being questioned.”
The man’s jaw slackened.
“Your daughter will be given as a gift to one of the court’s families. There, she will be taught the obedience and humility one can assume she has not learned beneath your tutelage.”
“No, please. Let her live with her aunts. She hasn’t done anything!”
“Aimery, you may proceed.”
“Please!”
“Your queen has spoken,” said Thaumaturge Aimery. “Her word is final.”
Aimery drew an obsidian knife from one of his bell-shaped sleeves and held the handle toward the prisoner, whose eyes had gone wide with hysteria.
The room grew colder. Winter’s breath crystallized in the air. She squeezed her arms tight against her body.
The prisoner took the knife handle. His hand was steady. The rest of him was trembling.
“Please. My little girl—I’m all she has. Please. My Queen. Your Majesty!”
He raised the blade to his throat.
This was when Winter looked away. When she always looked away. She watched her own fingers burrow into her dress, her fingernails scraping at the fabric until she could feel the sting on her thighs. She watched the ice climb over her wrists, toward her elbows. Where the ice touched, her flesh went numb.
She imagined lashing out at the queen with those ice-solid fists. She imagined her hands shattering into a thousand icicle shards.
It was at her shoulders now. Her neck.
Even over the popping and cracking of the ice, she heard the cut of flesh. The burble of blood and a muffled gag. The hard slump of the body.
The cold had stolen into her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, reminding herself to be calm, to breathe. She could hear Jacin’s steady voice in her head, his hands gripping her shoulders. It isn’t real, Princess. It’s only an illusion.
Usually they helped, these memories of him coaxing her through the panic. But this time it seemed to prompt the ice on. Encompassing her rib cage. Gnawing into her stomach. Hardening over her heart.
She was freezing from the inside out.
Listen to my voice.
Jacin wasn’t there.
Stay with me.
Jacin was gone.
It’s all in your head.
She heard the clomping of the guards’ boots as they approached the body. The corpse being slid toward the ledge. The shove and the distant splash below.
The court applauded with quiet politeness.
Winter heard her toes snap off. One. By. One.
“Very good,” said Queen Levana. “Thaumaturge Tavaler, see to it that the rest of the sentencing is carried out.”
The ice was in her throat now, climbing up her jaw. There were tears freezing inside their ducts. There was saliva crystallizing on her tongue.
She raised her head as a servant began washing the blood from the tiles. Aimery, rubbing his knife with a cloth, met Winter’s gaze. His smile was searing. “I am afraid the princess has no stomach for these proceedings.”
The nobles in the audience tittered—Winter’s disgust of the trials was a source of merriment to most of Levana’s court.
The queen turned, but Winter couldn’t look up. She was a girl made of ice and glass. Her teeth were brittle, her lungs too easily shattered.
“Yes,” said Levana. “I often forget she’s here at all. You’re about as useless as a rag doll, aren’t you, Winter?”
The audience chuckled again, louder now, as if the queen had given permission to mock the young princess. But Winter couldn’t respond, not to the queen, not to the laughter. She kept her focus on the thaumaturge, trying to hide her panic.
“Oh, no, she isn’t quite as useless as that,” Aimery said. As Winter stared, a thin crimson line drew itself across his throat, blood bubbling up from the wound. “The prettiest girl on all of Luna? She will make some member of this court a happy bride someday, I should think.”
“The prettiest girl, Aimery?” Levana’s light tone almost concealed the snarl beneath.
Aimery slipped into a bow. “Prettiest only, My Queen. But no mortal could compare with your perfection.”
The court was quick to agree, offering a hundred compliments at once, though Winter still felt the leering gazes of more than one noble attached to her.