Chapter 10: The Taste of Victory
The cold of the throne room was a different beast entirely. It wasn’t the wild, screaming cold of the cliffs; this was a patient, seeping chill that rose from the marble floors and dripped from the tapestries. It settled in the joints, a dull counterpoint to the other, more specific ache I carried.
Every shift on the hard obsidian bench beside the throne sent a reminder. A tender, deep-set throb between my thighs, a pleasant weariness in muscles I’d strained last night. From the way Mary subtly adjusted her stance, hand resting on the hilt of her sword, I knew she felt it too. Our eyes met for a second—a flicker of shared, secret memory—before we both looked back to the center of the room.
Ellie held court.
She was a vision, a strategic one. She wore a gown of winter-blue velvet, its high neckline and long sleeves speaking of stern propriety, but the way it clung to her hips and the generous swell of her breasts whispered something else entirely. Her blonde hair was coiled in an intricate crown of braids, a few artful strands escaping to frame her face. She looked every inch the queen: poised, attentive, impossibly warm against the frozen backdrop.
Nancy stood at her right hand, a half-step behind. She wore a simpler dress of cream wool, her curly hair a dark, vibrant cloud around her shoulders. She held a ledger, nodding as Ellie listened to a guildsman complain about ice-locked trade routes. But her presence was more than clerical. Her stillness, the gentle curve of her smile as she watched her mother speak, added a layer of nurturing authority. Together, they were a perfect circuit: Ellie the emotive force, Nancy the calming current.
“The eastern pass has been clear for three days, Your Grace,” the guildsman insisted, wringing his fur cap.
“And the sky over the Serpent’s Teeth looks like spoiled milk,” Ellie replied, her voice carrying effortlessly in the cavernous space. It was soft, but it had a core of steel. “Your wagons would be snow-coffins before the first league. Wait for the red dawn. You know the signs as well as I.”
She dismissed him not with a gesture, but with a slight shift of her attention to the next petitioner. The man bowed, defeated and oddly comforted, and retreated.
I leaned an elbow on the arm of our bench. “Look at them,” I murmured, my voice low enough for only Mary to hear.
“I am,” she said, her gaze fixed.
“No, really look. Your mother is performing a kind of… emotional engineering. Each smile, each head tilt, it’s calculated to get the best result.”
Mary’s lips quirked. “And Nancy is the stabilizer. Grounding the voltage.”
“Exactly.” I shifted again, the ache a sweet punctuation. “Meanwhile, we look like a pair of armed twigs they found in the forge.”
We did. In our practical, dark trousers, high boots, and linen shirts, with our swords at our hips and leather bracers on our wrists, we were stark lines against their soft curves. My short red hair felt utilitarian. Mary’s cropped blonde cut was efficient. We were diagrams of function. They were landscapes.
“They’re beautiful,” Mary stated, a simple fact.
“Dangerously so,” I agreed. “It’s their weapon. More effective than your cannon, in here.”
Mary’s hand flexed on her sword hilt. “My cannon works at a longer range.”
“But can it make a grown man want to cry and thank you for telling him no?”
She snorted, a soft, unladylike sound that echoed faintly off the vaulted ceiling. A courtier glanced over, then quickly away.
We lapsed into silence for a while, watching the dance. A farmer’s dispute over a frozen stream was resolved with a promise of stewards. A request for a festival permit was granted with a stipulation about firewood reserves. Ellie’s fingers occasionally brushed Nancy’s wrist as she took the ledger to note something. Each touch was a tiny, private spark in the public gloom.
“I keep thinking about last night,” Mary said abruptly, her voice barely a breath.
“Which part? The part where you almost blew your hand off, or the part after?” I kept my eyes forward, watching Ellie laugh at something a florid-cheeked vintner said.
“The after. Specifically, the look on Mom’s face when she told you to taste the victory on me.”
A slow heat, unrelated to the braziers, crept up my neck. “It was a good look.”
“It was a ‘I own this entire kingdom and everyone in it’ look.” Mary paused. “Including us.”
“Especially us.” I finally glanced at her. Her profile was sharp, thoughtful. “You mind?”
She shook her head once.“No. You?”
“Never.”
We’d never needed elaborate philosophy to explain the shape of our family. The connection was the foundation. The love was the structure. The rest—the messy, gasping, glorious tangle of it—was just the furniture. Practical, comfortable, and uniquely ours.
The line of petitioners was thinning. Ellie caught my eye over the head of a wool merchant. Her gaze was a physical touch, warm and heavy, sliding over my practical clothes and seeing right through to the marks she’d left. A small, knowing smile touched her lips. Nancy followed her gaze and smiled too, a softer, more secretive version. My breath hitched.
Then the great doors at the far end of the hall groaned open. A draft, colder than the rest, swept through, making the torches gutter. Two guards marched in, flanking a woman in travel-stained grey furs. She wasn’t a petitioner. Her stride was too direct, her bearing too rigid. She stopped at the base of the dais and bowed, not deeply.
“Your Grace,” she said, her voice raspy from the cold. “An envoy from the Northern Reaches.”
Ellie’s welcoming mask didn’t slip, but I saw the subtle change. The warm, accessible queen receded; the ruler of a frost-bound kingdom, daughter of forgotten kings, took her place. Nancy’s hand, holding the ledger, went perfectly still.
“You are far from home, envoy,” Ellie said. “Speak.”
The woman straightened. She had a sharp, wind-burned face and eyes the color of flint. “My lord sends word. The ice in the Dead Waste is cracking in ways it should not. He has heard… rumors. Of thunder from your western cliffs.” Her eyes, sharp and assessing, flickered past Ellie, past Nancy, and landed squarely on Mary and me. On our swords, our boots, the lingering scent of forge-fire and ozone we probably still carried. “He wonders what new tools are being forged in this kingdom. And to what purpose.”
The pleasant ache in my body tightened into a coil of alertness. Mary’s posture, beside me, went from relaxed to ready in an imperceptible shift. Her hand was no longer just resting on her sword hilt; it was curled around it.
The throne room, so recently a theater of domestic tranquility and minor grievances, suddenly felt vast and hungry. The faces in the tapestries seemed to lean in. The obsidian throne behind us hummed with a deeper, colder frequency.
Ellie didn’t look at us. She leaned back slightly, the picture of regal ease, but her voice when it came was no longer warm. It was clear, cutting, and carried the full weight of the ice behind it.
“Tell your lord,” she said, “that my purposes are my own. And my tools…” She let the word hang in the frozen air, her gaze finally sweeping to meet mine. A fierce, proud heat burned in her blue eyes. “My tools are sharper than he can possibly imagine.”