Page 16 of A Bond of Ice and Glass
“Maelena. Or Mae, Lena—whatever you want to call me. But not Princess or Queen or Your Majesty. Please,” I whisper. “We’re friends, right?” She tilts her head slightly to the side. It’s like she’s still trying to figure out if she can trust me. Truthfully,I’m doing the same. “Also, the only way you know I’m up so early is if you’re up just as early.”
“I have to clean a certain amount of things in this dreadful place or I won’t get breakfast.” My stomach drops and I immediately want to tell Loch to change that, but her rose gold chains catch my sight. She did kill Noble’s father, but even this seems cruel. “Like this morning, I was downstairs, past the dungeons. Did you know that there were things that were saved from your parents’ rule? The books, in particular, were heavily raided and taken out before the castle was burnt down. When many of your people saw signs of dragons coming, they started taking everything that was worth any value, like jewels and gold. But of course, the librarians took the old forbidden, treasured books and ran. Many called them stupid for it. I thought they were the smartest ones.”
She winks and I agree with her.
“I think my mother would have agreed with you. She once told me a book is worth more than its weight in gold sometimes, but we need gold to survive; therefore, it had to come first.”
“Maybe we need old knowledge of those who lived and died and put everything in books to make sure we don’t repeat their actions.” She shrugs. “Anyway, the books were brought here to the library that’s underground here. It’s sort of a secret place. Well, secret from the royals of this world, not so much from the common folk around here. Would you like me to show you it?”
“Yes!”
I nearly jump in excitement. She doesn’t have to ask me that more than once. I’ve seen the village just once, and since then, I’ve been kept on this side of the castle for a week straight now. I haven’t been feeling my best, and Loch didn’t want me going far, but I feel better today. I need to leave these six rooms and find something else to see.
Nymala leads me out, past the guards who whisper to each other when we are further down the corridor. Nymala opens the locked door at the end with a key from her pocket, and her eyes find mine as she slips it back into her pocket, showing me where it is before we leave. The castle is busy, filled with servants rushing about. Many don’t even notice us, and it makes it easy for Nymala to lead me through them to a staircase hidden behind a wall. It gets quieter the lower we go, until we come out to a long, dark corridor with nothing but stone walls and fire pits.
“There’s stolen witches’ history down here too,” Nymala whispers. “I haven’t been able to find out who brought them here, but they are interesting.”
“I don’t know much about witches,” I confess. “Well, no more than fairy tales from my parents that I vaguely remember, but not much. Your kingdom’s to the far north, right?”
“Yes, you’re right. We have a city there and many towns, all kept well hidden from the elements and non-magic folk,” she explains softly, like speaking to a child. “If you want to learn our history, maybe I should start at the beginning? A princess should know, Maelena.”
The doors to the library are guarded and locked, but the minute the guards see Nymala, one of them unlocks the door before they both immediately move to the side. I spot a flicker of fear in their eyes as they watch her go past, and she wiggles her pinkie finger at them. The blond guard on the left looks at her a bit too long with rage in his eyes, and she glares right back at him. Only when the door is locked behind us, leaving us at the top of another dark staircase, does she explain.
“That one tried to drop a sleeping potion into my drink, and we both know what he would have done if I hadn’t sensed it. I heard him laughing with his friends about using the witch for a night and sharing me. I dropped a potion into his drink the nextday that burnt off his cock.” I cough on thin air, and she pats my back. “Yeah, that’s usually the reaction I get. Now all the guards are a little fearful of me.” She sighs like it’s a bad thing. I’d be scared of her too, but he deserved everything he got. “And Noble was pissed. I had to scrub the outside of the castle for two weeks straight until my hands bled from cutting them on the ice,” she adds in a whisper. “Still worth it, though. I’d burn all their dicks off if I could.”
My lips twitch before I laugh, and she joins me until we both smile at each other.
We go down the spiralling staircase in silence, holding onto a thick metal bar that has worn down over time, making the metal silver. It smells like books the further we go, the musky smell that sometimes makes me think of the forest. Eventually, the rock walls give way to a giant library, spread out for what looks like miles below the entire town, and I gasp at the sight of it. We’re above the shelves here, and there are rows of them, dozens and dozens of rows, and there must be hundreds of thousands of books.
“You said some books were saved… this is a lot of books.”
“Well, it’s not just your family’s royal books, but books are sent here by common folk and nobles from everywhere. I’m sure there are a lot of stolen books too, and the funny thing is, there is no history on who built this place and began the library in the first place. It’s a mystery. This library takes books to store and keep safe from the world. They don’t care where they are from. Noble’s family are the guardians of books basically,” she explains. “There’s a lot of power to be had between the pages.”
“I never was given many books growing up, unless they were for learning or about the king,” I admit. “But my uncle always tried to sneak me in the odd romance book or the book on magic when I was a teenager. They gave me hope there was more than the doomed future I was given.” I touch her arm as we step intothe library and off the stairs. “Has there been any news on my uncle?”
“No,” she says quietly. “I suspect the king has him as a prisoner, along with his daughter, Ambre, who resided in the castle. Noble didn’t manage to get them out with you. That’s all I’ve heard.”
Loch didn’t tell me that. I know he was protecting me, but my uncle is one of the few people I have left in my family, and I need to know. It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask her about Freyren… if she knew who Freyren was in the castle, but I don’t. I can’t trust her enough to ask unsafe questions. She is a new friend and I have to be careful what I say.
Nymala leads me past the first few rows of bookshelves, down to a wall where there are tapestries hanging against the stone, seven of them in a row. They’re not in the greatest condition, and for a moment, all I see is someone holding me against another tapestry, kissing me, demanding me, and I wanted him so badly… I blink and the vision is gone.
Was it a memory? Was that the king? I don’t know, but I don’t like how it makes me feel. The king stole me, took me as his, and used my body. I almost don’t want to remember that, knowing it must have been painful and horrible to experience. Maybe it’s why my mind refuses to remember.
I focus on the first tapestry. “What is this?” I blurt out as I look.
I’ve seen a hundred tapestries in my childhood home, and none of them ever had dragons on them. This one does. There’s a dragon and a witch on her back, the witch’s dark hands glowing silver like the moon. She looks like Nymala.
“That is our oldest ancestor. Witch history can be complicated, but…” She looks at me. “Our ancestors found dragons first, and the dragons were at war with themselves. Humans had turned the dragons against each other, and therewas a great war between the elements they used. Fire battled ice, air battled earth, and on and on, but everyone lost. Crops burnt, homes were destroyed, the sea rose and drowned hundreds of thousands of people, all whilst the dragons battled on. Some were made completely extinct because of it. The witches came in to heal them by using ether, the strongest branch of our magic.”
Ether, that’s the name of the magic she uses, and she shows me it now.
A tendril of it swirls around us both, almost like a firefly, before she clicks her fingers and it’s gone.
“The witches ended up binding themselves and their magic to the dragons to control them. That began an alliance of peace. No more pain, no more destruction, because when dragons are at war, everybody suffers for that. Their wars meant burning and endless death. It wasn’t a kindness to bind them, but it was needed because no mortal or witch standing on the ground is any fight for a dragon in the sky. Not even the dragonmeyers could control them.” She sighs. “That’s how it was, and in return, this witch was blessed with immortal life. But immortal life comes with immortal problems.”
We move to the next one. “Many called her a goddess, and now the witches still pray to her.” I look at the second tapestry where it’s a wedding between the witch goddess from the previous tapestry and a man. “She met a human king, and she fell deeply in love. Until it went wrong.”
We move to the next one, and this one is different. The king is on a throne and he’s frozen into ice, and the witch goddess is hovering in the air above him, her hands outstretched, blue waves of magic flowing out of her body, but her expression? It’s one of hate, of pure anger and heartbreak. I can barely look at her pained face for more than a few moments.
