Page 43 of Fractured
My handvibratedas I put it down on the page again just like the book had done on the shelf, my mind blank, all the anger faded away.
The ink began to shift again.
It was another one of those things that I’d have never believed had it not happened right in front of my eyes. Myfingers were outstretched over both pages of the book, and the ink that had made those symbols was moving, fading and blurring and rearranging itself—into Latin letters. Forming wordsin English,slowly, like the book was still deciding whether to go through with it. Whether to show me what those symbols meant.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered, pushing my hand down harder so I didn’t disrupt whatever the hell kind of magic seemed to be in this book.
Within the minute, the whole passage had been translated for me.
“The stars named her ending,foresaw a quiet death, a still crown. But frost does not yield—it splits, and through the cracks she slipped; wounded—not the flesh, but time itself. The breath she took after the last breath unraveled more than her own thread. The magic remembers. The realm remembers.”
The words leftmy lips in a whisper—or maybe it was Vair who spoke them? It didn’t matter because we both heard it.
I read the whole passage over and over again, the letters big, impossible to miss or read wrong.
“Is it…is this talking about the Ice Queen?” I asked after the fifth time—and I still wasn’t close to understanding it.
“It is,” Vair said. “Is there more?”
My heart jumped. I turned the page, careful to keep my hand on it at all times, and it seemed all the symbols in the book had shifted, too, and they were all in English now, but…
“It’s the same paragraph. The same words,” Iwhispered, turning page after page until I reached the end of the book. All of it was filled with the same passage.
Vair sat down on the edge of the table again. “Read it out loud one more time, please.”
The way he said it—like he might be on the brink of tears. At least that’s whatIsounded like when I was about to start crying.
But Vair didn’t shed a tear, and I read the passage again out loud, but the words didn’t make any more sense than they did the first time.
A goddamn riddle given to me by a fuckingroomthat had locked me inside itself.
“Is there anything else? Do you havemoreto show me?” I asked after a while, but I got no answer. The room didn’t give a shit—this was all I was going to get.
And I swore I wouldn’t rest until I understood what this passage meant even if it took me the whole day.
Not sure howmuch time passed, but must have been more than a few hours, judging by how numb my ass was.
Still sitting at that table, still with my hand over the edges of the book, still reading the passage that I’d memorized completely by now. “Anything?” I asked Vair, who had jumped off the table and was pacing around the room as he thought.
He, too, had memorized the entire thing.
“Nothing,” he told me, just like the last six times I asked.
Which wasn’t surprising because these words didn’t make a lot of sense.
“The stars named her ending—that’s the prophecy, right?” I said.
“Correct,” said the lynx, coming closer to the table.
“The prophecy that foresaw her death. And thenfrost does not yield—does that mean frostfire?” Themagicthat Vair claimed I’d unleashed when I thought I was going to die in the forest. The magic I hadn’t allowed myself to think about at all, not yet.
“Could be. Through it, she slipped and wounded time,” the lynx said.
“How does one do that?” Because it sounded pretty impossible to me. “How does onewound time?”
“I don’t know.”
Those three fucking words.
