Stealing Snow (36 page)

I knew in a heartbeat that she’d made a grave miscalculation. The King was sprawled on his back, but he would be back on his feet again in seconds. She might have brought him down from the sky, but she put herself directly in his path.

Margot continued punishing the King with her heat rays, which worked on his wings but did nothing to his armor. He kept advancing.

I summoned my tornado to bring me closer to them, but by the time I touched down, the King had sent paper-thin ice discs
spinning into the air. They sliced into Margot with incredible accuracy and speed. I was too late.

“Until we meet again, Your Majesty,” she said with a deep bow before crumpling to the ground. As I had always suspected, it sounded as though she and the King had a history.

It had not been like in the movies. The King had taken her without so much as a word of preamble.

There were tons of tiny cuts all over Margot’s body. And ice shards stuck out of every single one of them.

I looked up at my father, who was savoring the moment, watching my pain with as much interest as Vern watched
The End of Almost.

I pushed him back with a walloping torrent of snow that shoved him hard against a tall snowbank. I concentrated on the snow above him, causing it to avalanche down. He tried to push back, but he disappeared under the weight of snow and ice.

I knew that this wasn’t the end. He would not go gently under that avalanche. But I’d bought a few minutes before he could dig himself out of the temporary grave I’d built for him.

Cadence had managed to put down the soldier she was battling and had draped herself over Margot. The girl’s eyes were wide and wild.

“Can we save her?” I asked as Fathom joined me at her side. Tears poured down her face.

Blood was already Rorschaching around Margot, staining the snow redder than red. There was so much blood. Too much.

Margot opened her mouth to laugh with difficulty. My chest stung, and I swallowed hard.

“My magic …,” Margot whispered.

Queen Margot’s face began to contort. Within seconds she looked like a normal person. She wasn’t old or young or beautiful. Her hair was short, and she wore glasses. A pattern of freckles covered her pretty olive skin. The freckles killed me the most. I liked them. I hated that she covered them up.

This Margot, the real Margot, looked ordinary, but her eyes were still the same: hungry and calculating. She looked down at herself, aware of the transformation. Her power was gone.

I reached for her. She needed help. I called out to the others to help her. Fathom must have a potion to heal her.

“I’m fine,” Margot vowed. But her eyes didn’t seem to be able to focus on me. Robbers were always confident, even when they weren’t. Robber Rules.

Her body was weeping blood the way the River Witch wept water.

The battle raged on around us, and suddenly Howl appeared beside me, yellow bottle in hand. There was blood on one of her cheeks and on her pretty feathered coat.

“Go. I’ll help her.”

Howl, always ready with a million little bottles, tipped a potion to Queen Margot’s lips.

Margot began to sing.

She brings the snow with her touch,

They think she’s gone, but we know

She will come again,

She will reign in his stead,

She will bring down the world on his head.

Oh come, Snow, come…

I saw Margot differently then. Not just because she was stripped of her magical enhancements, but because she was stripped down to who she was.

Some part of me had hated Margot for bargaining for Bale’s life when I first met her. But now I understood what she was trying to do. She was fighting for her people, for her castle. She was a queen—even more than the Duchess was a duchess or the King was a king. She had laid down her life for her people.

“Your Majesty, you have done your Robbers proud,” I said to her with a bow, kissing her cold hand.

When she looked up at me, she was smiling, but her dull green eyes were drained of their light and mischief. Queen Margot was gone.

The dark sky was silent. It was suddenly very cold. I was never affected by temperature drops anymore, but this one I knew was not merely external.

“You need to go,” Howl said, shivering.

I had never seen her cry before. But frozen tears decorated her magically enhanced lashes.

“
We
need to go,” I insisted.

“I won’t leave Margot. Help the others. And by all means, finish him!” She slipped off her feathered cloak and continued, “Take this. There are more potion bottles in the lining. Bring them to the girls.”

“We’ll be okay,” I said. I didn’t want to take the coat. I didn’t want to see Howl cold.

She shrugged the coat back on and began chanting under her breath. She tenderly placed her hand on Margot’s chest.

Around us, the other Robbers had heard about Margot’s death
and fought with enhanced vigor. Jagger threw the Enforcer halfway across the field using his magically enhanced fire-cuff hands.

Howl was right. It was time to finish this. I headed directly for the spot where I had buried my father in the snow.

I was ready and waiting for him when he burst out of the snow. He was breathing heavily, limbs wobbly.

The King blinked hard. He looked at me and at the snow on the ground between us. It rose and fell like the hollow of someone’s chest.

I concentrated on the snow as the pain flowed through me. I had never lost anyone close to me before. The pain was tinged with something else: guilt. If I was honest with myself, I had never particularly liked Margot—but she had died fighting for me. There should be a special word for this kind of sorrow.

Turning my attention to the mountain of snow behind me, I felt an immediate flash of pain when I thought about what King Lazar had done to me and Mom. But anger alone was not enough to fuel my magic. I thought of the peace I’d found with the Robbers. Finally, I thought about Kai and his buildings. Each one began with a simple snow brick. I thought about snowflakes. I thought about them multiplying. And as I thought about all of this, the snow began to stir. Finally, I thought of the light going out of Margot’s eyes.

My Champion rose from the ice in a jerky Frankensteinian fashion. She looked like me. This Champion had my face.

She was bigger and taller than me—possibly taller than even Vern. She was the fiercest, scariest version of me carved roughly out of ice and snow. She moved with my anger. With my pain.
With every ounce of grief and regret that I felt over Margot. Over Bale.

My Champion tested her limbs in the air and then crushed the nearest Snow Beast with a clap of hands around its icy skull. I could hear the ice break and see the beast’s head begin to fall apart.

I saw surprise register on the King’s face.

I felt a surge of something in my chest. Was it hope? Pride? Maybe the tide was turning. Maybe I had done something he could not.

But the King looked back at the field with new determination.

The remaining Snow Beasts gathered together. Their icy hides began to merge. The group was becoming one larger beast, bigger than my Champion. It was a Snow Wolf that stood a couple of stories high.

I cursed under my breath as the giant Snow Wolf knocked down my Champion with one easy swipe of its claw.

My father laughed and advanced on me, believing that he had the battle in hand.

But I focused on the field again. Everywhere I looked, a new Champion rose up from the snow.

There was a tiny bit of red just above the King’s eyebrow. It was a caked smear of red like the paint in the Whittaker common room that I sometimes got to use when I had been good. The color was Cadmium Red Deep, I recalled. But this wasn’t paint. It was Margot’s blood. The sight of it made me angrier.

The King flew at me. A gust of snowy wind pushed my back to the ground. I struggled to get up. I felt tired. My limbs felt heavy, as if the ice in my veins were no longer propelling me but
was weighing me down. I tornadoed away from him to regroup, to catch my breath, and to regain the strength I had somehow lost.

I landed on a bridge that crossed over where the moat merged with the River. My hands gripped the iron railing. I felt completely and utterly drained.

But the King followed me to the bridge, snow carrying him through the air without wings, like a current. He landed softly beside me.

The King sensed my weakness, too. I closed my eyes for the slowest of blinks, gathering strength I did not have as I rolled away from him. But he was too fast. He was over me again.

I needed to get to my feet. But I was spent.

I did what Rebecca Gershon would do when she faced Storm in this exact situation. (Well, not exactly. She had been kidnapped, but not by her demented patricidal father.) I tried talking to him, stalling as I waited for my power to return.

“Why did you bring me to Algid? I never would have known about this place if you hadn’t taken Bale,” I said.

My father cocked his head, considering. “You were always coming back here, Snow. It’s our fate.”

Below us, I willed my Champions to defeat the beasts and the King’s soldiers. My snow was gone for the moment, but my Champions still followed my will.

The giant Snow Wolf ate one of the Duchess’s soldiers as proof of its new combined power. I heard the Robber girls chanting something. At first I thought they needed me.

But no. It was Margot’s name they were calling. What sounded like fireworks suddenly followed.

A dozen grenades exploded on the King’s mega Snow Wolf. The Robber girls were now focusing all their efforts on one target instead of several. The Snow Wolf blew up into a billion bits of ice and frost. The blast spread so many pieces of it so far that even if it could find its way back together again, reconstruction would take time.

I looked coldly at the King. “You were never meant to find me. And I’m not sure I’m buying into your insane prophecy, anyway,” I replied.

“It is fated, my dear Snow. It is what will be. And you are just as magnificent as the prophecy said you would be,” the King said without a hint of irony.

I realized something was wrong. My feet slipped on the icy surface of the bridge. My body felt even weaker. My hands shook when I called for more snow. Trembling, I reached for the vial that Howl had given me.

The King knocked it out of my hand.

A thin liquid spilled onto the light coating of snow that covered the ice. I reached down and scooped a handful of blue snow to my lips. I didn’t feel anything.

“No cheating, Snow. It was hard for me at first, too. Until I met your mother, I killed countless people by accident,” the Snow King teased.

And now he kills on purpose
, I thought.

I concentrated on what little snow was on top of the ice, whipping up the smallest of tornadoes. It took him by surprise and pushed him back toward the railing of the bridge. He tried to hold himself steady, but his feet slid backward and he was
soon straining against the side of the bridge. I hoped the railing would break, for my father to fall into the water below. It would be perfect. It would be poetic.

But it was not to be.

My snow stopped swirling. I reached out my hands again and nothing happened. The air and the snow stilled and remained motionless. My father stood upright.

“You possess such raw force. I can see that you have had some training, but whoever taught you really should have told you the most important thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That you can’t make life without sacrifice.”

And then I understood what he was saying. I had sacrificed my snow to bring my Champions to life.

The King took another step toward me and restrained my arms. He shouldn’t have been able to reach me. I should have been able to stop him before he got so close.

But I couldn’t. I looked up at the sky and concentrated on the cloud formation that was just beneath the North Lights. I willed it to come close to bring me more snow. But the clouds remained in the same spot. The North Lights themselves were a moody dark blue. They looked melancholy.

“Don’t you worry, daughter. Your power’s not gone. It just takes a little recovery time. Unfortunately for you, you have run out of time. The throne is and always will be mine.”

And for the second time in Algid, I felt a wave of cold wash over and through me. The King was trying to freeze me.

I kicked him as hard as I could, but even when he released
me, I could still feel the cold burrowing into the corners of my heart.

My fingers felt paralyzed. My face felt twitchy, but every muscle was stuck in place. This was different from the battle with the Enforcer. The King was not going to hesitate for any reason. Certainly not out of love for his daughter.

His eyes weren’t just cold; they were distant. They burned with an intense wanting that I didn’t quite understand.

He came back again for more. And this time I was the one pushed toward the edge of the bridge. My body was half-suspended, and I could see the water below.

This is not how I end
, I told myself.

I reached for his face with my claws and for my knife from my dress pocket. I managed to shove the dagger deep into his side, where the chain metal gaped open just enough for my blade to slide through to his flesh.

The King roared in pain. I knew how he felt. The burning of the blade, the unforgiving heat that no amount of cold could temper. He responded with a head butt.

The pain radiated through me, and my ears rang. The King put his hands around my throat, but he didn’t squeeze. He froze, overtaken by the dagger that I withdrew as forcefully as I had stabbed him. I felt myself slipping into whiteness.

I thought of Bale and of me and him at the institute in happier times. Of the kiss near the window at Whittaker. Of the first time he had held my hand when we were so small. I would never get that back if I let myself go into the whiteness.

A new rush of strength surged through me. It wasn’t much,
but enough to create razor-sharp snowflakes. I concentrated, and the King’s face came back into focus. He was not faring well, either. His face strained with the effort of freezing me. My snowflakes fell from the sky onto his face. They were as hard as diamonds and as sharp as glass. They cut into the skin on his face and hands, just like in one of my dreams. Tiny red dots surfaced on his skin. My pulse quickened. I had drawn blood. Cadmium Red Deep. Same as Margot’s.