The Duke of Snow and Apples (23 page)

“Don’t you care about me?” he screamed—so childishly self-absorbed. “What if I went away and died like Father did? Would that make you happy?” He’d never felt so
angry
before, or been so cruel. His power pulsed in his head like a living thing, and he released it in a wild torrent—his loneliness, his jealousy, his neediness, all of his ugly, ungrateful feelings, unfurling like a filthy banner before his mother’s eyes.

A little color actually flashed through her—a glimpse of dark, agonized purple. His mother pressed her fist to her mouth and fled the room. When Frederick tried to follow, his stepfather stepped into the doorway.

“What have you done?” Sir Bertram demanded. “I’ve never seen your mother like this. What’s
wrong
with you?” All Frederick could do was stare, openmouthed and ashamed. For once, his stepfather was the first to back down, retreating from Frederick to follow the duchess down the corridor.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked the wind.

He found out when his mother tottered into the dining room that evening—her entire being nearly swallowed up by Gray.
Wrong, wrong, wrong
, Sir Bertram’s words clanged in his head
.
He wasn’t special. He wasn’t blessed. He was
wrong.

The Gray increased, and not only in his mother, but in the servants, too. He realized that the deadening of their colors alongside the increase of his anger and spite couldn’t be mere coincidence. His world of secret colors died by inches before his eyes, and whose fault was that? It was a world to which only he held the key. And he couldn’t seem to stop it.

Going away to school seemed like a blessing. Far from home, he tried locking away his power for the first time. He avoided other boys, tried to bring his emotions under control, while wrestling with the heat that built behind his eyes, the heat he’d always welcomed before he realized how dangerous it was.

At school, he received training on how to control Fey magic, magic that could be safely leashed with words and phrases. The only instruction he received for his own freakish powers was through observation of the consequences. Near the end of term, he remained an outcast, his emotions stifled, his magic restrained, but the other boys—during those rare, controlled times he released his magic—remained free of the Gray.

Charlotte loved him.

“Damn her!” Frederick growled. “Heaven spite and curse her!” The heated words escaped his mouth in a puff of steam quickly wicked away by the wind. Did Charlotte have any idea how her sudden confession had cracked him, and how close she’d come to breaking him completely?

She hadn’t just ruined him. She’d torn away the lies he’d spun around himself, lies of satisfaction, pride, and contentment in a life that was just as empty, lonely, and pathetic as it had been ten years ago. He couldn’t be content living alone in his cold place. Every human being yearned for warmth, himself included, even the searing emotions of jealousy, the scalding torment of desire.

Thanks to cruel fate, his warmth made others cold. When he allowed himself to feel, the curse escaped and drove people away, and left him alone regardless of what he did. He couldn’t promise to never feel anger, or envy, or disgust, or sadness. The only answer was to feel nothing at all.

When he was fifteen, and the letter arrived at school with the news that his mother had died, he’d already garnered a reputation for disappearing by himself at odd moments, so nobody noticed, except for the irate schoolmasters, when he locked himself in his rooms for half a day as grief boiled over inside him.

He returned to Snowmont Abbey for the funeral, hoping against hope that, with his newfound self-control, he could withstand the temptations of his power and keep the Gray from encroaching any further. But with the funeral came well-wishers, solicitors, death taxes, contracts bearing the royal seal, urgent letters from tenants and neighbors, the neglected duties of his estate, and the prospect of examining his mother’s last will and testament with Sir Bertram—despite the man’s refusal to spend a moment alone with him. It all rose up to devour every spare minute. It was all too much, too painful, too soon. He couldn’t keep it all in, he couldn’t scrounge a moment for himself to ease the frustration, the grief, the terror building up in him and Farnsby—he’d been, he’d been—

Lady Alderley’s carriage rocked to a stop in front of Charmant Park’s front doors. Jolted back to the present, Frederick peeled his hands off the railing and jumped down to open the door. Mrs. Templebaum descended first, still in heated debate with Lady Alderley. Afterward, the marchioness leaned on his outstretched arm as she lowered herself out.

However, Frederick’s mind wasn’t entirely on his work, and Lady Alderley’s booted foot came down on a slick patch of ice, sliding out from under her. The elderly woman pitched backward with a whoop, and Frederick barely caught her in time.

“Moon-addled layabout!” She cursed a few words in Kelok as she righted herself, making Frederick’s ears burn bright red—literally. “Look lively, John! I’m not so old or tongue-tied I can’t spell your hide any color I choose!”

“Yes, milady.” He didn’t need to use his power to see that the formidable marchioness retained her full emotional spectrum. It wasn’t so impossible to understand—they shared no attachment beyond having a whim and fulfilling a whim, and nothing strong enough to render Frederick anything other than a faceless “John Footman” to her.

His attachment to his mother, to the people of Snowmont, was what had doomed him.

The day after the funeral, standing on the bank of the Basca, he stared into the dark waters as if a better world lurked beneath.

Farnsby, his loyal gamekeeper, came upon him unawares, his hat in his hands, muttering condolences in his warm, weathered voice. “You’ve grown into a man,” he said. “Your mother would be so proud of you.”

Rage leapt in Frederick’s heart too quickly for him to suppress it, like dark lightning through his veins, and he turned on his gamekeeper, power blazing from his face.
Let him see what I am. Let him see what I’ve done, and decide if any mother could possibly be proud of such a freak.

Farnsby cried out in horror, shielding his eyes. Quickly, Frederick hid his power, driving it back behind his eyes, but not soon enough. His gamekeeper’s face contorted and he stumbled away. No magic was needed to recognize the look of utter terror that had been written upon his features.

Frederick followed Lady Alderley and Mrs. Templebaum inside Charmant Park, and removed one lady’s heavy fur-lined pelisse and the other’s muff. The numbing solace of routine used to be all it took to keep emotion at bay.

Think of the Basca
. Voices drifted down from a nearby staircase, guests practicing for the theatrical. Even the barest perception of the timbre of Charlotte’s voice sent heat coiling up his spine, until the only way he could escape was by diving into memory entirely.

The sound of the river as it cut through the Whitewood, its soft, liquid murmur a contrast to the harsh, loud sounds he made as he thrashed through the forest the day after his confrontation with Farnsby, bent on claiming some privacy and purging himself of pain any way he knew how, even if it meant hiking into the woods like a beast.

Underbrush groaned under the heedless trample of his boots, and low-hanging branches thick with leaves hissed and crackled as he tore them aside. He wanted to stomp like a brute, he wanted to snap and break something, and he went deeper into the woods than ever before, to distance himself as much as possible from the results of his freakishness and his failures.

With the Basca so close, its water music sang in his ears even as the first gunshot went off. The bullet missed Frederick by inches, burying itself in the tree in front of him. Frederick whirled, senses and power expanding, to see Farnsby standing behind him, a gray thread of smoke spiraling up from the muzzle of his gun.

Farnsby had served as gamekeeper all Frederick’s life, he knew the Whitewood better than the duke himself. He’d taught him the best time to hunt grouse and gnome, how to suck raw yoke from a cloudhawk’s egg. He’d held his five-year-old fingers in his scarred, chapped hands to show him how to tie fishing line. Frederick trusted him with his life.

When Frederick released his powers, he saw only Gray. His doing. His fault.

His rifle spent, Farnsby tossed it to the ground and went for the throat, his weathered, familiar hands tightening, forcing the air from Frederick’s windpipe, dragging him down. Frederick struggled, tried to make use of his own strength and height, but his man’s power dissolved before his boy’s fear, his boy’s shame. The nearby Basca roared in his ears.

“I’ve got to do it, m’lord,” Farnsby said, in a voice that rang as empty as a well. “There’s no reason not to. No reason at all.”

Frederick’s mind recoiled from reason, recoiled from the truth of what he’d done, what he’d driven Farnsby to. As lights and colors danced before his eyes, desperate survival crushed out all other thoughts. In Allmarchian society he was the wealthy, Pure Blooded Duke of Snowmont, but now, here, he was just a fifteen-year-old boy who didn’t want to die.

He dragged his power up into his head, feeding it on instinct. Farnsby’s colors splashed across his vision—he wasn’t all Gray after all, Frederick could dimly see the shades of thought and feeling beneath the Gray pall—loathing, discomfort, fear. Fear. Frederick focused on that sickly yellow color, and concentrated with the strength of his own overwhelming panic. The yellow exploded in all directions, flashing so bright Frederick almost closed his eyes against it.

Farnsby released his hold with a scream. Howling, clawing at his own face, the gamekeeper rolled off him. Frederick tried to stand, his whole body trembling with shock, until the gamekeeper’s flailing arm struck him across the face, and Frederick tumbled and rolled over into empty air. He slid down the ravine, Farnsby’s weight bearing down on him, until they both landed in the Basca below.

Cold. The river was so cold it bit like millions of diamond-sharp teeth, gnawing at him, tearing him away piece by piece to get at the last scrap of warmth he had left beating in his chest. The current dragged and wrestled him, as Frederick fought to gulp air before sinking below the surface, where constellations of bubbles swirled around him in the murk.

Frederick had no idea how far the river took him, but eventually it widened, slowed, and he thrashed his way into the shallows. The water felt like it had seeped into his very bones, to freeze around his marrow.

He’d never felt so cold in his life. So cold his bones felt like glass, splintering and clinking within him. So cold he couldn’t think, couldn’t remember, couldn’t feel. So cold, when he found the strength to lift his head from where he’d washed up and looked back to see Farnsby’s motionless body drift by on the current, he felt nothing at all. The Basca’s million teeth had cleaned him out, left him hollow.

And Frederick discovered that cold had its uses. It tempered him. It numbed and slowed the pulses of emotion in him that caused others so much suffering. If he could just trap some of that cold inside of him, carve a place out of the memories of moonless nights and winter winds, he could bring himself under control and bind whatever was wrong with him.

He’d failed in so many ways, not least of which the position he was born to. Self-loathing welled up, hot as blood, seeping to the surface, and he tamped it down, remembered the cold, numbed himself inch by inch. He curled his fingers into the dirt, and inwardly he imagined there was a space inside of himself, a cave of unfeeling stone carved by the relentless teeth of the Basca, icicles drooping from the ceiling, frost riming the walls. He could hide here, if he chose, whenever his emotions threatened until he gathered enough strength to send them back into the dark.

He slumped back against the reeds, his body shuddering with the real chill of the outside world. It was too hard. He could do it, but it took every conscious thought. How could he keep himself locked away and still be responsible for Snowmont? If he went back, the solicitors and the Council of Blooded would cast the Entailment upon him, the bone-deep connection to his lands and estates that had been held in regency by his mother since he’d inherited the dukedom at the tender age of three.

If he went back.

He heaved himself into a sitting position and stared at the river. People drowned in the Basca all the time. When he didn’t return, the servants and tenants might send hounds or wind-searchers, and they would find the place where Frederick and Farnsby had fallen into the river. Watermen and their undines might find Farnsby, but as for Frederick…well, the Basca eventually led, as all rivers do, to the sea, and no Waterman was powerful enough to find anyone in that, regardless of how many water elementals he employed.

Snowmont would go to someone else. A distant cousin, perhaps, but a better man for the land and its people than Frederick could be. His cousin would then shoulder the Entailment and all the land’s responsibilities, and everyone would be better off.

“I have to do this m’lord. There’s no reason not to.”
Farnsby had seen the darkness, the wrongness in Frederick and had tried to stifle it with force. Frederick would make sure no one else would ever be driven to that extreme of desperation again. He wouldn’t return to Snowmont—let them think he was dead, and rejoice. He, meanwhile, would make his way to parts of the world untainted by the warmth of memory, places where he could remain cold and unknown. Places where he could find some small purpose for himself that would allow him to make up for all that he’d broken and spoiled.

Outwardly shivering, but inwardly calm, Frederick staggered to his feet, and started walking.