#ohh how the gloves are kinda drooping too is so .. so. .. so !!!!!!!!!!!

[lanternlightss]

hello my beautiful mutual. bardven going through it doodle for u

AAWAAHAH

HELLO MY WONDERFUL BEAUTIFUL MUTUAL. PPOINTS !!!!! AT THEM !!!!!!! OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS

oh the absolutely defeated pose and slumped shoulders and the bubbling of the knife imbedded into the BACK …. back stabbed …. and how bard is trying to comfort, the hand reaching to cradle the jaw …. it’s okay, just hold on a moment longer,,,, the matching with the knife and hands 👁️

arson oh my god. arson im holding this up high and pointing excitedly at you and cheering

[gerbiloftriumph]

The Silence Between Snowflakes

(also on ao3) ~ 5/8 - Snowbound

~*~*~

Alexander thought he had lost Rosella somewhere behind him as he raced through the twisting corridors.

He had quickly uncovered most of Daventry castle’s secrets. Abandoned secret passages filled with dust and cobwebs that made him stifle sneezes. Alcoves long ignored behind ancient tapestries that overlooked odd little abandoned gardens. Closets stuffed to the hinges with cleaning supplies, torches, blankets, pillows, and the other sorts of things the guards needed to keep the castle suitable for royalty. It was almost possible for Alexander to make it from one side of the castle to the other without ever setting foot on the rich red carpet that covered most of it. Rosella wasn’t supposed to be able to track him through it.

Except, she did.

He had shoved himself into one of the forgotten alcoves, knees drawn up to his chin, watching snow fall beyond the dusty window, when she chirped from the other side of the tapestry, “You might think you know this castle well, but you forget: I grew up here. I know things about it you’ll need two decades to find.” She squeezed next to him. “Ohh, it’s cold.”

“It’s my fault,” he whispered, watching the guards trooping through the snow, the red and blue flashes of their uniforms striking against the endless white road. His warm breath fogged the frozen glass, turning them into colorful little blurs that faded out of sight around a snowbank.

“What is? Scoot over,” Rosella said, all elbows and knees and trying to find a comfortable place to sit without jabbing him—the alcove was too small for one person, much less two.

Alexander twisted his hands in his scarf. Rosella traced patterns in the frosted window with her fingertip.

She was better at getting reluctant courtiers to talk than Alexander knew, even if her means were a little less refined than Graham’s gentle coaxing. The expectant silence she radiated was more uncomfortable than being squished into this alcove. Alexander made himself start talking to fill some of the weird wariness.

“When Roberta…Number Three,” he corrected himself, “came in to tell us what she saw….” He took a deep breath, not wanting to admit this next part but knowing it would help. “When I lived with him, I could tell what he was feeling most of the time. It was the only thing that stopped me getting…um. Hurt. But. She was so afraid, even more than she was letting on. I think…she was worried she was going to get fired for not doing more, not getting rid of the problem like a guard should. And I…I don't want her to feel helpless. I wanted to see if I could do something to help her.

“I knew there was magic out there. I could feel it. Even last night, I sensed it was coming. Living with him, I got used to the taste of it. It’s like…it’s like hearing bells in another room, or like feeling dust in the air, but dust like the sugar dust in the Fey’s shop. Not a bad thing, even when he was doing it. And I thought, if I didn’t hide this time, if I went to see the castle with her, maybe I could help. I don’t want anyone to be upset anymore. I’m tired of being useless. I want...I want them to be happy.

“But when we got to the gate, everything felt wrong. Like there was this greasy stain over the whole castle. And I didn’t pay any attention to what Gra—Dad was doing, and he touched it, and the roses, and I should have stopped him, and I didn’t, and now this is happening. It’s my fault.”

It felt like the most he’d ever said at once in his life, and he sank deeper into himself, not at all sure he’d said anything right.

Rosella kept tracing circles in the frost, ice gathering under her fingernail. It was almost like she could do magic herself the way she could drag words out of people just by sitting there. He watched, wondering what it felt like for ice to spread up your hand. The others might not have noticed, but he had. The warmth of the fireplace and everything had probably slowed it down, but it was definitely moving. Graham had tugged down his sleeve at some point, so Alexander wasn’t sure how far along it was by now. What would happen when it reached his lungs, his heart?

“First, you couldn’t stop Dad from marching right up to those gates even if you tried,” Rosella said dismissively when she decided he wasn’t going to say anything else. “You saw Number One try, and they’ve known each other since the day Dad came to Daventry. So, quit thinking that. But that’s not important. If you can sense it, is there anything you can do to stop it?”

“I’m not sure,” Alexander said. “I know…a few things.” He shifted, evasive. “Maybe.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I…I don’t want to make it worse.”

“At this point,” she pointed out, “it might not be able to get much worse.”

“I could make it permanent.”

“It seems pretty permanent now.”

“That’s true.” He sat silently. Then, anxiously, worried about making her worry: “Did you see it spreading?”

“I did. And I saw him shivering. He’s hiding it, but you can see it hurts. What do you know about ice magic?”

“It’s not just magic,” he said. “It’s more like a curse. That greasy, sticky feeling. There’s something extra to it.”

She looked flustered by her own helplessness. This wasn’t something she could fight her way through. He thought about how she played Battle of Wits, how she always went for direct attacks and never around the board. “Why can’t I feel it?”

“You might not have been around magic enough to notice.” He’d grown up immersed in it, breathing it in, like glittery dust lining his lungs.

“Do you know how to lift a curse?”

“I don’t know.” His shoulders drooped and he stared at his fingertips.

Rosella, though, stumbled (fell, more like) out of the alcove and reached back to help pull him out, too. “That’s better than a no. Come on, let’s go back to the sitting room. At the very least you can have a look at it and see. I bet you know more than you think you know.”

But when they got to the sitting room, they paused. Valanice was pacing an otherwise empty room, clutching a tray with a teapot on it in her hands and fretfully muttering under her breath. She glanced up, and her face was ashen. “Where’s your father?” she asked.

“Isn’t he here?”

“No, he...” her face crumpled, and her eyes darkened with realization. “I’m going to kill him. He wouldn’t.”

“He would,” Rosella said.

“Would what?” Alexander asked.

“Go back to the castle,” Rosella said. “It’s Dad. Of course he would.”  

“I’m going to kill him,” Valanice repeated, slamming the tray on the table. The teapot rattled.

“He’s going to freeze,” Alexander breathed, barely audible.

Valanice heard him anyway and gestured dismissively. “I’m sure he’s got his cloak.”

“No, the ice. It’s spreading up his arm. Didn’t you notice?” Rosella said.

That drew Valanice up short, and she looked at her daughter with a perfectly unreadable, blank expression, something she’d honed in her role as queen dealing with unpleasant news. For Rosella, that look was as good as a scream: she knew exactly what it meant, and she almost flinched.

“Alexander and I noticed. It’s slow, but I saw it. I don’t know how much time he’s got if he’s gone to a place made of actual ice. We were...I mean, Alexander kinda knows a little magic. A bit. He might be able to do something.”

That, too, took Valanice aback, and she glanced sideways at her son with an appraising eye. Alexander squirmed beneath her gaze. “A bit of magic,” she said, thoughtfully. “Well then. Get your gloves on, find a warm hat. Let’s go.”

“Go? To the castle? Really?”  Rosella’s eagerness was tempered with surprise. “You...want us all to go? Just walk right up to the castle?”

“I’m not going to let my kids go there by themselves. What kind of mother would I be? I know you’re going to head down there the moment I turn my back, and I’m not going to sit around here wondering what’s happening to him.” She picked up a heavy woolen cloak and twirled it over her shoulders, a match to Graham’s but in her favorite color. “And anyway, he and Number One are probably both staring at a wall of ice, completely unable to get in. Now, what did I say about gloves? Shoo, go on, get them on.”

~*~*~*~

The gates were open.

Yawning, silent, open. Blue ice glittered, beckoning Graham forward. He lingered just outside the tunnel that led under the portico into the courtyard, wary of stepping forward, sure the gates would slam behind him and leave him trapped. Nothing within moved, nothing indicated the gates even could close. They seemed frozen into place, as immovable as a mountain.

But they had seemed that way yesterday when they were shut, too.

His icy fingers would no longer bend, and his wrist was starting to lock up now. The chill was well into his shoulder, and he couldn’t stop shivering despite his warm cloak and thick gloves. He drew in a deep breath, tasting the frost in the air, and, back straight, walked forward with as much confidence as a king.

The entrance was cold, but not nearly as cold as he’d expected. The exterior walls were so much colder than the interior, like it was leeching heat from its surroundings and hoarding it inside. He passed the guard house (empty), and he glanced a little nervously at the grates in the entrance tunnel’s ceiling, in case they did have some defenses ready to pour down on intruders—although to be fair, burning oil would probably chill back to regular oil before hitting him. He entered without incident.

The courtyard was smaller than he would have anticipated, but that was because it was crammed absolutely full with dozens of small buildings, much more than a functioning castle needed. Duplicate stables, barracks, keeps, kennels, aviaries, greenhouses, all with different designs. All the doors were blocked off with snow mounds and icicles thick as dungeon cell bars, proving that no one used those buildings.

The most impressive thing, and the building that seemed most likely to be occupied, was the central keep with the spindly tower stabbing into the skies from its exact middle. He walked around lamp posts of all different varieties, past snow coated benches and bushes, to approach what seemed like the main door. Like the gates, this door seemed frozen open. Snowflakes blew inside, covering what little of the entrance hall he could see.

He had definitely beaten the royal guards here. The courtyard was entirely unmarred by footprints other than his own lone trail. That was for the best—if Number One caught him here, Graham would catch quite the earful, king or no.

He hastened inside, cloak snagging on the door frame. Before him spread a cavernous room, as icy and clear as he’d imagined it. Huge reflective pillars soared upward. Alcoves, which would normally hold things like suits of armor or busts of nobility, were empty, but numerous. Graceful tapestries were frozen into place across them. The floor was checkered with large tiles in different shades of blue, and a little way inside, a snow-white carpet trailed off into the darker shadows of the hall before meeting an impressive staircase that swirled around and up, an impossible structure that promised more fascinating delights deeper inside.

With all the snow piled up within the door frame, his weight almost didn’t trip the pressure plate trap set up along the door. Almost. He didn’t feel his heel pressing down against one of the tiles as he walked, couldn’t hear the bell that started ringing in the depths of the castle, didn’t sense the crackle and snap of ice as figures stiffened, distracted from their original tasks, and started moving toward the courtyard.

He did notice the second trap tile, though—mostly because this one opened up a slide beneath his boots and sent him careening into a labyrinth of frosty rooms and tunnels beneath the castle. The tile slid back into place, the heavy ice perfectly silencing his startled yelp. Another, different bell started jangling elsewhere in the palace, interrupting teatime. The queen set down her cup and watched the chiming bell, the cat at her side flicking its long black tail.

~*~*~*~

Royal Guard Number One was already shivering. He and the rest of the guards were bundled up, but even with all the quilted padding and scarves and gloves and earmuffs-under-helmets and everything, he still felt the chill ache in his bones. But when he considered Graham’s frozen hand and how miserable that must be, he walked faster. He was determined to fix this. He would march right up to those gates and knock them down if he had to. He would find a cure for his king. He had to. Failure was not an option.

He didn’t have to knock anything down, though. The gates were open. Practically inviting the Daventry troop forward.

“That’s. Different than it was. Should we go in?” No2 asked. His voice was oddly hollow sounding, echoing off the castle walls.

“Something’s here,” No3 muttered. She nodded at the set of footprints leading inside.

“Stay in line. Move forward,” No1 said through teeth gritted to stop them chattering. The little group of colorful guards spread out inside the courtyard, looking around with wary curiosity, checking every corner for foes. Hands rested on sword hilts, ready to attack—but there was no one here. The courtyard was entirely still. No sign of any life. Their footsteps made soft crunching noises, but other than that and the gentle whisk of the wind twirling among the banks, the courtyard was silent.

And absolutely crammed with a ridiculous variety of structures of every shape and type. Whoever had planned this layout had definitely been at the mead too hard, and No1 should like to have a word with the castle steward about this mess. It was almost overwhelming to consider how much stuff was here, frozen in haphazard places. Benches, lampposts, fountains crammed between unnecessary buildings of every make and type—all coated in snow and ice.

No1 took a deep breath, held it, and let it out in a rush, an old, favorite way to maintain his poise. His breath fogged in front of him; impossible to hide his little calming trick in this weather. But when the cloud faded and his vision was clear, the courtyard was not the same as it had been. Not at all.

He found himself face to face with himself. Well. Sort of himself. It looked like a royal guard of Daventry, the same uniform and everything, but mangled, abstract. A sculpture done in ice, wacky and wild. It was taller than he was, and the feather part of the helmet crooked out at a ridiculous angle. He glanced behind him and saw more of the sculptures standing around his men. They’d just appeared. At least, it felt like they had.

He probably simply hadn’t seen them. They were practically translucent, a purest sort of ice. It was a trick of the light, a trick of the angle he was standing at, that had hidden them from view. And the courtyard was so crammed with other things, he just hadn’t noticed these particular statues among the rest of the chaos. Which was admittedly odd, since there were at least two dozen of them standing all around at first glance, if not more....

No one else had noticed them before this moment, either, it seemed, and all were surprised. Numbers Two and Three were now pressed against each other, trying to take up as little space as possible while still standing in about the same place—four or five sculptures seemed to be hemming them in. No4 was standing a little distance from them, not slouching for once but stiff as a tree. Larry squeaked and leapt into Kyle’s arms, and they stumbled back a pace from one of the sculptures posed as though it was reaching for them. Everyone was shivering, staring, baffled.

No one had gone for their swords—they were frozen sculptures, not enemies, after all. The team had merely been startled, and looked sheepish for being frightened for no decent reason.

No1 made to step around the sculpture in front of him, and it stepped with him.

It mirrored his movement perfectly. Its steps were silent. His hand instinctively reached for his sword hilt. The ice sculpture did the same, with the reverse hand, exactly like a reflection. He eased his hand back, and he watched his reflection mimic him. At his side, behind him, he thought he detected more movement. More sculptures. Circling and trapping him. Stars.

“Ah. I suspect you weren’t here a moment ago, were you?” he asked, quietly, careful not to goad the thing into attacking his men if he could avoid it. The sheer number of their foes was well beyond anything his team, well trained as they were, could handle. It was a pointless question. He already knew the answer. It hadn’t been a trick of the light hiding them—these sculptures had marched into place, alerted to the Daventry guards’ presence by something. Their blank visages were grim.

The ice guard cocked its head, and then it seemed to repeat the same question back at No1, the same intonation, but apparently in reverse. Alive, cognizant, and, No1 was absolutely, breathtakingly, certain, dangerous.

“Swords!” No1 yelled, whipping out his weapon. Didn’t matter how futile this was. They had to try. Around him, he heard the rasping metal sounds that indicated his men had obeyed. “As you will!”

But as he drew back for a slashing cut, to bring the ice creature down, something struck the back of his helmet, making his ears ring, and while he was momentarily distracted, freezing hands tighter than manacles grabbed his wrists, his arms, his legs, his shoulders, and he struck out desperately, but he was seeing double and his sword caught a bad angle, rebounding uselessly off the ice, and something heavy crashed down over his helmet, and everything went dark.

~*~*~*~

Even from a distance, Valanice could see that the castle gates were open, and that no one, not her husband, not the royal guards, not even someone belonging to the ice castle itself, was around. Her children trailed after her, and she wondered if she’d made a mistake. She should have asked the Feys to babysit them—never mind that Alexander and Rosella were almost eighteen. The two of them would probably rush off, stubborn as their father, to go have an adventure without someone watching them. Even the bubbly Feys could bring out their protective parent sides if asked. They’d done such a good job raising Taylor after all.

Too late now. She didn’t feel comfortable sending her kids back alone, if they would even listen to her in the first place. Both her husband and the whole team of guards were missing, and that likely meant something nasty was underfoot.

Speaking of underfoot: the courtyard’s snow was a tumultuous mess. It was impossible to determine anything in the mire. She couldn’t verify, in that tangle of tracks, if Graham or the guards had even been here or if they’d been waylaid on the road. But that, too, made her pause. The castle dripped loneliness like melting icicles, so who had made these tracks if not the Daventry folk? And if they had been here, where were they now? They hadn’t had that much of a head start, perhaps no more than twenty minutes, and Valanice and her family had been moving fast.

And why did the snow look so overturned? It looked like they’d been in a fight. But there was no one here. There simply hadn’t been time.

Rosella made a strange sound in the back of her throat and lunged for something half buried in the snow. Alexander drew up next to her, and they both stared, crestfallen, at the bright red feather that had clearly been yanked from one of the royal guards’ uniform helmets.

That proved matters simply enough. Valanice’s hands curled into fists, but that was the only sign she let herself show in front of her children. “I want you to go back to the castle,” she told them, in a sharp voice that left no room for argument, the voice of a queen. “Now. I want you to send a message to the villagers once you’re home. I want everyone to come to the castle, immediately, and I want the gates barred the moment the last villager is safe.”

But when they turned, they found the ice gates barred themselves, entirely frozen over, like they’d never been open in the first place. As immovable as the Daventry castle foundation. Valanice felt a shiver of fear dance along her spine (though, again, she showed none of her uncertainty).

Alexander’s eyes were half closed. He was glaring at the gate, muttering under his breath. “Not the curse,” he said, slowly. “That one’s ordinary magic. It’s dusty, can you feel it?”

“Can you reopen it?”

“Um. I’m not. I don’t know. Maybe? It...it’s strong.”

Valanice smiled, tried to set him at ease. “I have a feeling you’re stronger than you’re letting yourself believe.”

They coaxed him toward the gates. His boots slid haphazardly over the trampled snow, and he stood in front of the icy walls, concentrating hard.

Far, far above them, beyond the royal family’s sight, someone watched. And someone smiled, a cold, sharp, wicked smile, with rather more pointed teeth than a smile normally had.

The traps were all springing closed faster than expected, even with the day’s delay he’d needed to recover after encouraging the castle to come here. He wasn’t sure whom the ice labyrinth had caught (he hadn’t yet gotten a report) but whoever it was, he was sure he could use them as leverage against dopey Graham. The man loved his citizens to a fault. He’d planned on using whoever it was as a bargaining chip: trade them, possibly with all fingers and toes intact if he was in a good mood, for the crown prince.

The ice guards had been notified by the bell at the entrance hall. They had been coming up to check on the labyrinth to see if the interloper was suitably valuable for trading. But they had been distracted by the appearance of a whole pack of Daventry royal guards nosing their way into the courtyard. He’d stood at the tower window gleefully watching the ice guards surround the hapless royal guards and pick them off one by one, starting with that annoying Number One, and dragging them all away. Daventry's security was pathetic. It was a marvel the place was still standing. The royal guards should be ashamed.

Once they were done locking up the guards, the ice troop was going to come back and check on the labyrinth captive. But, suddenly, Manannan decided that whoever it was probably wasn’t important enough to worry about at the moment.

Not when the boy had strolled in of his own volition.

With Queen Valanice and Princess Rosella, even. It was enough to make him purr with delight. This was just too delicious, too lucky, too easy.

He’d shut the gates behind them almost as soon as they’d entered, practically vibrating with the urgency of holding the family inside before they turned around and left. For a moment he thought he’d timed it wrong, thought the boy had noticed the magic as it was cast and might be able to do something about it in the process. But Rosella had satisfactorily distracted them by finding something in the snow.

Tragically, the ice guards were a little too busy taking care of the royal guards to attend to the family. One of the various traps in the entrance hall would have to suffice. He even had a lever that he could pull to drop them straight into a single icy cell, and the more he thought about it, the more eager he was to use it. He wouldn’t have to scour the labyrinth but could simply pluck Gwydion out of his cushy life and make him undo this awful curse.

He padded lightly into the depths of the tower, scheming. The things he could do with all three royal family members in his claws.

Meanwhile, below, Alexander stepped back, breathing raggedly. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I don’t...it’s so strong. I don’t know how to open it. I don’t know the words. I don’t know how. I’m sorry.”

Valanice reached out and gently touched her son’s shoulder, and he flinched away. “Don’t fret, Alexander. Your father and the guards are here, and they probably need our help. We shall simply have to find them together, and then sort out an escape after that. We shall be fine—the Cracker family always is. All right?”

He nodded almost imperceptibly, looking guiltier than ever, like he could sense her unease.

“But we shall have to stick very close together,” she said. “No wandering off, right, Rosella?” The last two words were pointed.

“Right, Mom.” Rosella bounced on her heels, face upturned to study the tower, not actually listening. “We should hurry.”

“No, we should take this slowly and carefully,” Valanice decided. “Haste is what got your father into this trouble in the first place. Come along, let’s go inside. That wind is biting. And then I shall decide what to do next.”

As they came upon the entrance hall, Valanice, looking for trouble, drew back. She caught her children by the arms to make them wait. Little shreds of red thread were snagged on the icy door frame, easy to spot against the blue. Graham’s cloak. He had made it inside under his own power, she was certain—and her thoughts were confirmed when she found a few of his footprints, blurry but visible and alone, in the snow piled up beyond the door. But then...nothing. The snow petered out, the hall made of hard tiles that revealed nothing.

“Alexander, do you...” she hesitated, not sure of the right word. Feel? Taste? See? “Is there any magic here?”

“Lots,” he whispered. “It’s almost hard to breathe.”

“Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

“Everything’s made of it. But there’s this layer of…something on top? It feels like Gr—Dad’s arm. Sort of greasy. It’s hard to know what’s underneath it, but I think…we should be careful where we walk. The first couple tiles don’t, uh, feel safe.”

“And the rest?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Some are bad, some are good. If we can get to the carpet, we should be fine for a while.”

“Stay close together,” Valanice said, and stepped carefully over the tile where the snow abruptly ended (and Graham’s footprints vanished with the snow—she wondered about that). “Alexander, lead the way, if you please. We’ll see where those stairs take us.”

Alexander stepped ahead of his mother, Rosella at his side as they had promised.

In the tower, Manannan kicked back a lever.

A locking mechanism, entirely unmagical and entirely unnoticeable, clicked open. The floor began to shift.

Valanice saw Alexander and Rosella start to fall as the floor slid away to nothing beneath them. She lunged, slamming her hands against their backs and sending them flying forward. Rosella lost her balance and skidded across the floor face first, and landed solidly on one of the tiles Alexander had warned them about, which opened and sent her deep into the castle. It was a little hard to tell if her screams were of terror or excitement, but they cut off as the tile slid back into place behind her. Alexander fell hard, spinning in circles around and around and around. He saw Valanice drop into the pit that had almost claimed him and his sister, and he tried to scramble to his feet and reach her, but his momentum carried him to a different tile and he, too, disappeared into the castle depths with a cut-off yelp.

~*~*~*~

The slides had been Manny’s idea. He didn’t have the magic to carve and bespell them himself anymore, but the lady of the castle had been more than willing to oblige once he’d praised her strength and cunning and ability. He’d been bored and frustrated for numerous reasons, and she had been eager to please. The slides went all over the castle’s underbelly.

Some dropped people into a frozen labyrinth of spiraling rooms with no exit. Some didn’t bother with the tormenting labyrinth but simply dropped people soundly in the dungeon. Not as many, though: the labyrinth, a pre-existing feature of the castle composed of rooms as numerous and varied as the buildings in the courtyard, was tricky and confusing and uncomfortable, and he rather enjoyed leaving people to stumble around it helplessly for a long while before hauling them out. One or two of the slides led to pitch black ice pockets with no way out until one of the ice guards retrieved the captive or left them there to freeze (he’d been in a particularly devious mood that day).

And one spat people outside in a snowbank, although that one was near the stairs and mostly existed to annoy Mordack, who sometimes didn’t pay attention to exactly which tile he was stepping on when he descended the steps.

Mordack was the one who had learned of this traveling castle, the strange icy palace that left silence in its wake as it drifted with the winds. Mordack had sleuthed out its whereabouts, had helped lead Manannan, cursed and humiliated, to its gates. Manannan had found wheedling his way into the castle’s good graces a snap.

Everyone else she had met in her travels had demanded that the queen take her castle and leave. Threatened her, were rude and angry to her, and made her angry in kind. No one else had asked her if they could stay.

She was incredibly lonely…and incredibly easy to exploit. The castle had been his in less than a week.

A promise here, a smile there, a compliment every once in a while, and the castle and its ice servants were his to command. He promised to increase its strength, to magnify its storms tenfold. To protect the queen from invaders who would love nothing more than to destroy her for being different, as he himself in his current shape was different. Comparing the two of them had been a stroke of brilliance, he thought. Made her much more susceptible to trusting him as an equal outsider, not knowing he planned on dropping her off a cliff the moment he had his own magic back.

Still, once he was in charge, he wasted no time at all in guiding it to its new destination in Daventry proper (even if it was the slowest, most time- and power-consuming form of travel he could imagine, spreading its storms long before it even came close to the horizon).

Mordack could have complained about the snowbank slide, then, since he was the one who had helped his brother find this place. But Mordack was never one to complain about being the butt of a joke. At least a snowbank was softer than a goblin spear thumping across his shoulders. He still bore the scars to remind him of his abused years underground. He was careful to never complain in Manny’s presence about his treatment, about Gwydion’s treatment, about anything. Just in case Manny decided to send him back.

It took Manannan quite some time to navigate the ice castle, which was cavernous even on a human scale, much less his current cursed self. His stroll to the entrance hall was entirely unhurried. He knew how large the trap had been, and he was quite sure he had all three family members safe and sound. Best to let them shiver together and wonder. The anticipation was frequently more deliciously terrifying than the end result, he’d found.

He sauntered up to the pit, composing his fuzzy features into something suitably boastful. He gleefully called out, low and threatening, “Hello, hello, hell—” he stopped.

Valanice, and only Valanice, was standing at the bottom of the pit, arms crossed, tapping her boot and scowling up.

~*~*~*~

Standing at the bottom of an icy cell had not improved Valanice’s temper. She was already on edge, and with this she was positively fuming. She’d been standing here for ages. Her children could be anywhere by now, and her husband had definitely gotten himself into tremendous trouble, and she was stuck here waiting. The time for gentleness and politeness was long gone. She was more than ready to deliver a scathing attack to whoever deigned to look in on her.

But best laid plans began to melt away the moment she heard the voice. The voice that laced her nightmares. And the remnants of said plans shattered when she saw what was leaning over the edge of the pit, inhuman features distorting around a human voice. The face didn’t match her memories, but it didn’t matter. It was the voice that mattered.

Helpless, stumbling against the wall, spiraling back eighteen years ago, back to that horrible night. The sound of the green crackling magic banishing the final notes of Graham’s lullaby to their children, the pain of her wrists pinned behind her back, the aching loss that cursed her every step from that moment on, that moment when her son was stolen from her by this monster. At least the face was appropriately inhuman now, as he himself was inhumanly cruel.

Only her queenly respectability stopped her from swearing violently. “Manannan,” she snarled, as cold as her surroundings.

From behind Manannan, another voice spoke, and this one was all the more familiar, and all the worse for the strange icy echo behind it. It pressed deep into her heart, and she felt something splinter and break inside of her as she realized who else was in this castle, who else had been lost to Manny’s treachery.

All the different emotions, between hearing him and hearing her and losing Graham and her children and the guards and everything cut her knees, dropping her to the ice, startled and afraid and confused and lost.

From above, that oh so familiar voice said: “Did you catch another nice mouse, my dear friend? You do have so many traps. I wish we had not made quite so many, it does cause—oh. You are not a mouse.”