VOLUNGARD

The flower was already wilting when Isabella frosted it.

She hadn't meant to. She never meant to, when she was nervous — it was the one honesty her body insisted on despite every lesson in stillness her father had forced upon her. One moment the pale blue bloom had been sitting in its crystal vase on her dressing table, soft and living. The next, a thin rime of ice crept from the tips of her fingers across the stem, the petals, the curling leaves, turning the whole thing into a perfect, brittle replica of itself. Beautiful and dead.

She pulled her hand away and pressed it against her thigh, hidden in the folds of her gown.

"You frosted it again," said Talicia, not looking up from the ribbon she was threading through Isabella's half-finished braid.

"I didn't."

"The vase is foggy."

"The room is cold."

"Isabella."

"Talicia."

A pause. Then Talicia's warm fingers found the back of her neck, a brief, wordless reassurance. "It's going to be fine," she said. "You'll survive a single day of looking nice."

"I look nice every day."

"You look like you're tolerating everyone every day. There's a difference." Talicia secured the final ribbon and stepped back to survey her work in the mirror. "Today, tolerate them with slightly more warmth. That's all he's asking."

That was not all he was asking. But Isabella held her tongue, because Talicia had been up since before dawn helping her dress for the Peace Summit and she didn't deserve to absorb what Isabella actually wanted to say about her father's instructions.

She turned to face the mirror properly.

The gown was the color of deep winter sky — a blue so dark it was nearly black at the hem, bleeding upward into the silver-white of frost at the bodice. The seamstresses had embedded tiny chips of actual ice crystal into the fabric, charmed to hold without melting, so that she shimmered when she moved. Her brown hair had been dressed with pearls and silver thread, and her green eyes — too vivid, always too vivid, her father had once told her, a touch too warm for a girl of Isveld — stared back at her from beneath dark lashes.

She looked, she supposed, exactly like a princess of the Hollengrams ought to look.

She looked nothing like herself.

* * *

The Peace Summit convened once a decade, and Isabella had attended two of them — one as a child of seven, where she had fallen asleep under a diplomatic table and been quietly retrieved by a mortified attendant, and one at seventeen, where she had stood very still beside her father for six hours and learned that stillness was its own form of exhaustion.

This year the Peace Summit was convening seven years earlier than normal. Today she was twenty, and she was expected to be useful.

The summit was held in the Divide — the neutral no-man's-land between the glacial territories of the Hollengrams and the volcanic south of the Fieros. A great hall of dark stone had been built there generations ago, its architecture belonging to neither tribe, its walls thick enough to hold out both the northern cold and the southern heat. Isabella had always thought it looked like a place that couldn't decide what it was. She supposed that was the point.

The Hollengram delegation assembled in the palace's outer courtyard as the early light turned the ice towers pink. Horses breathed fog. Guards stood at attention in their pale armor, frost glinting off the pauldrons. Advisors clustered around her father with parchments and urgent whispers. Isabella stood to one side with Talicia and watched her father dismiss every advisor in turn with the particular brand of patience that was, in Rowan of Isveld, indistinguishable from contempt.

He was a tall man, her father. Brown hair gone half to silver at the temples now, jaw sharp as a carved glacier, eyes the grey of flint struck just before the spark — that one suspended, dangerous moment. He wore no crown to travel. He didn't need one. Rowan wore authority the way other men wore cloaks.

He looked at Isabella across the courtyard, and she stood straighter without meaning to.

"Walk with me," he said, and it wasn't a question.

She fell into step beside him, away from the attendants and the horses and the cloud of diplomatic anxiety, toward the far wall where the frost crept up the stone in feathered patterns. Their breath turned to vapor between them. She waited.

"You understand the purpose of today," he said.

"We renew The Accord. Both tribes agree, again, that fire and ice do not mix. Everyone nods. We come home."

His expression didn't change. With her father, the absence of change was a language she'd spent twenty years learning to read. This particular stillness meant: you are being flippant, and I am deciding whether it is worth addressing. "The purpose of today," he said, "is to demonstrate unity within the Hollengram delegation. The Purebloods have been agitating. The Fiero Warlords will be watching for any sign that our position has softened."

"And has it?"

"No."

"Then we have nothing to worry about."

"We have a great deal to worry about." He stopped walking. She stopped beside him. "Which is why I need you to be exactly what you are today and nothing else. You will stand where I place you. You will speak when I indicate. You will not offer opinions on things that are not your concern." A pause. "You will smile."

The word landed like a stone dropped into still water. She watched the ripples.

"Smile," she repeated.

"Warmly. But not too warmly."

"That's a very specific temperature."

"Isabella." Her name in his mouth — quiet, final, a door closing. "I am not asking you to enjoy it. I am asking you to remember what you are. You are a daughter of Isveld. You are a Hollengram. You are my heir." His grey eyes held hers. "You are not a girl with opinions. Not today."

She wanted to ask him when she was allowed to be a girl with opinions. She wanted to ask if there was a scheduled date on his diplomatic calendar — perhaps the third Tuesday of the year, after the frost festivals, when his daughter might briefly be a person rather than a prop. She wanted to say that she had spent twenty years memorizing exactly what she was and that she was growing quite weary of the curriculum.

She said: "Yes, Father."

He looked at her for a moment longer than necessary — something almost searching in it, quickly smoothed away. Then he turned back toward the delegation. "We leave in the hour."

* * *

Talicia found her in the stables ten minutes later, pretending to check the buckle on her horse's saddle with great intensity.

"That bad?"

"He told me to smile."

"You have a lovely smile."

"He told me to smile and not speak unless spoken to and remember what I am." Isabella yanked the buckle, which was fine, unnecessarily. The horse turned to look at her with what she felt was excessive judgment. "I know what I am. I've known what I am since I was old enough to be told. I'm beginning to feel I know it rather too well."

Talicia leaned against the stall door, arms crossed, and watched her with the particular expression she reserved for moments when she had something to say and was deciding whether Isabella was ready to hear it. "You're nervous," she said finally.

"I'm not nervous."

"The flower."

"The flower was a coincidence."

"You frosted three roses at breakfast."

"The dining room was cold —"

"Isabella." Talicia's voice was gentle. She stepped closer and laid a hand on Isabella's arm, and Isabella let herself stop pretending to fuss with the saddle. "You're allowed to be nervous. It's the summit. The Fieros will be there. It's a tense day for everyone."

"I'm not nervous about the Fieros," Isabella said, which was mostly true. She had never met a Fiero face to face — the summit was one of very few occasions when both tribes occupied the same space, and even then there were rules, distances, protocols. She had been taught to regard the Fieros as necessary enemies: people to be maintained at arm's length, treated with the formal courtesy extended to a wolf you chose not to antagonize. She felt no particular fear of them. She was not sure she felt anything about them at all.

"Then what?"

She thought about how to answer that. How to explain the particular quality of the dread she'd woken with — not sharp, not pointed, but low and pervasive, like cold seeping up through stone. The sense of a day already decided. Of herself already arranged in her father's careful tableau before she'd ever stepped into it.

"Nothing," she said. "I'm fine."

Talicia looked at her with the eyes of someone who had been her best friend for fifteen years and therefore did not believe her in the slightest. But she was also, blessedly, the kind of person who knew when not to push.

"You do have a lovely smile," she offered again.

Isabella laughed despite herself. It came out short and slightly reluctant, the way her laughs often did when they surprised her. "You're insufferable."

"I know. Come on. They're calling the horses up."

* * *

The ride to the Divide took half the morning.

The land changed as they went — the deep crystalline blue of Isveld's frozen plains giving way, gradually, to a more neutral grey as they crossed into the no-man's-land. The air here smelled different: mineral and damp, heavy with the steam that rose wherever subterranean heat met the surface cold. The sky above the Divide was a perpetual murk of low cloud, and nothing quite grew here, and nothing quite died. It was the most neither-place Isabella had ever seen.

She rode near the front of the delegation, behind her father and his advisors, and watched the summit hall resolve out of the fog ahead of them. Massive. Squat. Built to last and built to impose, its dark stone walls unmarked by either tribe's sigils. The doors were already open.

"There," said the advisor Merin, riding up beside her father and nodding ahead. "The Fiero delegation arrived an hour ago. They're already inside."

Her father said nothing. He just straightened slightly in his saddle — not a tell, exactly, but something. Isabella filed it away.

The courtyard of the hall was shared neutral ground, and as the Hollengram delegation filed in through one gate, Isabella could see the Fiero horses stabled along the opposite wall. Even their animals looked different — darker, heavier, bred for volcanic terrain. Steam rose from a nearby grate in the ground. The smell of sulfur was faint but unmistakable.

She dismounted and handed her reins to a groom. Around her, attendants and advisors moved with practiced efficiency, arranging themselves into their prescribed formation. Talicia materialized at her elbow.

"Ready?" Talicia murmured.

Isabella looked at the dark stone doors ahead of her. Somewhere on the other side, the other half of the world was waiting.

She thought of her father's instructions. She thought of the frosted flower, still and perfect and useless on her dressing table back in Isveld. She thought about smiling.

"No," she said pleasantly, and walked inside.

— End of Chapter One —