Page 79 of Cursed Crowns
He didn’t deny it. “Why the knife?”
“Because your earth—however fancy it is—isn’t enough to cast the spell you’ve asked of me.” She raised her palm, revealing the jagged wound. “It has to be blood.”
Alarik stared at her hand for a long moment, his expression unreadable. “How much blood?” he said at last.
“I don’t know,” Wren confessed. She had been trying not to dwell on that part. Raising a mouse from the dead was one feat, but she suspected the cost of raising a human would be much higher. “But wemightneed to draft in one of those wolves out in the—”
“No.” The word was sharp. “We will not harm the beasts.”
“But—”
“I saidno.” He bared his teeth—not a smile, but a threat. “The beasts of Gevra are my brethren. They will not be harmed.”
Wren hesitated. “I don’t know how much blood it’s going to take...”
“Then we will find out.” Alarik reached into his coat again. He removed a slim silver dagger.
Wren moved to take it, but he snatched his hand back. “I’d sooner hand it to your grandmother.”
“This spell is going to requiresometrust,” said Wren. “Unless you want us to freeze to death in here, with your brother.”
Alarik fingered the dagger. “I confess I have always imagined a more valiant death for myself.”
“I can picture an ice bear eating you,” said Wren. “How many bites do you think it would take? Two, maybe three?”
“You’d like that, I’m sure,” said Alarik drolly.
Wren turned her gaze to Prince Ansel, drawn to how his fair lashes cast spidery shadows along his cheeks. “There’s a chance this might go wrong. I’ve never raised a human from the dead before.”
“I had assumed as much.”
“It’s not a good idea,” Wren went on. The more she looked at Prince Ansel, the less sure she became. Why disturb the peace he had found in death? And all just to drag him back to this snow-swept hell, where no one truly appreciated him? “I mean, morally speaking.”
“You may leave the matter of morality to me.”
She glanced sidelong at him. “Because you are such a pillar of it.”
The king bristled, and she got the sense that she had finally,somehow, offended him. “I promised I would do everything in my power to bring Ansel back,” he said curtly. “And a promise made by a Gevran is cast in iron. It is not easily broken.” A pause then, his lips twisting. “Although if Tor Iversen had kept his promise to protect Ansel with his life, then you and I wouldn’t find ourselves in this predicament.”
Wren looked at the ground, thinking of the anguish on Tor’s face when he had visited her the other night. Ansel’s death haunted his every thought, and still he could not bring himself to regret saving her.The memory of those words curled around her heart, squeezing too tightly. “Then I would be dead.”
“And Gevra would be all the better for it,” said Alarik.
Wren didn’t even flinch. “Who did you promise?”
“My sister,” he said after a beat. “It was the only way I could get Anika back on the ship and out of your country before her anger got her killed.”
Wren didn’t have to cast her mind back very far to recall the princess’s fury, how her rage had erupted from her like a volcano. Even the sight of Wren standing in the throne room the other day had turned Anika rabid.
“But, in truth, this endeavour is more for my mother than Anika,” he added, as an afterthought. “She hasn’t been right since my father died. And now this...” He gestured at Ansel, without looking at him. “This loss, I fear, will be the end of her. Ansel was her favorite.”
“I can see why,” said Wren.
She hadn’t meant it as a barb. In fact, despite the king’s general odiousness and appalling lack of charm, she was beginning to understand that there were some things Alarik did care about. Things beyond war and bloodshed. His loyalty to his family had led him to this moment, shivering in the depths of the Fovarr Mountains, pouring all his hopes out to a witch who would run him through with his own sword if given half the chance.
“I didn’t know Ansel very long,” she went on, “but he was always kind to me. He struck me as thoughtful. Good-natured. Gentle.”
“He will be those things again.”