The Forbidden Frost Queen

A boy draws a sun on a frozen window with one fingertip, and the frost holds its shape for three full heartbeats after he lifts his hand away. That is not a party trick. That is a diagnosis. The ice-kissed glass sings under Bram's finger, a high thin whine that sets Vivienne's teeth on edge before she has fully crossed the threshold. *You'll smudge it*, she says, shutting the door behind her. He does not turn. His breath fogs the pane and the frost spreads under his touch in deliberate branching patterns. Not the wild lace of a child's idle game. This is controlled. A sun, eight rays, each one perfectly angled, the centre a tight spiral that seems to pull light into itself. *It's pretty. Look how it catches the morning.* She moves beside him, close enough to see the dark crescents under his eyes. They have deepened this week. His collarbones stand sharp under his tunic. And when he lifts his hand away, the frost stays. *You're using too much.* *I'm practising.* There is one healer in three kingdoms who has treated this before and survived saying so out loud, and she belongs to a court that has been at war with Vivienne's since before either of them was born. Asking costs a marriage. Not asking costs a brother. What follows: ice that burns, a prince she despises, a healer's price, a falcon's shadow, a truce negotiated in a conservatory, a queen's secret, an assassin who works in frost, and a note that somebody forged well enough to fool the people who wrote it. *I don't know how to be fire and ice, how to be a princess and a traitor, how to save my brother and my kingdom and myself. But I know I can't do it alone.* Ronan will burn the treaty, the conservatory and the crown that made both. Whoever in that court decided a sick child was a bargaining position is going to find out precisely how far he is prepared to go, and he is not going to be talked down by anybody.