━━━ ❝ I pity the fool who wants to be a God. ❞
&
━━━ There is enough fire inside you to put
all of Hell to shame, but you are
pretending to be water, for someone
who is too afrai...
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CHAPTER XX. are we not all but things?
Jarl Brum stashed Bol Yul-Bayer in a vault inside the Treasury. You'd have to cross the Glass Bridge to get to the White Island. When you reach the shore of the ice moat, find a wolf carved into the centre of the wall. Cross that bridge instead. You best camouflage yourself with the white chalk powder along the walls.
"Fucking Fjerda," Leia cursed under her breath, the biting cold of Fjerda's Ice Court gnawed at her peeling nail beds. How could people survive in this frozen wasteland? The bloody weather was an added incentive to not fail her mission.
Her mission was simple—to find the carved wolf on the wall surrounding the ice moat and follow Erik's instructions. She balanced on the thin shore of the ice moat and ran her finger across the wall at hip level. If everything went well, Leia could sail out of this forsaken place in a few hours.
As the centrepiece of the Ice Court, the ice moat felt even colder, if possible. Fjerda was making her appreciate the warmth and chaos of Ketterdam, maybe even the familiarity of Ravka.
Painful awareness came in waves. Of how the Grand Palace compared to the Ice Court. Leia's last good memory of the Grand Palace was the banquet held for her mother's appointment as Envoy to the First Army—the first time a Grisha had that position.
Adira Valentine had already carved a chapter in history as the first Tribrid, but all Valentine women preferred to make history simply because they can. Her mother was a force to be reckoned with, surpassing the Black Heretic himself to attain what he couldn't—respect from Ravka's First Army.
Leia stayed in the Grand Palace until she was five, often bored and restless in the gilded cage. With Selma trapped as the studying companion to the Lantsov brothers, Leia's only source of entertainment was her silly crush on Vasily Lantsov. She thought he was suave for taking fencing lessons.
But the night they fled to Balakirev was forever burned into the five year old's soul. Leia remembered the fleeting joy of finally being able to taste cinnamon cookies—a rare delicacy in Ravka back then due to their strained trade relations with Shu Han. Just a moment the little devil was licking the crumbs off her fingers, then she blacked out, only to awaken in her father's arms. They were fleeing from Os Alta under the cover of the twilight, their feet pounding against the frozen earth.
Throughout the journey, her parents had repeatedly induced vomit in Selma and her. They claimed the banquet's food was spoiled and the routine was a precaution. When they settled in Balakirev, this routine evolved. Every day, Adira would weaponise her Healer skills to perform a blood cleaning ritual for the sisters.
Nothing made sense to the sisters, who were only at the tender ages of 12 and 5 back then. But every sibling had their own secret language—and so they said nothing when they caught their parents' worried glances after each blood cleaning ritual.
