Daggers of Ice

Chapter 6

1010.

The Tenth Year of the Golden Age.

Edmund.

The sun had not yet cleared the horizon. A thin, pale light bled across the ocean, painting the waves in bruised silver. The wind came sharp from the east, carrying the salt and chill of the Great Eastern Sea – cold enough to bite the skin, not enough to cool his temper.

Edmund moved through the quiet, through the repetition.

The straw dummy before him was no living thing, but in the half-light, it might have been. The tattered strips of cloth that hung from it snapped and whispered in the wind, and for a moment he could almost imagine a heartbeat in the air between them.

He exhaled slowly and adjusted his grip on the dagger – the black hilt cold against his calloused palm. His body ached, muscles taut from hours of movement without pause. He ignored it. Pain was a companion, one that kept his thoughts from wandering where they should not.

The dagger flashed as he moved, a clean arc of light through the air.

He struck low – a sweeping kick, a pivot, a thrust. The familiar rhythm grounded him: motion, breath, steel, stillness.

But beneath the steady cadence, his pulse betrayed him. It raced. Always a little too fast when he held this blade.

The edge caught the light. Not steel, not silver. Something that caught and fractured the dawn into shards.

He slashed once more, the blade slicing through one of the loose cloth strips. The fabric fluttered to the ground soundlessly, curling like smoke.

He rolled his wrist, twirling the dagger easily between his fingers. Front to back. Back to front. Tossed and caught again. The weight was perfect, balanced, familiar. Too familiar.

He watched the light scatter through the glass-like blade, pale and colourless, as if it held the last ghost of winter inside it. Even in that moment, it seemed to hum faintly, as though remembering the hand that had forged it – or the one that had wielded it.

Arianna of Charn.

He did not like the way her name sounded in his thoughts, soft and sharp all at once.

He exhaled through his teeth; eyes fixed on the dagger.

There were two others – it's sisters, he supposed – lying in his quarters, wrapped carefully in cloth and locked in a chest beneath his bed. He hadn't dared to touch them since the night she fled.

And yet he had brought the longest out that morning to train with.

Its owner was somewhere in the North, if his scouts were to be believed. Somewhere beyond the river passes, where the frost still lingered on the pines even in midsummer.

He turned the dagger over once more, thumb brushing along the carved edge. It wasn't just beautiful. It was dangerous. A weapon made for precision, not spectacle.

A weapon much like its maker.

He tightened his grip until his knuckles went white.

She had wanted him to catch her. He knew that now. She'd wanted him to see her – to remember her. And damn her, it had worked.

The wind picked up, snapping at the edges of his tunic. The ocean roared below the cliffs. Somewhere far behind him, the bells of Cair Paravel gave a single, mournful toll.

Edmund lowered the dagger, breathing hard, the morning light catching the edges of his hair.

She was out there – cold and clever and somehow two steps ahead of him.