The silver flower was growing.
It now spanned from her wrist to her elbow, unfurling only at night retreating shyly at dawn. By morning, it pulsed faintly beneath her skin a rhythm too alive, too sentient. She hid it beneath long sleeves and calm smiles, but its magic prickled through fabric like a secret desperate to be known.
Whatever it was, it was not natural.
Nor was the visitor who arrived just after sunrise.
He came cloaked in the blue-gray of northern nobles, boots blood-red and dusted with frost. The corridor chilled at his passing, warmth bending away from him like in fear.
Rheya felt her thorns bristle before he even spoke.
The man bowed too low, smiled too wide.
"I bring news from the High North," he said, voice slithering like silk. "And a gift… for your prince."
A servant stepped forward with a velvet box, black as a grave.
Rheya moved before she thought. "You'll give it to me first."
The man hesitated. "I was told..."
"I don't care what you were told."
She took the box and opened it herself.
Inside, nestled in dark satin, lay a single frozen rose glassy, perfect, and very much dead. Around its stem, a silver thread coiled delicately, binding a lock of pale hair.
Rheya's stomach turned cold. She knew that hair.
Kael's mother's hair.
Her heart lurched. She didn't think she ran.
The first thorn bloomed on her ninth birthday.
It wasn't a special day. Her mother was already deep in her cups. The servants whispered. Her father hadn't come home.
She sat in the back garden, knees scraped, hands still.
Then the messenger came.
Her father was killed in the border wars.
She didn't cry. She didn't scream. She simply broke silently, utterly.
And in that silence, her body answered.
Thorns erupted along her arm like claws breaking through skin. Crimson-black. Veined in pain. Her veins burned. Her voice cracked with a sound so raw the birds fled the trees.
No one came.
Only her aunt, later, with a whisper that smelled like fear:
"Hide them, Rheya. If they see what you are, they'll put you in a cage."
That was the day Rheya stopped touching anyone.
The day she learned: feeling was dangerous.
Kael's POV
He hadn't meant to show her the garden.
It had once been his sanctuary the one place where frost felt like peace instead of punishment.
But Rheya was a paradox he couldn't unlearn.
He'd watched her walk between broken roots and frozen roses, her thorns glinting like defiance carved into flesh. The light caught her hair, the hollow of her throat, the curve of her jaw. She was made of edges but carried softness like sin.
He should have stayed away.
But when her thorns touched his bare skin and didn't pierce him, when his frost met her heat and didn't kill he'd understood.
Whatever tether bound them wasn't born of treaties or crowns.
It was older.
Deeper.
He would burn kingdoms for her.
He just didn't know yet that he might have to.
The court convened for the weekly Accord Council. Nobles filled the High Hall, jeweled and venomous. Lady Mirca stood at the center, a serpent coiled in silks.
She held up the box Rheya had intercepted. Opened it. Displayed its contents the frozen rose, the hair-like evidence.
Gasps echoed through the chamber.
"A message," Mirca declared. "From the Northern Houses. A threat disguised as a gift." Her gaze slid to Rheya, all honeyed venom. "And yet, it was you who handled it first."
Kael rose slowly. Controlled. Lethal.
"Explain yourself," Mirca pressed, her voice a purr. "Your consort intercepted royal correspondence"
"She protected me," Kael said, voice low and glacial.
"From what?" Mirca tilted her head. "A flower?"
His eyes cut to her like blades. "From you."
The room froze.
Rheya could feel the temperature drop, could see her breath fog in the air.
Kael removed his glove.
Gasps.
Frost crawled over his skin, up his wrist, down the marble dais. The floor began to splinter with ice, crawling outward like veins of glass.
"I will not be questioned," he said, his tone as soft as falling snow. "And I will not be told whom to trust."
His gaze flicked to Rheya. "I trust her."
He turned to the court. "More than I trust any of you."
After the Frost
Silence strangled the hall.
Frost spiderwebbed across the marble floor, anchoring nobles to the spot. Some whimpered. Some prayed. None moved.
Rheya's heart thundered. This wasn't just Kael's anger it was something deeper, something inherited and terrible. The Frost King's legacy is waking in his blood.
"Leave," Kael commanded.
The word fell heavy and final.
Chairs scraped. Robes swished. The nobles fled like broken things. Only Mirca lingered, trembling behind her mask of poise.
"This is madness," she hissed. "You endanger..."
"Enough." His frost flared at her feet. "Leave."
When she was gone, the air cracked and thawed. Shards of frost fell from the ceiling like shattered glass.
Rheya stepped closer. "Kael.."
"Do you have any idea what they were planning?" he said, his voice jagged. "That flower was not a warning to me. It was a warning about you."
Her pulse stumbled. "Why me?"
He looked at her sleeve. At the faint silver glow beneath the fabric. "Because of what you're becoming."
Rheya tugged back the cloth. The silver flower pulsed, each petal unfolding like an eye opening to watch them both.
That night, sleep abandoned her.
The flower throbbed beneath her skin like a second heart. Outside, snow fell in spirals, silent as breath.
She remembered the first thorn, the pain, the secrecy. But this...this was different. The flower didn't want to hide. It wanted to be seen.
It pulsed stronger whenever Kael was near.
She pressed her palm to the cold windowpane. The reflection staring back at her was not entirely human her eyes gleamed faintly silver in the moonlight.
A knock.
"Rheya?"
His voice.
She hesitated, then unlatched the door.
Kael entered without his crown, his cloak, his calm. He looked like a storm half-broken hair damp, breath uneven, eyes bright with fear and something else.
"I shouldn't be here," he murmured. "But I..."
His gaze caught the glow beneath her sleeve.
She tugged the fabric down. "Don't."
"It's growing faster," he said.
"Yes."
"And it's tied to me."
Her throat tightened. "What do you mean?"
He stepped close, his breath brushing the edge of the bloom. The petals quivered, frost forming on their tips before melting again.
"I felt it," he whispered. "When the box arrived. Like someone pulled a thread between us."
Her knees weakened. "Kael…"
"I think they know," he said. "The Northern Houses. They know you're changing. And they want to use it."
"For what?"
He didn't answer. Instead, he took her hand, bare skin against thorns that didn't cut. "I don't care what it costs. I'll protect you."
She met his eyes. "Even from your own blood?"
A beat.
Then softly, "Yes."
The Poison Feast
Two days later, the court threw a banquet "to restore appearances."
Rheya sat beside Kael, her arm tightly bandaged beneath her gown. The laughter around them was brittle, the kind that hides the smell of fear.
Lady Mirca sat opposite, her smile thin as glass.
"I hear the northern envoy has… vanished," she said. "Curious, isn't it?"
Kael's jaw flexed. "Curious indeed."
"They say he left without his head."
He didn't look up. "Then they say too little."
Rheya's stomach twisted. The flower beneath her sleeve pulsed violently.
A servant poured her wine. The scent was wrong—too sweet, too sharp.
Kael's hand shot out, catching her wrist. "No."
She blinked.
He took the cup, raised it to his lips.
"Kael..."
He drank.
The hall fell silent.
Then frost climbed the goblet. The poison inside turned into a perfect crystal. Kael set the cup down with deliberate calm.
"You'll have to try harder," he said.
Mirca's smile faltered.
The court whispered. Fear spread like rot. Rheya's pulse thundered. Kael wasn't just defying them he was daring them.
And he was doing it for her.
The next morning, a raven arrived from the High North.
No letter. Only a single feather dipped in silver.
Kael's face blanched as he read the sigil.
"The Claim," he said quietly. "They're demanding you."
"Me?"
"They think you belong to them now."
Rheya's breath hitched. The flower throbbed painfully beneath her skin.
"What will you do?"
He looked at her and the look was a vow and a threat all at once.
"Anything," he said. "Everything."
Snow swept through the palace courtyard like smoke. Rheya stood at her window, pressing her hand to the glass as the flower flared, its light so bright it seared her vision.
The petals peeled from her skin, drifting into the air like shards of silver flame.
Below, Kael stood in the courtyard, raising his arms. Frost coiled upward in spirals, meeting her petals midair. Where they touched, something began to form—a bridge of ice and light, pulsing, alive, hungry.
Her breath caught.
She felt his mind brush hers.
Run, he whispered.
But she couldn't.
Because the bridge wasn't a bridge—it was a root. A tether binds her to him.
And as it solidified, she realized:
He wasn't just protecting her.
He was binding her soul to his.
The garden beneath her thorns had always been a metaphor.
Now it was real.
As the storm outside thickened into chaos, winged constructs of ice descended from the clouds creatures of Kael's making, summoned by the spell that tied them.
Rheya's flower flared open in full bloom. Silver thorns unfurled like spears, tearing the air, tasting power.
Kael turned toward her through the storm, his face raw with devotion and despair.
"They'll never take you," he said.
"They?" she whispered. "Or you?"
His expression fractured.
And for the first time, she saw the truth that had been blooming in him as surely as the flower had in her.
He hadn't chosen her over the court. He had chosen her instead of the world.
And if she didn't stop him now, he would freeze the heavens themselves to keep her.
The silver flower pulsed like a dying star.
Rheya drew a breath and for the first time, she didn't know which of them was more dangerous.