Cervis sat in the cell for long hours in anguish.

  Now and then, the princess would come down and comment on his gray hair, and offer crumbs of almost-sympathy at seeing his distress, and then leave again. Cervis wept many times. She had disappeared from his head- he couldn’t even speak to her in dreams. He knew what that meant, what it must mean.

  He thought about everything he could have done differently.

  He regretted having ever brought her to his palace, and then he didn’t, and then he did. If he hadn’t, she wouldn’t have died- but she wouldn’t have ever truly lived, either.

  He remembered her melding kiss in that one sweet dream, the touch of her hand on his cheek, the moment she finally pressed her lips to his in the darkness. He could have spun the dream to meet her anywhere- but that setting had seemed best. He now knew beyond all fact that, whether he could escape the Jotunn princess or not, he could never return to his own bedroom. The one Under the Ice was identical to the one he’d had in the Palewood. He couldn’t bare to sleep there without her, to remember her and know he would never feel her touch again.

  There would be no saving him.

  He wanted to be strong in memory of her. He wanted to escape the Jotunn princess, find a way to break the stag curse elsewhere, find some source of happiness and rule his kingdom. He wanted to imitate the spirit he knew she would have in this situation, to be the Cervis that could ever possibly deserve her.

  Instead, he was only the Cervis that grieved her, and he couldn’t find it in him to be anything more than that.

  The days waxed and waned, nearing the wedding. Tailors came down to his cell to begin work on his suit. It would be Jotunn fashion, meaning entirely unfashionable, and he felt hideous just thinking of wearing it. He was too tired to fight, however, and allowed the Jotunn their squabbling and confusion over how to dress someone of his form.

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  The food got better as time passed and the queen observed Cervis’s broken will. She took his defeated look to mean compliance with her wishes, and he didn’t bother to correct her.

  The day of the wedding came. Cervis slept in late, trying with everything in him to reach Aster in a dream. She never showed.

  But something was different when he woke. The heaviness that had lived in his chest since that last dream, in which he’d begged her to live, had lifted. Something in his head had shifted from shock and grief to what he considered might be denial- but the prevailing belief overcame all others: she was nearby.

  It had been something in his attempt at dream-spinning. Rather than the blankness of being unable to reach her, he had felt only that she was awake, and that was why he couldn’t reach her. It puzzled him.

  As the tailors dressed him in draped furs, thick boots of heavy fabric, and coarse trousers, Cervis thought over this. The island and castle east of the sun and west of the moon were nearly impossible to reach. There was very little possibility she had actually been able to come- and she was… Well, he couldn’t think the word, but it simply wasn’t possible. The servants layered berries and twigs through his ice-hued hair and painted stripes and circles over his exposed skin.

  It couldn’t be that she was here. It couldn’t be that she had somehow lived. It… Simply couldn’t be. He daren’t hope.

  The servants, with help from guards, escorted Cervis upstairs, to the lands of the Jotunn. He hadn’t seen the sun in what felt to be a very long time, and it blinded him briefly, and then they entered a tunnel of woven branches, and then the mud-and-stick structure of the Jotunn castle. The guards walked him to the easternmost tower and locked him high in it, leaving him alone for pre-wedding meditative rituals. He sat in the floor of the room, that same confusion glistening in his eyes. He was terrified to hope- but that pain had left, and his brain circled the same contradictory thoughts. Was it- was it possible, after all?

  He walked to the window and looked at the blue skies, stretching endlessly as far as the eye could see, the black ocean that kissed the horizon, uninterrupted.

  An aspen leaf, vibrant red with veins cherry-dark, flew in through the window and fluttered past his cheek on a cold northern breeze.

  Cervis caught it and looked at it, and looked out to see a dark streak in the blue skies as the wind turned south once more.

  His eyes searched for some explanation.

  On the white sand shore below, in a crumpled heap, gathering her bearings, a blindfold around her eyes and an arm missing, Aster Fallowfall lifted herself to her feet.