The last time we’d flown towards the ice giants, fear had almost overwhelmed me. This time, I wrapped myself in the protective power of the emotion I’d struggled to resist all my life: unpretty, un-princessy anger.
These hulking creatures had stolen my sister. It was wrong, and I was never going to let it go!
‘Hey! You lot!’ I bellowed the insolent words as Fedolia dropped her spell of invisibility and Jasper landed us on top of the first icy prison slab, where several of the ice giants had gathered in our absence.
‘Ah-ah-ahh!’ I waved the beating blue heart high in warning as giants roared to their feet all around us. ‘Careful! You don’t want this to get hurt, do you?’
It seemed to take forever for the deafening roaring to subside. But if they thought they could intimidate me now, they were wrong. I kept the same unimpressed sneer on my face until the noise died down.
‘We are here,’ I shouted to the giants when they’d finally settled, ‘to discuss your plans for the future.’
‘Stupid!’ An ice giant to our right shouldered past the others with a grinding noise, like mountains scraping against each other. His endless blue-and-white beard bristled to a halt six feet in front of me, jagged shards of ice sticking out like crystal spears of warning.
He’d already taken away my only family. He couldn’t threaten me with any worse.
Fury gave me the strength to smile patronisingly up at him. ‘You know. Your plans to keep your precious little territory safe – that’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? Well, we thought you might like the advice of trained philosophers while we’re here.’
He glowered down at me, raising one enormous fist in warning. ‘No advice needed from tiny trespassers!’
Jasper’s big snout fell open in outrage. ‘What do you mean, tiny?!’
‘Shh, dragon-boy,’ Fedolia muttered to him. ‘Brains, not fire this time, remember?’
Ignoring them both, I crossed my arms. ‘No?’ I asked the giant. ‘What are you planning to do then, once all of these rulers’ armies start to arrive? Thousands and thousands of humans marching across your perfect, pristine landscape, messing up all of that beautiful, flat snow …’
It took even longer for the irate roaring to subside this time. Finally, the ice giant in charge – I thought of him as the Big One – cut off the others with a sweep of his arm that sent cold wind billowing through all of my layers.
‘They send armies, we kill their kings!’
‘Mmm,’ I said doubtfully, turning to the others. ‘Do we really think that would work?’
Before I’d gone to Scholars’ Island, I might have agreed.
Now, Fedolia shrugged. ‘There can always be new royals, can’t there?’
‘There can.’ I sighed. ‘Trust me, there are always more cousins lying in wait to take the throne the moment anything goes wrong.’ Personally, I couldn’t stand any of my cousins – even Katrin could hardly bring herself to be polite to some of the really slimy ones – but still …
‘As far as most people are concerned,’ I told the giants, ‘it doesn’t matter who’s the king. All they care about, deep down, is that there is one, just to serve as a symbol for the country. The crown is all that really matters, and there’s always someone ready to wear that.’
The Big One turned to the others. ‘We’ll send our scouts to take their crowns!’
Argh!
‘That is not what I meant!’ I shouted. ‘It’s not about the physical crown, you idiots. It’s just about someone being in charge.’
‘Ice giants are very literal.’ Fedolia dusted off her sparkling blue nails. ‘You may be noticing that by now.’
‘Dragons don’t wear crowns,’ Jasper growled. ‘And there isn’t a threat in the world that could stop my family from attacking if you keep my mother prisoner!’
The Big One glowered down at us, beard quivering. ‘We’re not afraid of puny dragons!’
Dark smoke burst from Jasper’s nostrils … but he kept his snout firmly shut, despite the look in his eyes.
I was so proud of my friend’s true strength – but I had no time to stop and praise him for it.
‘You might not be scared of dragons,’ I told the Big One sternly, ‘but do you really want them flying over your territory all the time to bother you? And as for the armies, they will just keep coming. There are so many humans in the world nowadays! They’re all obsessed with looking powerful to each other … so they can’t sit back and just give up when someone kidnaps their rulers and makes them all look stupid.’
The Big One’s beard moved up and down with the workings of his massive jaw, as if he were physically chewing over what I had said.
I decided to make it easier for him. ‘Let us take a moment,’ I said in my best lecturer’s voice, ‘to consider the definition of true power.’
Fedolia chortled happily as she crossed her legs on Jasper’s neck, settling in to get comfortable. ‘Let’s hope this ends the same way the last lecture on power did!’
It was astonishing how easy it was to make someone listen to your philosophical opinions when you were holding their literal heart in your hands. Of course, it might have been considered cheating by a truly ethical philosopher, but I thought it was only fair: they were holding my heart and Jasper’s heart too, with our relatives trapped in their prisons of ice.
So I kept talking and talking … and talking even more, as my throat grew more and more parched, and Jasper and Fedolia took turns too, to add their own thoughts on the matter.
The giants rumbled and bellowed, but they didn’t walk away … and I took it as a good sign, two hours later, when the Big One’s closest neighbour lifted up his great beard in response to my latest dry, hacking cough. A stream of cool, melted ice trickled down into my mouth a moment later.
I’d never in my life hoped to drink an ice giant’s beard water. But my throat was in such dire straits by then that I swallowed down the cold, bitter stream with gratitude, tipping my head back to catch it all before I moved on to the next stage of my logical argument.
The Sofia I’d been a month earlier would have been horrified to find me here, dirty and rumpled, wearing multiple layers of stolen clothing and arguing with terrifying giants hundreds of miles away from the safety of my bedroom. I hadn’t even tasted a sip of hot chocolate in weeks!
For the first time ever, though, I was filled with the glowing certainty that I was exactly where I belonged and doing what I had been born to do.
It felt utterly exhilarating.
Almost four hours after we’d begun, the Big One sighed heavily and shook his head, circling back once more to the main point that I’d driven all along. ‘They will never stop coming? Even though they’d all die?’
‘Never,’ I said firmly.
‘Trust her!’ said Fedolia. ‘She’s an expert on human stubbornness. Just look at her now!’
I was too tired to even frown at her by that point. I kept my weary gaze fixed on the blue-flame eyes of the Big One. ‘Whether you freeze thousands and thousands of soldiers or you kill them all, is that really what you want for your territory? A land littered with thousands of human bodies?’
The blue heart in my lap pulsed in time with my heartbeat as I waited for his answer.
‘Kobolds say,’ said the Big One at last, ‘Humans are coming anyway. New machines from their exhibition want to tear and change our land forever!’
‘I know what your spies in Villenne told you,’ I snapped, ‘but can’t you see? Now’s your chance to change that balance of power for good! The king of Valmarna only wanted to prove himself to the world by conquering the elements and creating new settlements here. But just think: what’s even stronger than the elements? You are! You control the elements, for goodness sake.’
I waved at the magically icy landscape. ‘Valmarna and the other kingdoms will never stop attacking if you make them look weak to the world. But if you make them look strong instead –’
‘We’re not giving up our land!’ Flames blazed in the Big One’s eyes.
Jasper rumbled with reluctant sympathy.
‘I told you they’d never go for it,’ chirped Fedolia.
‘They don’t have to.’ I smiled fiercely at the Big One. ‘I have a plan that will work for all of us,’ I told him, ‘but we’ll have to melt my sister first.’