When he was little, and he and his brother had been throwing punches until at least one of them had a black eye they would feel for a moon, Mother would first smack him in the head, then look at him with a devastated look on her face. How could a boy so calm and clever as he turn into the playing ball of the God of Wrath? This wasn't how she had raised him. He should have known better. Back then, he had hidden his hands in his pockets and promised his mother to try to defy Him. Now he was older and wiser and had stopped trying a long time ago.

Of course his behaviour was wrong. Of course it was a pointless sin. Jerking the Queen's comforting touch off his arms wouldn't unsink the Acedia's Revenge. Shooting up from his seat, screaming the lungs out of his body as he lunged towards Seb's voice wouldn't save Alex. Nor would driving his elbow into the King's chin bring Billy back to his box of straw and hay, waiting for him to bring him apples and tell him stories. Still, he allowed the madness to take over.

Because when Wrath attacked, he became a God.

The King didn't call a guard to do the dirty work. Though blind, Nick could tell. The agility with which one strong, muscular arm wrapped around his neck and a dagger's blunt handle poked him in the back meant King Thomas had seized him.

As another arm curled around his chest, he wriggled and writhed and clawed at all he could reach. The King hooked his legs behind his. Kicking and squirming, Nick wobbled. He had no answer when the King's body slumped onto his and he was pushed to the floor. The King landed on top of him, with a big thump that ended in a softer thud. 

He lay sprawled, his muscles yearning to unleash the God's renewed strength. The stacked-up energy from wasting half a moon in the hole his chamber had become burst forth in the form of coiling fits that slammed all in their vicinity. Fragments cut his knuckles open—sharp like porcelain, not biscuit crumbs.

"Don't let your uncle fight your battles!" he yelled out to Seb. "You killed Billy and Alex. It's their blood on your hands. Fight me!"

He got pulled back as Seb murmured, "No, you're wrong. They're alive. They have to be."

"You're an even bigger fool than I thought, you Muttonhead. Sinking ships suck everything and everyone down to the bottom of the sea. You can't escape the force of a maelstrom."

"No, they got out. They must have. They're not dead, Nick. You must have faith. It's Alex, our friend Alex."

"And my Billy." He made an attempt to lunge forwards.  A lousy attempt—King Thomas grabbed his waist and held him tighter. "You killed them. You're a murderer, Seb! Why can't you die?"

"I'm not! I didn't want her to leave." The squeak that came from the other side of the room revealed Seb's sobbing. "I didn't... I never... you..."

The snivelling moved closer, as did the quickening of footsteps.

"Run, Seb," Nick scoffed. "Run.I've heard that's what you do best—runaway good-for-nothing Prince Sebastian. And stay away from me forever."

"Oh, go to The Seven Hells!" Seb screamed. He banged the door shut so loudly the floor shook.

"I'm already there," Nick said under his breath.

Silence settled for less than a heartbeat. Then, the women started talking, arguing even, their quibbling as useless as his writhing. King Thomas was holding him tight—he had nowhere to go. If the God of Wrath wasn't still raging inside of him, he would chuckle. Better to laugh than to cry, especially when there were no more tear canals left to let the misery through.

"You shouldn't blame Seb," the King finally said. "It's not his fault. Blame me. Fight me if you want, but not him."

 Nick wasn't sure he heard that right. "I can fight you?"

"You need it. Let it out—all of it—until the God of Wrath is gone."

Nick felt the King loosening his grip, allowing him to turn towards him. His fits met his open hands. "I lost everything because of you!" He punched with his right hand. "My family." Then with his left hand. "My friends." And again with his right. "And my eyes." The next punches followed in rapid succession. "I hate you."

"Such lousy punches. I don't think you hate me enough. Show me what you got."

"Thomas," the Queen said.

"I've got this," the King assured his wife. "Bring it on, Nick."

Nick threw punch after punch. There came no pushback, no counter-attack. Fists against open hands, over and over again. Had his eyes worked, he would have outwitted the King, slammed his gut, his face, his deaf ear and then his functioning one too.

"I had a future," Nick continued. "I had my doubts—I disagreed with you. But now I have nothing. And I hate you. I hate you so much!" He slammed his fists down, hitting more of the carpet than of the King's knees. "Come on! Why don't you fight back, coward!"

"Nicolas!" The Queen gasped.

The King seized his wrists, pulling them down with a sharp jerk. His voice overwhelmed the Queen's concern. "You challenge me?"

Nick winced.

"I could break your arms and legs, knock you out, throw you into my dungeon, even cut off your head or have you hanged," the King said calmly.

"Then why don't you? I'm a worthless nuisance. I mean nothing to you."

"Because I have nothing to gain from killing you." The King let go of him.

Nick didn't attack. "It would save you gold."

The King chuckled in disbelief. "True. But this good-for-nothing boy happens to be fond of my daughter."

"She loves me, Your Majesty."

"And you happily return her kisses."

Nick lowered his gaze, more out of habit than anything else. "I'm no good at keeping the Gods of Sin at bay."

"No, you're not." The King smacked his lips. "You're grieving and hurt, and that makes you a danger to yourself and everyone around you. I can't allow the puppy-love to continue."

"I understand, Your Majesty."

He half-expected Princess Alana to intervene and protest, but she didn't. In fact, she had been uncharacteristically quiet this whole time. The God of Wrath was leaving his body, his wit slowly returning. Though he would miss her tender kisses and the comforting warmth of her bosom against his chest, there was no hope for them. Princess Alana was the most desirable woman in the five kingdoms. When asked, she would always say that she didn't like people treating her like she was a prize to be won, but other times she would giggle and tell him tales of Lords and Princes practically offering their souls to her Papa in exchange of her hand. She took a strange pleasure in watching her parents turning them down.

"Last night, Lana came to visit me," the King said. Leather and fabric brushed against the floor. There was a slight cracking of a joint. He was getting up. "She does that, from time to time. I make no illusions—she comes for my couch instead of me. But we like to talk. Yesterday, she came to talk about you."

"I came to tell you a story," Alana corrected him. Her shaky voice suggested she had been crying too.

"You used the story to remind me of a history I had long forgotten." The King moved away from him. "Why don't you tell Nick the story?"

"He doesn't like me telling stories, Papa. Not since he can't read them anymore."

"It's fine," Nick said, curious yet uncomfortably clueless by what was happening. "I wanna hear it."

Since the Queen decided he could not remain seated on the floor, she helped him up and guided him back towards the couch. It didn't matter to him, but it was a huge deal to her. And when his bottom hit the cushions, he was glad of the Queen's persistence. She also wrapped a cloth around his hands to stop the bleeding.

"It's an Ician tale," Alana explained when he was ready. "King Clay's shade, it's called."

The title sounded familiar. He must have read it in the book with Ician tales that Father had bought for him here in Sundale. He didn't remember reading the actual chapter. Laneby had burnt down before he had the chance to read more than the first five chapters and learnt the list of Ician Kings by heart.

"Prince Shade was the first-born son of King Clay and Queen Petal," she said. "As with many first-borns, he was their pride and joy. He was a clever boy, quick to crawl and swift to learn. As the son of a Fire Magician and a Water Magician, Shade was but an infant when he made his doll fly through his chamber. Three years later, his flames melted the snow on the rooftops of Bigtown castle and made it rain momentarily before the water fell back on the ground in shards of ice. By the time he was ten years old, he managed to pull fish out of the river using no rod nor fishhook. Magic only."

"When he was twelve years old and able to make the ground stir beneath his feet, his older cousin, Forest challenged him to a friendly duel. Forest too was able to wield all four elements. It was the golden age of magic, and King Clay declared the duel a feast unlike Ice had ever seen. Word travelled along with the wind, Forest and Shade made sure of that, and they invited all of Ice to come to Bigtown. And so on the second day of the second moon of the Summer Dragon, Forest and Shade stood surrounded by three thousand men and women. All of them expected to see a magical spectacle."

"And a spectacle it turned out to be. Shade and Forest entertained the guests with rainbows that split to hurricanes, sandstorms that crossed the courtyard and turned to ice and snow halfway, and a sky filled with fire. While Forest was the better Earth and Water Magician, Shade excelled in fire and air. Still, the crowd expected Shade to win. After all, he was their Crown Prince.

"After nearly two hours, Forest barely attacked anymore. Time after time, he set up a wall of impenetrable mud while his cousin rapidly shot arrows of pure fire at him. To turn the tide, Forest gathered all the happy memories he could think of and launched himself up to stand on top of his wall. He stretched his arms, taunting Shade. It worked. Shade fell for the trick and charged a burning arrow towards his cousin.

"Forest ducked into a ball and cast a shield of air around him. The arrow bounced off the shield and returned whence it came. Startled, Shade dodged too late. The burning arrow hit him sideways in the face, piercing his eyes. Like a bird shot out of the sky, Shade fell from the rooftop of Bigtown Castle."

"But he lived. He ended up blind," Nick predicted.

"Do you know this story?" Alana asked.

"No." Nick shrugged. "But if he had died, you wouldn't be telling me this story."

"I'm getting to the interesting part now," she said. "So, indeed, Shade recovered from broken bones and a headache that lasted until the next summer. He never got his sight back. King Clay and Queen Petal were devastated, and it took them two whole years to denounce Shade in favour of his older cousin."

"Sounds like that wasn't such a friendly duel after all," the King remarked.

"Entire books have been written about that, Papa," Alana explained. "A discussion worth having, but not right now."

"I know. Continue, darling."

"Stripped from his birthright, Shade was desperate to prove himself worthy of the Ician throne. So he left court every morning to stand at the shore of The Long White, his eyes closed, even to the point that his nostrils were frozen and his eyelids glued to his skin. He performed no magic, didn't speak, nor moved a muscle. The older he got, the longer he would stand there. The Icians soon thought him insane and ignored him. 'He awaits the Bear,' some said. 'He's becoming the ghost of Bigtown,' others said. A sigh was not far away when they spoke of their former Crown prince. 'He was destined for greatness. Such a shame.'

"The summer of Shade's seventeenth birthday, four Silvermarkers crossed The Great Bridge, seeking business with King Clay. Heron, Crow, Buck, and Lord Python were their names. They had weapons of the purest silver and were looking to trade. The King, who hadn't had a visit from his southern neighbours in a decade, invited them to court and held a banquet. Just as he was uncorking the bottle of honey wine the visitors had presented as a gift, Shade entered the hall. 

"He heard his father making small talk with the men as he poured the wine out. But before the King was able to take a single gulp, Shade took the glass from his father's hands and obliterated the icy cup with a single squeeze.

''These are no businessmen,' Shade said. He snapped his fingers. Heron, the smallest of the four Silvermark men, uttered choking noises. 'I smelled their deceit in the air, Father,' Shade told the King. 'Pungent like the tarnished silver they brought with them.' As Heron smacked into his steaming hot plate, Shade conjured a green flame in his hand. 'I heard it in their pounding, racing heartbeats.' He grabbed Crow by his fur collar and lit it on fire. The man dashed out of the hall but died before he reached the Great White. Meanwhile, Shade stomped out four tiles from the floor of the hall and immobilised Buck. 'I felt it as the men touched me, thinking I was an ugly forgotten statue, and mocked our nation, Father.' Lord Python drew out his sword, but Shade cornered him easily. He burnt the hilt until the man had no other choice but to drop it, then he twitched his hand and the uncorked bottle of honey flung towards him. Shade grabbed it mid-air. 'He'll taste his own poison until he dies, Father. No Silvermarker gets to kill an Ician King.'

"King Clay could cry. It was the first time in five years that his son had spoken to him. While Lord Python sank to his knees, vomiting up blood and honey wine until he fell into the pool and no longer moved, the King felt regret. His blind son, who he had thought would never accomplish anything anymore, had saved his life."

"But there has never been a King Shade of Ice. Forest became King after Clay died," Nick said.

"Only because he lived to a hundred and one years," Queen Crystal said. "And Forest only ruled for two summers and a winter before the Winter Bear took him to the lands of Eversleep."

"But that's not important," Alana said. "Prince Shade may have died a good decade before his father, but during his life, he founded the school of the Four Other Senses. The school still exists today, Nick. It's smaller than it used to be three hundred years ago, but pupils travel from far and wide to obtain Prince Shade's legendary skills."

"But I'm no fighter or magician."

"Though some magicians go there, it's not a school of magic," Queen Crystal explained. "Fighting is but a subject in the curriculum. You'll learn to predict the weather by listening to the wind, you'll be able to identify the scent of diseases before they strike men down. You'll learn how to tell whether land is fertile by holding the earth in your hands. And if that doesn't convince you, the school hold feasts that will tantalise and tease your taste buds."

Though the Ician food was known for being bland wrapped in a leaf of more blandness, he had this sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he had no choice. That the King and Queen wanted him gone. "You're sending me to Ice?"

"It's in everyone's interest," the King said. "Too much has happened between you and Seb. And I don't want the whole of Sundale to know that my daughter was getting cosy with an army deserter whose hand I should have cut off. I don't need to explain to you why it's important she remains a coveted bachelor."

"But there will be magicians there. I can't... I don't want to be in the same room as them."

"Prince River has promised to arrange something," the King said. "It's a diplomatic gesture. You'll be the first Greenlander to go there."

Nick nodded. "And stay there for the rest of my life?"

"No, once your training has been completed, and if it is still your wish to return to Sundale, you can. We'll help you find a job where you can put your newly acquired skills to good use. And if you and Seb wish, it can be here at court."

"But I'll never be a General, never Princess Alana's husband."

"No, before the incident at Whitepeak, I favoured you. A General marrying the only Princess—that's an important statement to my Lords, my allies, and my enemies," the King said. "And it would have been a fairytale that the Greenlanders would speak of for decades, centuries perhaps—the small farmer boy of Laneby who stole the Princess' heart. But the Gods have chosen a different path. I have no option but to follow Them."

"When would I leave?"

"When the negotiations between River and me have ended. A few days to a week—tops."

That was fast. His eyes hadn't fully healed yet. The school had some appeal, but not the long journey. 

"Am I allowed to decline the offer?"

"No."

That was clear. "Then I guess I'm going to Ice."

"It's not a punishment, Nick," the King said. "It's an opportunity."

It didn't seem like it. And when the King left his office not long after, announcing he would bring the news to Seb, Nick wished he could stand up and go to the stables to tell Billy what had happened. But his favourite stallion would never come home. His family in the Heavenly Halls would have to tell him stories from now on and feed him apples they had stolen from the kitchen of the Gods. Alex would help them—he was sure.

Lana joined him. Her flowery perfume betrayed her, as did the soft fingers that played his hair. "Papa's right. You'll like Ice."

"Not as much as I like you." He refrained from kissing her. The Queen was still there.

Alana giggled, yet a sob wasn't far away. "I'm sorry about Alex and Billy. I hope they miraculously survived but..."

"Then you're like Seb. A Muttonhead who believes in fairytales. I used to like them too, but life ain't no fairytale. You'll get married to the ass with the biggest fleet or army behind his back, and I'll freeze to stone in Ice." He turned to the Queen. "No offence, Your Majesty."

"None taken, Nicolas," she said. "Ice is a dark and desolate place, but it has its own charm. It's a different, more quiet life, closer to nature. You'll grow to love it."

"And there's more," Alana said mysteriously. "Mama, Uncle River and I talked about it this morning. We don't want to mention it to Papa. It's best he doesn't know."

"What, you're secretly coming with me?" Nick chuckled. "After the runaway Prince, the Greenlander royal court surprises with a runaway Princess. That's gonna ruin your father's chances and reputation."

She clacked her tongue. "You're a Porktail with a puddingbrain." She smacked him in the chest. "You may fear the magicians, Nick. And quite rightly so. But magic has many purposes, including healing. There's a Water Magician up in Flowerpool—Uncle River will take you there. Your stay at the school of the Four Other Senses is temporary, a decoy. You'll get your sight back—that's the real reason you're going to Ice."

"I'll get my sight back!"

"Hush. Not a word leaves this room," Queen Crystal whispered sternly. "You'll still stay in Ice for a few years. Upon your return, I will find enough Healers to claim your eyes healed by themselves. This is why it's important to leave now that the Healers of Sundale can't seem to agree whether you'll make a full recovery."

"And the magician is going to guarantee that?"

"She's the best chance you have, Nicolas."

A better chance than staying in Sundale, she meant.

Alana laid her fingers on the unburnt part of his lower cheek. "We'll be apart, for Gods know how long, but after that, we'll have the rest of our lives together."

"What if you get married in the meantime?"

"Leave that to me," the Queen said. "My husband won't say 'yes' to a betrothal without my approval."

A meeting with a magician scared him, but if it meant getting his eyes back, then he could be brave and follow a stranger to a frozen wasteland. He would be able to read again.

"Ice suddenly doesn't sound so horrible," he said to Alana.

Queen Crystal's strong perfume suddenly smelled stronger. Her voice turned back to a whisper. "There's one other thing. A favour I must ask you, Nicolas."

"What is it, Your Majesty?"

"I love my brothers, but I don't trust them. While River is negotiating with Thomas here in Sundale, Storm is on another important mission in Moondale. Both want the Ician throne, but only one can succeed Father. If Storm can save Fox from Ariel's clutches, Thomas will drop the demand that no magician can govern Ice while the diamond route flourishes."

Nick discarded the shock of hearing this cunning plan. His curiosity wasn't so hard to toss aside. "Why would Prince Storm lie about having Fox?"

"Because Fox is important. Very important," Queen Crystal said.

"He's Seb's brother," Alana said. "A bastard but still heir to the Greenlander throne."

"Fox is... " Nick needed a deep breath to process that information. "Fox can one day rule over The Greenlands?" He sniggered, cackled at the idea that the clumsy redhead would one day sit on the obsidian throne. Then it hit him—the banishment of Lord Brandon. The King's ear, scarred by magic. All pieces of the royal puzzle fell into place.

He stopped laughing. This was serious—Fox could never become King. All he had to do was pass on the information he learned in Ice, and he would get two working eyes for it in return.

There were worse deals he could make with the Greenlander royal family.

A/N Time to head back to Moondale, don't you think?