Page 39 of Throne of Ice and Blood
“Selena?” she says. Her eyes widen in what looks like genuine shock. “What are you doing here?”
“What amIdoing here?” I stare at her in disbelief. “What areyoudoing here?”
She tilts her head to the side while a considering look blows across her beautiful features, as if she is recounting everything that has happened in the two weeks since the Atonement Trials ended.
“The Icehearts flew back to get me,” she says eventually. A bitter smile tugs at her lips. “They consider tree magic too important to let it roam free.”
“You mean toodangerous,” I say.
That bitter smile on her lips widens.
“So yeah,” Alistair says from behind me. His voice is laced with bitter mockery and exasperation. “You asked how I’m holding up? I’ve got one person who’s completely catatonic and another who either just sits there staring into space or screams about how crowded it is in here.”
A sharp glint flashes in Lavendera’s eyes. “Itiscrowded.”
“Regardless, neither of you are doing anything to fight back.”
“Because it’spointless.”
I’m stunned by the sharpness of her voice as she practically growls that final word at us. Shifting on my knees, I move so that I’m sitting at an angle where I can see both of them. Alistair is glaring at Lavendera, who looks back at him with equal steel in her eyes.
“It’s pointless to fight the Icehearts,” she snaps, her voice cracking through the air like a whip. “They’re too powerful. Too cruel. Too vicious. They control everything. How much food we’re allowed to eat. What we’re allowed to drink. How many children we can have?—”
A jolt shoots through me. “Wait, what?”
She continues glaring at Alistair for another second before she slides her gaze to me and shakes her head as if she doesn’t understand the question. “What, what?”
“What do you mean they control how many children we’re allowed to have?”
Still seated there cross-legged in the middle of her cage, she stares at me in silence for a few moments, as if the answer should have been obvious. Then she cocks her head while a considering look instead blows across her features. “You really don’t know, do you? You’ve truly never suspected anything?”
“Suspected what?” Alistair snaps from my right, sounding as impatient as I feel.
“That they’re sterilizing us.”
My stomach drops.
For a while, only the faint hissing of the lone torch by the wall breaks the dead silence. Light from its flickering flame dances over the white ice walls, casting ominous shadows around the rest of the room.
“What?” I manage to press out at last.
Lavendera holds my gaze with serious eyes. “We didn’t always only produce one child. Back before the war, we could have as many children as we wanted. But after they trapped us in the Seelie Court, they began to sterilize us after we have given birth to one child.”
Ice spreads through my veins.
“Why do you think all the doctors in the Seelie Court are dragon shifters?” She shakes her head at me, as if she can’t believe that I had never thought about it. “After the mother gives birth, they give her something that they say will help relieve the pain. But it actually makes us sterile.”
“Why?” Alistair asks. He sounds as horrified as I feel.
“To produce strong magic users.”
Nausea crawls up my throat as her words clang through my skull. “They’re breeding us?”
“Yes. They think that having multiple children thins the magic in our blood, so they only let us have one to make sure that if that child is born with magic, it gets all the magic in that bloodline.
Dragging in an unsteady breath, I press a hand to my mouth. I feel like I’m going to throw up. We’re not people to them. We’re less than animals. A source to be controlled and bred.
And then, age-old guilt, guilt that I thought I had already buried when I left the Seelie Court, suddenly flares up inside me. They’re limiting us to one child to make that child’s magic stronger. Which means that I destroyed my parents completely simply by being born. More than I even knew. Not only because they sterilized my mother without her knowledge after I was born, but also because it made my magic stronger. Which ultimately ruined my parents’ whole relationship.
