Archive of Our Own ^beta

Cassandra had been cold since she died.

It was normal, Percival told her at first, his voice full of false cheer.  The fatigue, the trembling, the nausea. The nightmares. He knew. He’d been dead too, after all.  Twice. Or so she had heard. He was the only member of her family she hadn’t seen dead. Up until recently, she had been the same for him.  

His smile always took on a brittle edge when he looked at her, and she had lived in the halls of the Briarwoods long enough to recognize fear when she saw it.  He was afraid of her. Afraid at first of her hate, of her anger, of the possibility that maybe they could put that all behind them and be family once more. They had, they almost had, when he finally stopped running, and for the first time since she watched him disappear into the woods, blood in her mouth and his name on her lips, she had thought they could reclaim a piece of what had been stolen from them.

Now he was just afraid she would fall apart.  Or get angry. Blame him, because he promised, he promised, he promised she was safe-

Silly.  Cassandra wasn’t a little girl anymore.  She should have known better than to trust any of her brother’s promises.

But it had been all she had had.  The only way she could continue on, when it looked like their newly-saved world would fall apart again, when Whitestone needed her more than ever.  Gods, she was beginning to see this world of hers was built on nothing more than cobwebs and bones. Once, she had thought the Briarwoods to have such power, to destroy her whole world in just an evening’s time.  But it was not the Briarwoods. It was that Whitestone, and all the world, stood on ice spiderwebbed with cracks. It took nothing more than the lightest touch to overturn it all.

Still, she had clung to Percival’s promise, to that illusion of safety, to the fact that she had Jarret and Kynan and Trish and…

And it only took a whisper of magic for Delilah Briarwood to step into Whitestone, as if she had never left, and slip into Cassandra’s room.  It was the last thing Cassandra remembered, before dying in a bloody mess with the earth shaking under her fingers: Delilah’s sleek red hair glimmering in the candlelight as she met Cassandra’s eyes in the mirror.

“Daughter,” she had said.

And Cassandra had sat there, motionless, despite the dagger at her belt, despite the hated contraption resting in her desk, waiting for her hand.  She had sat there, frozen by Lady Briarwood’s smile and the familiarity of it all. She hadn’t even screamed.

And she had been cold ever since.

It would fade in a week, Percival said.  He’d been lying, like always. Just another of his little white lies, another plea for her to for god’s sake smile and bear it because someone in their family had to keep their head.  A week, he promised. That was all the time she had to bear death’s pall hanging over her.

It had been a month, and she still couldn’t get warm.