Sisters Three (Completed)

48. Adair

She'd searched every inch of the castle and she still hadn't found Silver. Her voice was raw from the amount of times she'd yelled his name, each time a little more worried, a little more frantic. And as she came upon the last room that she hadn't checked yet, the place the wolves and other wild animals used to sleep, she still did not find a response.

The old fear of being alone crept up into her bones, settling on her like an old pair of clothes. She shivered in its drafty embrace, remembering moments in that old manor home when Papa and the others would spend a day at Brenna and Morna's Mama's dowry house, leaving Adair to fend for herself. The echoing halls, the crushing silence. They all haunted her now. She knew the only way to dispel it was to find Silver, yet he was nowhere to be found.

As she closed the door to the animal room, a creeping thought filled her mind. Her head snapped up as she realized that there was a reason that he couldn't be found, one that she'd worked to make sure would never happen. If he had somehow achieved the impossible and broken through her layers of precaution...

Heart pounding, she bounded up the stairs and raced down the hallway toward his observation room. If he was where she thought he might be, then he was in for a world of screaming once she found him. The door flew open at a flick of her wrist to reveal no trace of Silver beyond. But she hadn't expected him to be there. Instead, she walked to the bowl and summoned up the shimmering water.

"Silver," she said, waving her hand over its surface. She needn't have spoken, as her magic did not require words to work, but she felt better as his name passed her lips. Connected to him in some way.

It took a moment for the bowl to find him, and when it did it only offered a vision of him huddled in a ball, leaning up against a rocky wall. Snow and wind whipped his black curls into his face, chapping his cheeks and lips. Adair drew in a shuddering breath at the sight. He was, indeed, in that one place she'd dreaded he'd be. She needed to be there before he could find a way around it. She only hoped he'd stopped in that particular place because he was tired, not that he'd found out what she'd done to the borders.

With a wave of her fingers she shattered the image and ran out the door to prepare her sled.

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There was more than one pass into Adair's lands from the fertile green fields of the village on the border. No one knew of the second, a small and hidden corridor through a crack in the mountain walls. It was not pleasant or pretty, but it led nearly exactly to the border between her kingdom and the next. And somehow Silver had found out about it. Perhaps he'd always known, or perhaps he'd stumbled upon it in one of his recent wanderings since the departure of her sister. But he was there now, and she felt severely uneasy about it.

The walls were too narrow to take the sled down, so she had to walk. When she came upon her sole companion, he didn't even look up at her. His eyes trained on the decline of the passage which eventually petered out into a field of grass a few hundred yards away.

"What are you doing?" she asked, her voice sounding loud and harsh in the quiet.

"I wanted to see out." He lifted one hand and moved to swipe at the air in front of him. But instead of his fingers cutting through it like through any, normal air, they came to a stop as if he'd just pressed his palm against glass. Nothing in the space looked different from the air they breathed, yet his hand was unable to move any farther than the spot he was sitting in. He rolled his eyes to face her. "But apparently this is as far as I can get."

Adair cocked her head, staring at him. Her mind raced between the two options that laid themselves out before her. Tell him the truth and weather whatever anger he would undoubtedly throw her way, or ignore him and keep him exactly where she'd always kept him. Safe and sheltered.

It was when he looked back to the invisible wall, his forehead slumping forward to press against it, as if he were straining toward the grass just on the horizon, that she decided to tell him the truth. Even if she knew he would not like it.

"I placed a spell on the borders a little after I built the ice castle. I designed it to do one thing, and that's to keep something in," Adair said, trying to sound as confident as she could muster. "You."

Silver's jaw clenched. "Why would you need a spell like that?"

Adair shrugged, her eyes darting away from him. "I was taking you to a barren wasteland. You weren't my brother, you weren't honor bound as a friend to stay with me. I didn't think you'd want to, and so I made sure you couldn't leave me if you ever decided to."

"I stayed willingly all these years, Adair. And you never even gave me a chance to prove that I would do that for you," he said through a strained voice. "Did it never occur to you that I might find out about the spell? Or do you not care if I stay willingly or not? Just my mere presence is enough, even if I'm staying only because I'm trapped in a cage."

Adair fought back the lump forming in her throat. "You're all I've ever had Silver, and I'm not stupid enough to not notice that the people that I love do not return the feeling. They never stay, and I cannot hold onto them. I had to make sure you could not slip from my grasp."

Silver scoffed softly, his hand pressing against the invisible wall as he forced himself to his feet. He still didn't face her. She felt a pang at this, but couldn't help but be thankful that she'd kept the spell going for this long. Had it not been there, he might have disappeared this morning. He could have been gone before she reached this spot, disappearing into the world that rejected them when they most needed to be accepted.

"I want to go back home now," he said, slowly turning. She stepped back as he walked by her, heading for where he knew the sled would be. She followed a few feet behind, thankful that he had come so willingly. She hadn't wanted to use her powers to force him home, but she'd been afraid she might have to. Him walking on his own two feet was the better option, and she was glad he chose it on his own.

But even as they plodded through the snow toward her sled, Adair could see something different in him. He looked thinner, more worn than before. As if he were a carpet walked on by too many feet, rubbing through in places. When he climbed into the sled, his eyes unfocused and she had the uncanny feeling that she wasn't sitting next to Silver anymore. Somehow it was just his body next to her, breathing and pumping blood, yet not housing the boy she'd come to know as her only and entire world. Terror gripped her heart for the first time in so long, and she fought against her instincts to lash out. Her powers could not help her right now, and she had to let it be that way. She could not force him to talk to her, even though she tried making him laugh with a few ice statue shows on the way back. He stared through them, ignoring the antics that he used to find so entertaining. He'd seen all her tricks before.