my hands.” I plopped back into the chair. “He’s pulling away from me. He’s not the same man I fell in love with. And to be honest… he gets in the way of my destiny. If Ethan is going to stop me from fulfilling my job as the Worldweaver, he has to go. Saving the fae is more important than any relationship.”
“Emma, you need to be careful about making this very permanent choice. Once this is done, you can never go back.” Mom stared at me. Her look was pleading. I was breaking her heart by making this admission.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I know, Mom. But if there’s nothing left, I have to do this. To protect myself. Please help me.”
Mom nodded. She got up from the table, and took down from a bookshelf a very old and battered diary. “I wrote my own breaking ceremony down. It’s the only thing that severed the connection between myself and King Lycus.”
Mom opened the diary and began shuffling through the yellowed pages. “Listen closely, Emma. I’ll only teach you this once. You can make the decision from there.”
That Saturday was the first round of the women’s free skate at the Malovian National Championships. I’d be skating my short program at six o’clock, right after the men’s short program.
I hadn’t decided if I was going through with the breaking ceremony or not. This wasn’t the right weekend— I needed my focus to be on the competition, not on Ethan and I.
I’d practiced the cleansing ceremony every day. My energy felt clear, and I was calm. I was prepared to compete. The only thing that mattered was the ice.
Figure skating was determined by a tally of points. Jumps, spins, and artistry all combined to create the final score. The scores of a skater’s short program and the long program were added together in order to determine a skater’s placing. The top three placings would go on to compete in the European Championships early next year.
I needed a spot on that podium. The European Championships were the first step to going on to qualify for Worlds later. Not only that, the Malovian National Championships next year would determine who would go on to represent Malovia in the next Winter Olympics. If I wanted to establish myself as a competitor, and have a chance of making the team, I had to prove myself now, and have a history of winning so I’d be chosen to compete.
That’s if the prophecy doesn’t kill you first, a mean voice in my head added, but I pushed it aside. There was no magic today, no fairy tales. I’d been working on this dream for nearly twenty years. Now that my chance to shine was here, I couldn’t miss my shot for anything. Prophecies and doom would have to wait.
The Malovian National Championships were being held at the Arcanea University Ice Rink, which made sense, because the arena itself was massive. I liked that I was in my comfort zone at my home rink, and wouldn’t have to adjust to a new environment while trying to prove myself.
I got to the rink a few hours early, to begin my warm-up. I really wanted to watch Jasper skate, but his program was close to the end of the men’s competition, and I wouldn’t have enough time to get ready for my own skate if I was watching him. I jogged up and down the basement hallways, mentally ran through my program and practiced my jumps in my tennis shoes. As I stretched, I was feeling pretty confident. I felt ready to go on the ice.
Gabby was here, of fucking course. Because being queen obviously wasn’t enough to support her fat head. She wanted a gold medal, too. Apparently, she wanted to be Malovia’s darling sports hero on top of being its fascist dictator. She sneered my way, but I turned my back on her and tried not to let her in my head. Figure skating was twenty percent talent, eighty percent mind games. Gabby was good at those, which was why she’d gotten this far. I couldn’t afford to be another one of her victims. She had a bright red dress on that matched her tango music, and her hellish personality. Her hair was slicked back, and her makeup was done so fiercely, I wasn’t sure if she was trying to win the judges over or scare them.
Since I’d changed my long program into my short, I was