I groaned and buried my head in my hands. There was a crippling feeling of failure in my chest that blossomed with sharp bursts of anxiety and pain. Shouldn’t I know what the Hel I was doing by now? It’d been nearly a year since the events of the Hunt, and I was still nowhere closer to discovering how to use the stag’s power actively or figuring out why I was seeing Lydian, why I heard his voice, and why my sleep was plagued with these apocalyptic nightmares. Sure, maybe I was born on the border of the Permafrost and the human world, and maybe it filled me with a type of magic that others couldn’t possess. Maybe that magic was why the original stag, the symbol of the Erlking, the great spirit of the Permafrost, could pass on its mantle to me after its original form had died. It didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t tell where the stag ended and I began, much less reach the part of my brain that kept the stag powers in check for me to use. It was like an entirely new sphere of my brain had shown itself behind a glass wall, but I couldn’t get through the glass to actually reach it.

“You have the ability to do so much, Janneke.” She placed a hand on my knee. “The power is in you; you need to understand it.”

“Well, it’s not my fault being the stag doesn’t come with an instruction manual,” I snapped, then immediately felt guilty. Diaval was only trying to help. “I’m sorry. I’m frustrated.”

Diaval didn’t look offended. We were close enough to deal with each other’s unique brand of harshness. I never would have believed I’d find others in the Permafrost that gave me the same sense of connection as people in the human realm had. Not to degrade Soren and Seppo, obviously, but I’d lived my human life with six other siblings, all female, and was privy to all the gossip and talk even if I could never be a part of it due to my restrictions. I always had to play rough with the men outside. And maybe Diaval was not particularly traditionally feminine, but she sure as Hel was close to that type of friend I longed for growing up.