Tears of Frost

by Bree Barton

  “Is everyone there as beautiful as you?” Ville chimed in. “If so, how do I get a one-way ticket?”

  Nelladine rolled her eyes. “Will you at least try to be a decent human being?”

  “I have an appreciation for beauty, Nelladinellakin. Is that indecent?”

  “I hate when you call me that.”

  “You mean when I call you by your gods-given name? Since you are officially no longer my friend, your judgment simply doesn’t affect me. Pity.”

  Nell let out an exasperated sigh.

  “It never stops with these two,” Zai said, but Mia caught him smiling.

  For her part, she hoped they would keep ribbing one another the rest of the ride. Maybe their joy would be infectious. Maybe her darkness would begin to lift.

  The sun still hadn’t risen as they approached the White Lagoon, though the morning would soon tip into afternoon. Hordes of well-dressed visitors poured out of the carriages. Giant, speckled volqanic rocks framed a winding passageway that shunted guests to the lagoon’s front gate.

  And on the far side of the structure, where a cluster of reinsdyr ate and shat—in an area cleverly concealed by the gigantic rocks—Mia saw quite a different tableau.

  A row of women hunched on the ground, dirt creased into their hands and faces. Many wore the traditional Addi dress. But whereas the wool of the barmaid’s gohki was crisp and carmine, these women’s gohki were faded, the red frieze pilled and threadbare.

  Three tall men lingered nearby. Though they wore no uniform, their purpose was clear. Every time one of the women tried to wander toward the long queue of foreign guests, the men would guide her back to the others.

  “You three go in,” Zai said. “I’ll tie the reinsdyr.”

  When he reached for his satchel, Mia saw a loaf of bread peeking out of the leather.

  Their eyes met briefly. His face was inscrutable.

  “Nell,” he said. “Can you take Raven to the disrobing chamber?”

  “I can!” Ville offered cheerfully.

  “No, you absolutely cannot.” Nell scoffed. “Men and women have separate chambers for disrobing, thank the moon above.”

  Nelladine took Mia by the hand, ushering her away before Ville could protest.

  “I swear he isn’t usually like this,” said Nelladine. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s always bad, just not this bad.”

  On one hand the attention was flattering. But there was something unnerving about it, too. Ville’s words roiled in Mia’s belly. Did this mean the numbness was fading? If she felt physical discomfort, perhaps other, better sensations would soon follow.

  “How long have you three known each other?” she asked Nell.

  “I’ve known Zai for years. As for Ville, only a few months . . . which honestly feels like a lifetime. Sometimes I think that boy would be better off gelded—it would keep him out of trouble, that’s for sure. Not that I’d ever wish harm on his poor, godsforsaken balls.”

  Nell gave a quick wave, and a woman with yellow braids pinned in the Luumi style ushered them to the front of the line.

  “It’s lucky Zai is friends with the owner,” Mia said, impressed.

  “Zai is friends with everyone.”

  Inside, another blond woman handed them each a thick canvas bathing cloth. Nelladine sauntered down the hallway, pushing open the doors to the disrobing chamber.

  The women inside were, in a word, disrobed.

  Mia froze. She had never seen a roomful of naked women.

  Her eyes drank in all sorts of physiques: women with rolls of flesh on their thighs and bellies; tight, hard bodies with flat chests and narrow hips; dark-skinned women with large nipples like brown blooms, and fair-skinned girls with perky pink nipples no wider than a coin. Bodies shaped like pears, plums, and every fruit in between.

  Some were beautiful; others weren’t. She saw a thin girl with a baby in her belly and slashes of white marks on her thighs. She saw a big matronly woman with glorious curves and wavy black hair who reminded her so much of her mother. She saw tiny, wrinkled ladies with bowed backs and breasts sagging to their navels, froths of dark, untrimmed hair between their legs.

  Mia felt a flash of repulsion. But the reaction was so sudden—and frankly so mean—she forced herself to examine it more closely.

  The answer came quickly. Shame.

  In Glas Ddir such a thing was blasphemous. So many unbridled bodies, so much potential for touching, all that filthy magic stewing skin to skin. Her whole life she had been taught that the female body was dirty, evil, wrong.

  Mia hated that wherever she went, she took the river kingdom with her.

  She wondered if she’d ever truly break free.

  “I don’t have any bathing clothes,” Mia said.

  “You don’t need any! They provide everything for you, it’s very luxurious. They even give you lotions for your skin and hair, see?”

  Nelladine flourished a hand toward the candlelit marble slab, where a row of brown clay bowls were filled to the brim with creams and salves. A dozen frostflowers hovered in the air, their violet flames guttering as Nell sat on a wooden bench.

  “Put your hands in the ice tub, Raven!” She beckoned toward a large black basin. “The cold closes your pores, makes your skin nice and tight. No more than half a minute or you’ll freeze.”

  Tentatively, Mia sat on the bench, sliding her hands gingerly into the basin. Beside her, Nell dipped a swatch of linen into a bowl of water and swabbed her brow.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Why wear pigment the day you’re going to the lagoon, Nell? Isn’t that a lot of fuss if you just have to take it off again?”

  She wiped the cloth over her eyelid and lashes. It came back inky blue.

  “But I like feeling beautiful. Pretty and womanly, what’s the harm in that?”

  Nell flipped the blue-smudged cloth around and continued to rub in smooth, firm swipes. Mia felt a twinge of guilt. When Angelyne had prattled on about gowns and skin greases, she’d assumed her sister was vacuous. She would not make that mistake again.

  “I’m hopeless about that sort of thing,” she said. “Maybe sometime you could apply my pigment? Show me how it’s done?”

  Nell brightened. “I’d love to! Applying pigment always gives me the same feeling I get glazing my clay: you’re turning something plain into something beautiful.” Her large brown eyes widened. “I didn’t mean you’re plain! What a thing to say! You don’t need a speck of pigment, Raven, truly, you’re beautiful without it. I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “It’s all right,” Mia said. “I know what you meant.”

  “Sometimes I talk too much, it gets me into trouble. Don’t argue! I know I do.”

  Nelladine dropped the linen square into the water bowl, pressing it down to soak. She sighed. “I wish the lagoon would buy my bowls, these brown ones are hideous.”

  She stood, then gasped. “Raven! Your hands!”

  Mia had completely forgotten about the ice tub. She pulled her hands out abruptly. Her fingers were sickly white, frost crystals clinging to her skin.

  “I said half a minute,” Nell cried. “The ice is freezing! How could you not feel it?”

  Mia couldn’t think of a believable lie. She tried to wiggle her fingers, but they’d gone completely stiff.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I was lost in my own thoughts.”

  “You have been a bit distracted, haven’t you?”

  Nell cupped her hands around Mia’s, rubbing vigorously.

  “I guess it’s easy for your mind to wander when I go on and on! Thinking about someone you loved, maybe? Someone you lost?”

  Mia frowned, realizing Quin hadn’t crossed her mind once since arriving at the lagoon.

  “It’s all right,” Nell reassured her. “You don’t have to talk about it. We all have our secrets.” She gave Mia’s hands a gentle squeeze. “Secrets are what make us real.”

  A shadow passed over her face, vanishing so quickly Mi
a didn’t trust her eyes.

  When Nell removed her hands, the frost had melted. Mia bent and straightened her fingers. They were rosy again.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. Had Nelladine healed her with magic, or just good old-fashioned heat? Despite the general Luumi openness on the subject, Mia still felt nervous asking. Another legacy King Ronan had so generously bestowed.

  “Now that you’re not at risk of frostbite,” Nell said, “we can get dressed.” She stood and stepped out of her peach bodice, which dropped softly around her ankles.

  Nell strolled nude to the hamper, hips in gentle sway, and began to sort leisurely through the bathing clothes.

  Mia blushed. She was hopelessly shy about this sort of thing.

  And yet. Even if Mia was shy—Raven didn’t have to be.

  She wriggled out of her shirt and jacket, slid off her trousers, and let the whole twisted clump drop to the floor. Then she unclasped her undergarments and discarded them. It felt simultaneously liberating and terrifying.

  “Here, these should be about your size.” Nell handed her bathing clothes in festive Jyöltide colors. “Waifish sprite that you are.”

  Mia had never thought of herself as waifish. In fact she’d always taken pride in her womanly hips, which she’d inherited from her mother. But her hips were no longer as fleshy as they once were. Another side effect of dying.

  She slipped on the purple bathing clothes, mortified by how much more comfortable she felt with garments on.

  Nelladine gave a nod of approval. “Gorgeous. Ready? I’m sure Zai and Ville are already in the steam room, waiting for us to grace them with our presence.”

  Mia swallowed. “You and Zai . . .”

  “You want to know if we’ve ever been together? We kissed once when we’d both had a few too many. It was a mistake.”

  Jealousy stirred in Mia’s chest, followed sharply by self-reproach. Why did she care if they had kissed? This was all a distraction, anyway: she hadn’t come to White Lagoon to pine after a beautiful boy. She had a job to do.

  But she couldn’t help herself.

  “A mistake because you didn’t like him?”

  “Let’s just say, if there was a moment that confirmed my lifelong lack of interest in boys, that was the moment.” Nell laughed her warm, husky laugh. “But you’re interested in boys, aren’t you? Or at the very least you’re interested in him.”

  “I hardly know him.”

  “I hardly know a slab of clay when I put it on the wheel, but I still want to touch it.” She nudged Mia playfully. “Maybe you should touch yours, too.”

  The long corridor from the disrobing chamber emptied into the steam room, where people reclined on long pinewood benches. Mia could barely see anything through the white fog.

  “Zai?” Nell called. “Where are you? Are you here?”

  “What about me?” came Ville’s jolly voice. “Don’t you want to find me?”

  Nell snorted. “I’m sure you’ll make yourself apparent soon enough.”

  The boys materialized. They were sitting cross-legged on the farthest bench, Zai in a white linen tunic, Ville with his pale belly hanging proudly over his canvas trouser tops.

  “The lagoon is that way, under the arch.” Zai nodded to a speckled stone ramp descending into cloudy water. “You should swim out alone first, Raven. It’s really something.”

  Mia glanced at Ville. She’d been forced to leave the frostflower in the disrobing chamber; there was no space for it amidst all her exposed flesh.

  “If you brave the waters of the White Lagoon,” Ville said, “I’ll reward you with an ale on the other side.”

  Hope flickered in her chest. “Challenge accepted.”

  “Don’t let Græÿa eat you!” he said with a wink.

  Mia edged down the ramp as it sloped into the lagoon. When the water reached her midriff, she took a deep breath and dunked her head under.

  She emerged into another world.

  Chapter 14

  A Blaze of Scarlet

  THE LAGOON WAS A dreamscape drenched in grays and blues. Steam curled off the water, clouds of fog hovering just above the surface. The hazy dawn light transmuted the visitors into beasts and elves and gargoyles, shadowy black shapes against a pink-limned sky. A land of witches and sorcerers, Mia thought, and the people haunted by them.

  The water itself was perfectly white, like bathing in milk. She scooped up a cupful and let it stream through her fingers. Overhead, the moon was plump and shiny as a hardboiled egg.

  Mia inhaled. Despite the sulfyr in the water, the lagoon had no sour tang.

  Of course it didn’t. Nothing had a smell anymore.

  She had a sudden flash of sense memory, the echo of a scent inside her nostrils: the sulfyric pinch of the hot spring she and Quin had stumbled across in the Twisted Forest. Suddenly Mia could see his green eyes reflecting the iridescent water, the image so vivid she almost gasped. She’d had more memories resurface in the last day than in the whole last month.

  I said I’d come back for him.

  Did she, though? She’d never actually said the words. She had simply stared into Quin’s eyes in the castle crypt, making a silent promise without a shred of common sense to support it. Considering she’d stopped her own heart seconds later, she wasn’t the most reliable purveyor of promises.

  Still, Mia was determined. She would find her mother and destroy the moonstone. She would save Quin.

  But as she waded into the White Lagoon, Mia found she didn’t want to think about the boy she’d left behind. Every memory of Quin only made her feel more broken, more empty.

  She swam out farther. The visitors thinned out as the lagoon flowed into rills and runnels. Though she could have easily stood in the shallow water, she kept herself covered up to her chin, mesmerized by the way her whole body vanished into the soft milky white. There were lakes in Ilwysion, of course, the alpine forest she’d grown up in, where her mother taught Mia and Angelyne to swim. But the mountain lakes were crystal clear, nothing like this.

  She scooped white water into her hand, letting it sieve through her fingers. What would she say if she found her mother? No matter how many times Mia envisioned their reunion, she’d never been able to script the conversation. When she imagined seeing her mother’s face, a swell of feelings took over, joy and love bound up in hurt and blame. She wanted to thank Wynna for everything she’d done—and punish her for everything she hadn’t.

  Overhead, the dark sky faded into pale blue, a salmon-pink strip smudging the horizon. Soon the sun would rise.

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?” Nelladine swam up behind her, long black braids twirled atop her head to keep them dry. “Such a strange combination, your bottom half piping hot while the top of you is freezing. Gives me the shivers, in the best of ways.”

  Mia wished more than anything to feel the shivers. Absently she traced the indigo frostflower on her wrist.

  Nell gasped. “I love your ink, Raven! How gorgeous! When did you get it? Your mark reminds me of Zai’s.”

  “Zai’s what?” he called out, rapidly closing the gap between them. He swam with strong, powerful strokes, his black hair slicked back and tapered at the neck, his linen tunic clinging to his chest like sealskin.

  Ville paddled along beside him, reminding Mia of an actual seal.

  “What are you ladies talking about?”

  Nell held up Mia’s wrist. “Look, isn’t that pretty?”

  Zai’s expression changed. He stood, shaking the lagoon water out of his hair, and examined the indigo mark on her skin.

  “This is fyre ink.”

  She nodded. “The ink painter said now that they’ve dug new mines, he’s had a surge in business. So many foreign visitors come in asking for—”

  “Were you honoring our culture?” Zai said gruffly. “Or mocking it?”

  Something had shifted. “I—I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “He means,” Ville said, “that the Addi marks have deep meani
ng. Just not to you.”

  Mia blanched. She knew fyre ink was indigenous, but she hadn’t put two and two together. Her conversation with Zai about the Addi came rushing back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really didn’t mean any offense.”

  Ville’s face cracked into a smile. “I’m only joking! It’s your skin. Do whatever you like with it. Though, if you write messages on your body”—he raised an eyebrow—“you should know boys are going to read them.”

  Mia frowned. She turned to Zai to see if he’d been joking, too. But his face was a closed door.

  “Show her your ink, Zai,” said Nelladine.

  The linen was coarse yet supple beneath his broad fingers as he uncapped the button of one sleeve, rolling the fabric into a taut cuff over his bicep’s swell.

  “Come on, Zai, don’t be modest. Show her the whole thing!”

  He stared at Nell a moment, then peeled the tunic over his head in one swift stroke.

  What Mia noticed first was not the ink at all, but his torso carved into eight neat rectangles. She swallowed. He must have lifted quite a few ale casks to achieve that physique.

  Reaching across his collarbone—and over his back and arms—was the ice-blue ink.

  Frostflowers unfurled across his shoulders, long tangled roots spilling down the muscles of his back, snaking into dozens of symbols she didn’t recognize. On the front of his chest, the ink coiled into a giant six-petaled blossom over his heart.

  Mia liked how her own indigo mark looked against her ivory skin and freckles, but she found Zai’s icy blue ink even more striking. It transformed his chest into a landscape, glimmering and alive, the gently moving ink like a stream burbling after the first thaw. She had a fierce urge to run her fingertips over the current.

  While Mia’s mark was still fresh, his were so pale they looked almost like scars.

  “My ink is very old,” he said, answering her unasked question. “From the last reserves before the pits were emptied. Yours is the new kind.” He pointed at the purple mark on her skin. “They say the wrist is the most painful place to take the ink.”