Tears of Frost

by Bree Barton

  “And when the moon is weeping . . .”

  “The witches do their reaping,” they finished together.

  She nodded. “Very well. And the Snow Queen?”

  “Preparing to meet the Snow Wolf,” he assured her.

  “Good.”

  He pressed his palm to the frostflower on the iron gate, and it swung open.

  “This way.”

  The boy led her down the dazzling white corridors of the palace. She passed stately drawing rooms and a well-lit music room with a large window, where a white piano looked out over the wharf. Angelyne felt a flicker of heat and the attendant memory: she and Mia twirling through the cottage in their mother’s finest gowns, singing that dreadful snow plum song.

  She turned away. What a child she’d been.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked the boy. “I haven’t seen a single guard.”

  “They’re all outside for the Illuminations. Like pigeons with bread crumbs: so easily entertained.” The boy ushered her into a large box embellished with bronze beasts. “The Descending Room, I call it.”

  The room was well named. It did, in fact, descend.

  As they dropped beneath the palace floors, she took note of her companion. His face was a study in contrasts: dark, heavy-lidded eyes set in a round face with skin so fair it was almost translucent. He boasted a shock of ghostly white hair, with spurts of the same fine hair on his knuckles, which he cracked with obvious pleasure.

  The boy was a stranger—and not the stranger she’d expected. Yet, in spite of all this: she felt no fear.

  The realization coaxed a smile to her lips. There was nothing this boy could do to her, no harm he could inflict. Angelyne was untouchable. This was why she loved magic so dearly: it granted her a power she had never known.

  Moments later, the box came to a bumpy stop. The boy offered his arm.

  “Your Grace.”

  He led her down a long silvery tunnel freckled with purple dots.

  “Why is Lord Dove underground?” she asked. “He’s been slaving over the Illuminations for months. Doesn’t he want to revel in the fruits of his creation?”

  “Lord Dove tries to be everywhere at once. Sometimes he is successful.”

  He pulled a velvety white rope, and a pair of silver doors clanked open.

  In the months since Angelyne had struck up a correspondence with the queen’s Grand Fyremaster, she had spent plenty of time imagining his underground laboratory. She envisioned it wreathed in pungent smoke, an army of workers scuttling between experiments so magnificent they took her breath away.

  Now, standing in the thick of it, her breath was decidedly untaken. In the middle of the room, a large mirror with an ornate gilded frame stood six or seven feet high. Lackluster tables encircled it, littered with parchments and writing implements.

  “Where is Lord Dove?”

  “He said to tell you we are happy to commence a new era of peace with our northern neighbor.”

  The boy hefted a barrel onto the closest table, heaped high with carvings in various shades of blue: azure, cobalt, luminous cerulean. Flowers and beasts, mostly.

  She frowned. “This isn’t fyre ice.”

  “No,” the boy agreed. “Not yet.”

  She was far less interested in the blue gems than in the red stone bird perched on a nearby table.

  “That’s fojuen,” she said.

  “With eyes of fyre ice. Lord Dove finds the combination particularly effective when summoning a person’s Reflections.”

  Angelyne knew the bird well, of course. She’d recognize the ruby wren anywhere.

  Her mother was close by. Probably tucked into a cozy balcony upstairs, awaiting the Illuminations. As far as Angelyne was concerned, her mother had betrayed their family the moment she stopped her own heart, twisting the knife of that betrayal when she’d chosen never to return.

  Angelyne meant what she’d said in her letter to Mia and Pilar. This wasn’t a time for parents and children, old families and old alliances. It was a time for sisters. The sisterhood would rise up and save them all.

  She dug her hand into the mound of blue carvings, sieving out a few choice pieces. They were cold to the touch. She dropped the carvings back into the barrel with a pitiful clink.

  Trinkets. A pathetic, trifling magic. Fury bloomed in her chest. Did Dove really think these would appease her?

  The wren, on the other hand, might prove useful.

  Angelyne angled her body away from the boy, and—with a clever sleight of hand—poached the bird from the table. She dropped it discreetly down the front of her gown.

  When she wheeled back around, her voice was icy.

  “I didn’t come all this way for baubles.”

  “Of course not, Your Grace,” the boy said. “But these are only one ingredient.”

  He threw back his shoulders, round belly lifting an inch or two, and strolled in front of the gilded mirror in the center of the room.

  Angelyne gasped.

  In the mirror’s reflection, she no longer saw a boy, but a wiry white-haired man. A gentleman, by the looks of it. Pink cheeks, pink nose, and a white beard both thick and impeccably trimmed. His eyes sparkled a pale sapphire silver.

  A thrum of excitement thrilled through Angelyne’s chest.

  “Lord Dove?”

  “A pleasure to be reacquainted,” he said with a wink.

  Chapter 46

  Reservoir

  MIA CLAPPED A HAND over her mouth, willing herself silent. From her hiding place, she could see Lord Kristoffin Dove perfectly framed in the mirror’s reflection. But from her unique angle, she could also see him from the side, not in the glass, and the flesh-and-blood figure was not Lord Dove at all.

  It was Ville.

  The instant she had seen Angelyne brush past the music room, a flash of strawberry hair against white walls, Mia knew she would follow. Quin had urged her not to go. When he realized she couldn’t be swayed, he announced he was going, too.

  “The last thing I need is my sister’s lackey accompanying me,” she’d said.

  “I think that’s exactly who you need. When it comes to the inner workings of Angelyne’s mind, I have the clearest view.”

  She had no choice. He was coming whether she liked it or not. Together they’d stolen down the palace halls, careful to stay one corridor behind, until Angelyne and her companion—one of the queen’s guards, Mia imagined—stepped into the Descending Room and were lowered inch by inch on its cables.

  “What is that strange box?” Quin whispered as it dropped out of sight. “Can we ride it, too?”

  Mia shook her head. “It’s too loud. I have another idea.”

  Once the screeches and creaks subsided when Angelyne arrived below, Mia leaned over the edge and gripped hold of an iron cable, signaling Quin to do the same. Far below, she could just make out the eerie lavender glow of the box, the cranks and pipes puffing violet steam. She hoped the hazy light would be enough to guide them.

  And thus began the horrifying endeavor of using two swaying cables to climb down a lightless shaft. She couldn’t help but be reminded of the night she and Prince Quin had slung themselves off the cliff outside the Kaer in a dusty bronze carriage. They seemed to have a knack for free-falling down tremulous cables.

  Once again, they’d survived. Mia and Quin landed on top of the Descending Room, sweaty but unscathed. “How far does this thing go?” he’d asked, as they peered into the darkness beneath them, catching their breath. She’d thought the chute would dead end where the box stopped, but, judging by the cold current blowing up from below, it kept going. Did the Descending Room plunge even deeper than Kristoffin’s laboratory?

  “I don’t know,” she’d said. “But we don’t have time to go exploring.”

  Mia had found the hatch door in the roof of the box, precisely where she remembered. She and Quin dropped soundlessly through it and hurried down the corridor lit with shimmers. Then they crawled into Lord Dove’s shop, where
they crouched behind a table just as the guard stepped in front of the mirror.

  The guard who wasn’t a guard at all.

  When Mirror Lord Dove spoke, Flesh-and-Blood Ville’s mouth moved in synchronicity. Same wink. Same wry grin. Though their two voices came in different timbres, their bodies in different shapes, every gesture and inflection found its perfect twin.

  Mia dragged her eyes away from Ville—or Kristoffin—and fixed them on her sister. Her heart rose in her throat. Angie had always been slender, but in a few short months she’d gone from slim to emaciated. It took Mia a moment to recall the person her sister resembled, until it struck with sickening clarity: Zaga.

  Angelyne studied Kristoffin, then Ville, a smile flirting at her lips.

  “Which of you is real?” she asked.

  “Both, Your Grace. What your eye perceives is what the mind believes.”

  “What kind of magic is this?”

  Mia caught the excitement in her sister’s voice. There was a hunger beneath the words. Ambition.

  “Are you familiar with the Renderer, Your Grace?” Kristoffin asked.

  “Of course. The Second Soul of Jyöl?”

  “Good, good.”

  Lord Dove stepped out from behind the mirror, and the moment he did, Ville disappeared. One second he stood beside Angelyne; the next, he’d vanished into air, with only the Grand Fyremaster remaining.

  “Remarkable,” Angie murmured.

  Kristoffin looked pleased. He waved her over to the table, where he sifted through a stack of parchments and extracted a large charcoal drawing. Ville had been rendered flawlessly: round belly, dark eyes, silvery blond hair. His face was frozen mid-wink.

  “This is Ville,” said Kristoffin, clearly delighted. “He has served me admirably well.”

  “I presume you have others?”

  “Of course.” Kristoffin rifled through sheaves of parchment until he found another sketch. This fellow has become one of my favorites. I get to be a bit naughty, if you will. The sort of chap I never had a chance to be.”

  A tall blond boy slouched on the paper, with watery blue eyes and a belt of frostflower trinkets.

  Mia nearly choked. Here was the lout she’d met at the alehouse a few weeks back. The same night she’d met Kristoffin Dove, come to think of it. Which means he’d been in two different alehouses, watching her.

  “So this,” Angelyne said, “is how you manage to be everywhere at once.”

  “I can only exist in one place at a time. There is only one Kristoffin Dove. But I can take on different guises. Some people respond best to a doddering old fool. Others to a virile youth in his prime.”

  “You’re a Renderer.”

  He shook his head. “What I do is far more powerful. I am fully present inside each illusion, made manifest outside the palace walls. Not only can I warp what the eye perceives: I can make those illusions material.”

  Kristoffin licked his finger, dabbing at the charcoal sketch in his hand. “Perhaps I should explain how magic works.”

  Angie’s jaw tightened. “I know how magic works.”

  “Forgive me,” said Kristoffin, “but I thought I did, too. The work I’ve done, the successes I’ve been able to achieve . . . they have shown me things I never could have imagined.”

  Mia waited for her sister’s temper to flare. Either Dove didn’t know the extent of Angelyne’s powers, or he was intentionally playing with fire.

  When you strike a woman, you strike a match.

  What an awful expression. Why hadn’t she realized that when Kristoffin said it?

  “Magic is born of a power imbalance,” Kristoffin said. “In the natural world, it is physical. But when that imbalance of power is found inside a human heart . . . when one person oppresses another . . . something shifts. A shift that goes deeper than the visible world.”

  Mia leaned forward on her heels. Her sister leaned, too.

  “In each of us there is a reservoir,” Kristoffin explained, “carved from this imbalance. The deeper the reservoir, the stronger the potential for magic. Thus any living creature that bears the capacity for great suffering bears the capacity for great magic.”

  He gave a sad little chuckle. “Of course there are others for whom the reservoir runs dry. Fortunate devil that I am, my lake is more of a thimble, really. Left to my own devices, I could never practice magic.”

  “But you do practice magic. You’ve rendered yourself a whole army of guises.”

  “Once you find the right method to extract this magic, the potential is limitless. And that, Your Grace, is why fyre ice is so powerful.”

  Lord Dove broadened his shoulders, winding up for his grand crescendo.

  “We have found a way to divorce magic from its legacy of pain and suffering. Divorce in the truest sense of the word: to separate one from the other. Fyre ice is both catalyst and container, a tool and a gift.”

  Mia studied her sister’s face. Angelyne was inscrutable.

  “Surely by now, Lord Dove, you know I am far more interested in process than results.” She seized a blue bird and held it up. “I want to know how they’re made.”

  Kristoffin rubbed his hands together. “Sharp as an arrow, and just as quick. Good Græÿa, how you remind me of your sister!”

  A shadow stole over Angie’s face. Mia could see the question in her eyes. Which sister?

  “If suffering is a reservoir,” Kristoffin said, “then the substance that most effectively fills it—the most potent ingredient—is pain.”

  Every hair on Mia’s neck stood up. Instinctually she knew something was about to be revealed. Something unconscionable.

  Come with me, she mouthed to Quin. She planted her hands on the ground, then her knees, crawling silently toward the metal doors.

  “You have concealed the truth from me since I arrived, Lord Dove,” Angelyne said coldly. “You’ve masked your true form and obfuscated the work you do here—the work I’ve come all this way to see. You will answer my next question truthfully, or there will be consequences.”

  Mia and Quin slipped through the doors, just as Angie asked her final question.

  “This isn’t the real laboratory, is it?”

  Kristoffin let out his breath.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

  Chapter 47

  The Forgotten

  ANGELYNE WAS GOOD AT playing coy. The trick was in the wavering voice, the tear-brightened eyes, the lowered lashes. Deferential and pliant, the kind of girl who always needed saving.

  She hated that role.

  As Lord Dove escorted her out of the laboratory—the false laboratory—rage swelled in her chest. It would be so easy to turn his breath to shards of glass, slit his throat from the inside out.

  “Right this way, Your Grace,” said Dove, ushering her down the corridor and into the iron box.

  Angelyne swallowed her fury. She needed to get into that laboratory. After that, she made no promises.

  As Dove reached for the crank, she found herself staring up at the ceiling, the hatch door slightly askew. Just a touch, but enough for a wedge of violet light to peek through.

  She pointed overhead. “Is that normal?”

  Dove looked up, then frowned. “Forgive me. Sometimes it comes loose on the descent.”

  He jiggled the hatch door until it snapped back into place, sealing out the light.

  For a moment Angelyne thought she heard a slight twang underfoot. But then Lord Dove twisted the crank and the box descended, drowning out all other sounds in a cacophony of groans.

  As they plummeted deeper beneath the earth, Angelyne’s thoughts grew darker. Did the Grand Fyremaster really think he could deceive her? Or was he toying with her the same way she’d toyed with him? If, after months of correspondence, Lord Dove truly thought she’d come for a pocketful of trinkets, then he hadn’t been paying attention.

  The truth was, Lord Kristoffin Dove troubled her. If a man who claimed to have no magic himself could somehow transfo
rm illusions into bone and flesh . . .

  For the first time since arriving in the snow kingdom, she allowed herself a trickle of fear. She was powerful; no one would dispute it. And yet.

  Angelyne shook her head. It didn’t matter what the Grand Fyremaster conjured. She wasn’t here for the end product.

  She was here for its derivation.

  The tunnels beneath the tunnels boasted none of the same gloss. No glowing lilac flecks adorning the walls. Lord Dove led Angelyne through caverns and passageways roughly hewn from dark rock and damp earth.

  “You have assistants, I presume?” she said, hearing hoarse whispers up ahead.

  Lord Dove shook his head. “Not down here. I can’t risk prying eyes.”

  She heard the noise again: two hushed voices intertwining. The air in the corridor chilled, the same cold she sensed when subjects cowered at her feet.

  “Someone is down here, Lord Dove. We are not alone.”

  “Of course not. But I assure you, you needn’t be afraid.”

  In her letters she had played the part of the weak, fearful river queen, under the control of someone much stronger. Frankly, that didn’t require much exaggeration: Zaga committed most of the truly egregious acts. Heap the bodies of all disloyal subjects in the Hall of Hands? The stench was heinous, not to mention the flies.

  “Does Queen Freyja know about this place?” Angelyne asked.

  “Not an inkling. Nor does her cousin—and I intend to keep it that way. As Ville I’ve grown quite chummy with Zai. As for my niece . . .”

  He sighed. “Freyja rules our people with justice and compassion, but she does not understand that some sacrifices are required. There is always a cost, and always a reward.”

  Angelyne nodded. This was precisely why the snow queen had never interested her. Freyja struck her as the kind of ruler who believed in essential goodness. As if that were enough to rule a kingdom. Being good.

  “You do her dirty work, then.”

  “I do what is necessary,” Dove said, “for the queendom to thrive.”

  They had come to the mouth of a large cave, light shifting and flickering from within.

  Lord Dove straightened.