From the top, she could see out onto the Arctic. Low and fat, the moon danced over the translucent ridges. Wind stirred stray snow. She watched drifts form and dissipate, deep blue in the polar night.
Silhouetted, Bear came over the lip of the ridges. He was majestic on the ice. She watched him take great strides across the floes. His fur rippled in the moonlight. He almost glowed.
He galloped to the castle and disappeared inside. Finally, he was home. She swung down from the tree and landed with a crunch on the ice. She followed him to the banquet hall. He was waiting for her at the table. Melting frost dripped from his fur.
Cassie flopped down onto her throne. “What’s the news from the ice?”
“It is icy,” he said solemnly.
Cassie picked up a frozen apple. “Perfect day here,” she said. She tossed the apple up and caught it. “But then, it always is.” She threw it higher, and caught it. “Monday: perfect.” She tossed it. “Tuesday: perfect.” Caught it. “Wednesday: perfect.” Tossed it. “Thursday.” Caught it. “Friday. What day is today?”
“I do not track human days.” He cocked his head at her. “Are you all right?”
She tossed the apple back into its bowl. “Perfect.”
“You are not happy,” he said.
“Yes, I am,” she said irritably. She was queen of the ice. She was the Polar Bear’s wife. Of course she was perfectly happy, wandering around alone in an ice castle every dark day. Maybe if she could convince Bear to take her with him . . . But they’d had that discussion. Alone, he could travel unseen. With her, he ran the risk of detection. And besides, she’d serve no more purpose out there on the ice than she did here. She couldn’t help him be a munaqsri.
“Cassie, talk to me.”
“I don’t know what color my mother’s eyes are,” she said.
“Green,” he said. “Like yours.”
“All better.” She dared him to contradict her. Instead, he growled at the table. The table shot up a stem. It blossomed into a glass. Red wine filled it. Another bit of table folded up into a plate. Steam rose from it as her dinner grew. It was her favorite dish: chicken soaked in a white wine sauce. She stirred it with her fork. He treated her like a queen. How could she think about leaving?
The thought stopped her. Was she thinking about leaving? Truly leaving, as in never coming back, never seeing Bear again, not being his Polar Bear Queen?
Bear summoned a seal carcass and a dinner roll for himself. He held the carcass down with his paw and ripped upward with his teeth.
She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to never see him again. But did she want to stay? What about her life at the station? Why couldn’t she have both? “I could do research,” she offered.
Bear raised his head. Seal blood stained his muzzle a brilliant red. It looked like a child had smeared lipstick on him. “You cannot,” he said.
She scowled at the red stains. “Can’t you eat without dripping?”
“I have a large head.”
“You’re a slob.”
“All polar bears eat this way.”
“You’re making me lose my appetite.” Grabbing her linen napkin, she marched to Bear.
“I am sorry,” he said contritely. She wiped the gore from his chin and then went back to her seat.
With her watching, he snipped the blubber delicately with his incisors. He let the blood drip onto the floor before gulping the fat whole. “Better,” Cassie said. “You know if I had work to do, I wouldn’t obsess over your table manners. Plenty of research topics out there. You could tell me how polar bears navigate so effectively on the changing ice, or I could have the final word on whether polar bears are evolving into sea mammals.” She could be a station staffer on sabbatical, sort of. She’d already planned to do her college degree remotely. This would simply be more remote than anyone knew.
Gently, Bear said, “You cannot be a human scientist here. No one would believe you. What would you tell them? Your source is a talking bear? You live in an ice castle and feel no cold?”
Cassie swirled the sauce. She watched seal blood pool on the ice and thought about her future. Her path had always seemed so certain before. But she’d given it up by staying here, and she hadn’t even noticed. No wonder she felt so restless. She’d abandoned her future and replaced it with what? Gourmet dinners and pretty sculptures? She had no purpose here.
The table absorbed the blood, and the red vanished as if down a drain. She looked at her chicken. “Have you ever seen a polar bear in a cage?” she asked. “It paces. Back and forth. All day long: back and forth. It wears a rut in the floor. It doesn’t stop to eat. It doesn’t stop to sleep. It simply paces until it wastes away and dies.”
“You are unhappy?”
Unable to answer that, she looked up at him. “I want to go home,” she said.
* * * * *
It didn’t take her long to prepare to leave. Bear watched her from the bedroom door as she packed her belongings. All was silent around them. There was no wind, no creak of ice, no nothing. It felt as if the castle were holding its breath.
“Do you plan to return?” Bear asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She couldn’t look at him.
“How can you not know?”
“I just don’t.” All she knew was the idea of staying made her miserable and the idea of leaving made her just as miserable.
“So I must wait like a good little puppy dog while you decide our future?”
Cassie couldn’t answer that. Instead, she focused on pulling on her Gore-Tex and flannels over her clothes. She was heading back out into a world where she’d need all her layers. She had a memory of herself, age eight, being dressed by her father in so much fleece and down that she couldn’t lower her arms. When she got back to the station, she’d see her father again. She tried to imagine that conversation. How was she going to explain why she hadn’t returned sooner?
Bear growled, low in his throat, making the hair on the back of her neck prickle. “I have been a fool,” he said. “I believed you cared about me.”
Cassie frowned at him as she zipped her parka. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s me.” He was . . . sweet. And fun. But this wasn’t about him. It was about her—who she wanted to be, what she wanted her future life to be.
“Of course it ‘has to do’ with me,” he said. “It is my life you speak of.”
“And my life,” she snapped back. “You want me to sacrifice my career, friends, family, a mother I have never even met.” Granted, after the first few weeks had passed, she hadn’t missed her mother at all. Ruthlessly, she pushed that thought aside. “I can’t do that.” She’d worked so hard—late nights studying for Dad’s pop quizzes, long treks chasing bears, weekends cleaning equipment, all so she could someday earn an official staff position, a future she’d just tossed away to do what? Be Bear’s companion? Play in the topiary garden? Dance in the ballroom? It wasn’t enough.
“You do not belong there anymore,” he said. “It is your past. You cannot go back. This is your home now.”
Cassie shook her head. This wasn’t her home; this was Bear’s castle. Her eyes swept over the ice rose bed and the seabird wardrobe and the shimmering walls and golden door. She did know every curl of ice now, every rainbow reflection. She loved the shimmering sheen of the ice, the soothing wind outside, and all the memories she now had of everything here. But it’s not home, she told herself firmly. She had to remember that. Home was the station.
“You belong with me,” he said. “We are one.”
“No, we’re not. You’re out being munaqsri, and I’m . . .” She felt like . . . like a pet, kept at home until he was free to play with her.
“Should I let the polar bears be stillborn? Is that what you want me to do? Let their souls drift beyond the ends of the earth? I have responsibilities. You know that I do.”
“I know!” This was hard enough, and he was making it worse. It reminded her of how she’d come here—by b
eing blackmailed with a bargain she hadn’t been able to refuse. But that wasn’t fair. The bargain to save her mother had been her own idea. And after that, Cassie had chosen to stay. At least, she’d thought she’d had a choice. She’d believed him when he’d said she wasn’t a prisoner. What if . . . He wouldn’t force her to stay. He wasn’t like that. “If you really cared about me, you’d let me go.”
He turned away from her. “Go,” he said. She exhaled a breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. He added, “I will stay here and pace like a bear in a zoo until you return to me.”
Cassie sat down hard on the bed as the anger and frustration drained out of her. “I didn’t mean . . .” Didn’t mean what? To leave? But she did mean to leave. From the beginning, she had meant to leave. She just hadn’t meant to hurt him. And she hadn’t meant to care if she hurt him.
Bear sighed. “If you wish it, I will take you home.”
TEN
Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N
Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W
Altitude 10 ft.
CASSIE HADN’T REMEMBERED the station being so ugly. She’d always thought it resembled a sideways soup can, but she’d never noticed what an old soup can it had become. Its metal walls were pockmarked with the red-brown stains of decades of rust. The shed walls were worse. The whole complex was incongruous with the pristine ice desert. After all the years she’d walked in and out of that dented, rusted door without ever looking at it, seeing it now felt . . . strange.
She dismounted from Bear, but her hand stayed on his neck. He turned his head to look at her with his soulful eyes. “It looks different, that’s all,” she said, in answer to his unspoken question.
“You are different,” he said. “This place is not your home anymore.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” she said, taking her hand off his neck. “This is hard enough as it is.”
“I do not want leaving me to be easy.”
“Well, it’s not, so stop it.” He subsided, and she went back to staring across the station compound. Skidmarks from a Twin Otter crossed in front of the shed and headed behind the station. Max was here. Max. Owen. Liam. Scott. Jeremy. Dad and . . . and Mom. Cold pierced her cheeks even under her face mask now that she wasn’t touching Bear. Cassie closed the gusset on her hood.
“Are you afraid?” Bear asked gently.
“Like hell I am,” Cassie said. Ridiculous to be nervous about meeting her own mother. This should be the best day of her life.
But her feet wouldn’t move. All she had to do was walk to the door and open it, and there she’d be—her mother. “You could come in with me,” Cassie said.
Snow drifted across the doorstep in silence.
“I know you do not want that,” Bear said finally.
She nodded. She didn’t know what had made her say it.
“Raise the station flag and I will come for you,” Bear said.
No more thinking, she told herself. It was time to do this. Shouldering her pack, Cassie marched briskly across the lit snow. Closer, she heard the generator humming—a comfortingly familiar sound, like the welcoming whine of a family dog—and she slowed to a stop in front of the door.
Behind her, she heard Bear rumble, “I love you.”
Suddenly, going inside seemed easier than staying outside. Without looking at Bear, she pushed the door open. The smell of unwashed bodies hit her in a wave, and she reeled backward from the sourness. Steeling herself, she stepped into the entryway and closed the door behind her. Breathing shallowly through her face mask, she opened the second door.
And she was home.
* * * * *
Cassie stood in the second doorway and blinked, her eyes adjusting to the barrage of color: orange life vests, red parkas, bright blue packs, green and purple climbing ropes. Slowly, as the colors resolved into familiar shapes, she started to relax. Heaps of gear, stacks of files, rats’ nests of clothes on top of and around the desks and file cabinets . . . She knew this mess. Cassie stripped off her outer gear. She could hear voices in Owen’s workshop. She left her pack and gear on her desk and crossed to the half-open door.
The scene was very familiar: Max and Owen stood at the workbench. They were muttering over a chunk of engine. Leaning against the door frame, Cassie watched them. Max and Owen. Her two pseudo-uncles. She used to play in here while they muttered over some hunk of metal, exactly as they were doing now. She felt a grin tugging on her lips. “Nice toaster,” she said lightly.
Owen dropped the clamp.
“You should be more careful with that equipment,” she teased. “Treat it like a baby.”
Max whipped off his goggles, reverse raccoon mask underneath. “Cassie? Lassie!” He leaped over a sawhorse and scooped her up into a bear hug. Max! She’d missed him! She hugged him back fiercely. “Look at you, Cassie-lassie!”
Owen was frowning at her. “Cassie?” he said.
“It’s me. In the flesh. Good to see you.” She meant it. It was very good to see them, surprisingly good. She’d focused so much on her parents that she hadn’t thought about what it would be like to see the rest of her family. “Good to be home.” She threw open her arms and inhaled the smell of home: stale winter. She coughed.
“Cassie . . . we didn’t know if you were alive or dead, lassie,” Max said.
“Your mother always believed you lived,” Owen said.
Your mother. Cassie felt her heart stop for an instant. Bear had done it. Her mother was here. Alive and here. Cassie hadn’t realized that up until this moment, there had still been doubt, lurking. But hearing it from prosaic Owen’s lips, here in the unmagical, ordinary station . . . When her heartbeat resumed, it felt loud, like a timpani under her skin, and her voice sounded far away to her ears. “Where is she?”
Max grinned broadly. “Come on, Cassie-lassie.” He draped his arm around her shoulder and shepherded her out the door. “I want to see the expression on their faces when they see you.”
Cassie let herself be led. She didn’t feel her feet touching the floor. She barely saw where she was walking. Their faces, plural, when they see you. Max propelled her through the research lab to the kitchen. He released her as they entered.
There was only one person in the kitchen.
Her father was sitting at the table with his head bent over his notebook. A pot simmered on the stove behind him. For a long moment, she stared at him, feeling her insides tumble, unable to sort out what she was thinking or feeling.
After months with Bear, her six-foot-five father looked small and fragile. Gray streaked his hair, and his neck sagged beneath his mountain-man beard. She had forgotten his gray. She stared at him, trying to match this man to her memories. How had she ever found him intimidating? She wanted to cross to him and push his hair out of his eyes. He looked so . . . human.
Max cleared his throat, and Dad glanced up from his papers.
“Hi, Dad,” she said.
He looked stunned, as if she had dropped from the sky into the kitchen. Recovering, he shot out of his chair. The chair clattered backward to the floor behind him. In two large steps, he was in front of her. He crushed her in a hug. “Oh, my little girl,” he said.
He hadn’t called her that in years. Cassie swallowed a lump in her throat. “Where’s Mom?” The word tasted strange in her mouth.
His face split into an enormous smile. Still holding her shoulders, he called, “Gail! Gail, she’s home!” He squeezed her shoulders. “Gail!”
Cassie heard footsteps from the hall behind her. Her mother’s footsteps, running. Cassie’s back muscles tensed. The footsteps stopped at the doorway, and her father released her. But Cassie couldn’t turn around. Her feet felt glued to the linoleum. She had dreamed of this too often for too long. What are you afraid of? she challenged herself. Turn around.
No, I don’t want to.
Tough, she told herself. Turn the hell around.
Slowly, she turned—counter, cabinets, wall, Max, Owen . . . “Gail,”
Dad said to the woman in the doorway, “this is Cassandra. Cassie, this is your mother.”
Green eyes. For a long moment, Cassie had no other coherent thought. She stared at her mother’s eyes and felt as if her brain were spinning like a coronal aurora. Cassie did have her mother’s eyes.
But the resemblance ended there, at the eyes. Gail was short compared to Cassie, maybe five-foot-five. She had black hair, not red. Instead of sharp cheekbones, she had soft baby-doll cheeks. Decked out in a red blouse and jeans, she looked nothing like Cassie, except the eyes.
“Mother,” Cassie said, testing it.
Her mother swallowed and fluttered her hands as if she weren’t sure what to do with them, as if she were surprised that she had hands. “You can call me Gail, if it makes you more comfortable,” she said, her voice quivering.
Her mother was a stranger named Gail. “Gail,” Cassie said. She had not pictured using her mother’s first name. Cassie attempted a smile. “Very punny. North Wind’s daughter. Gale.”
Her mother sparkled at her with a smile out of a Crest commercial. “It’s short for Abigail.” Inanely, Cassie wondered where her mother had found lipstick up here. It was as red as Red Delicious apples, and as inappropriate as cotton jeans in fifty-below. “Oh,” Cassie said, continuing to stare. Her mother seemed smaller than she’d been in her daydreams.
The smile faded, and Gail twisted her hands. “Could I . . . Would it be all right if I hugged you?”
“Maybe,” Cassie said. Was it? “Yes.”
Gail took a step toward her and awkwardly held out her arms. Cassie took a matching step forward. Her mother smelled like pine trees, like wild air. Her arms felt bony around Cassie’s back. Cassie placed her hands on her mother’s shoulder blades. She was hugging a stranger. This close, Cassie could feel the gulf of every year, of every minute.
Her mother said in a soft voice, “My baby. My little girl.”
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