Prisoner of Ice and Snow

by Ruth Lauren

  The girl at the back of the line is small, almost running to keep pace with the others. I catch up to her, cold stinging my cheeks and running like ice water into my throat and lungs, but I pause as soon as I reach her. We’re heading for a building I didn’t see earlier, one that was camouflaged in the snow. One made entirely of ice. It glows an eerie blue in the morning light.

  I remember myself and run forward. Snow crunches under my boots as I hurry along, dodging out of the line so I can see ahead. It does me no good; all I can see are dark braids and brown furs, and none of them are Sasha.

  I should never have encouraged her obsession with the music box. Two weeks before it disappeared, we were eating dinner before the fire in the kitchen. Mother and Father were working and the housekeeper was busying herself elsewhere, so we were alone and indulging in our favorite topic of conversation—the Royal Parade.

  “We’ll have to watch from the square, of course, but Father will be able to find out exactly where we should stand for the best view,” I said, picking up chicken with my fingers. Sasha saw me and put her fork down to do the same.

  Her eyes were bright in the firelight as she shook her head. “I know exactly where it is in the palace, and yet not one glimpse, no matter how many times I engineer a reason to be in the same room.” She sighed, using her now shiny fingers to eat mashed potatoes.

  She was fascinated by mechanisms and clockwork. Combined with her interest in Father’s work and all the old stories in her history books, the level of her excitement was no surprise. Sasha had made it her mission to see the music box up close before the parade, and everyone knew it. When I think about her stealing it, I wonder whether she ever meant to, or whether she just wanted to look at it, to admire it for a while. I should have realized.

  “Ow!”

  “Oh, saints, I’m sorry,” I cry. The girl in front of me is facedown on the ground. She comes up spitting snow. In my haste I’ve plowed right over her. I crouch to offer my hand, and from nowhere she shoots out her foot and hooks the back of my knees. My legs buckle, and I fall in an inelegant heap toward her. She rolls away with a screech like a wildcat, as if it’s my fault I was about to crush her.

  “Valor.”

  I push myself up from the frozen ground onto my elbows. Immaculate gray boots come into my field of vision. I raise my head.

  “Proclivities for violence will not be tolerated here,” says Warden Kirov.

  “But I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to—”

  “This is not a good start, Valor.”

  The rest of the line ahead of me has disappeared into the building, including the girl. I haul myself to my feet, but Warden Kirov is already walking away.

  Nothing I do or say means the same as it did before. I was the daughter of two of the queen’s highest-ranking officials. Now I’m nothing more than a traitor and a prisoner. I brush myself off and follow through the narrow doorway into a long hall. Thick ice blocks rise, translucent and shimmering, to a roof of pink-hued ice reflecting the dawn sky.

  At one end of the room there’s a counter with a man behind it, serving something that smells like salty porridge in wooden bowls. Down the length of the room are wooden tables with stools bolted along either side. Most of them are filled already with boys and girls. I stand and stare until my stomach drives me forward with a loud gurgling that reminds me I haven’t eaten since Feliks offered me a date under the cart in the market. He was right; I should have taken more.

  I walk the length of the hall, searching every face. The girl I accidentally tripped scowls at me. I skip over my cellmate, trying to ignore how annoyed I am with her for not telling me what was going to happen. It wouldn’t have hurt her to explain. As I walk, I can’t help but notice that a lot of the faces are staring back at me. No, not at me, exactly—at my head. I wipe my hand across my forehead and my fingers come away with a trace of gritty ink on them. They’re staring at the ink mark. And I can’t see Sasha anywhere.

  At the counter, I feel eyes on me as I walk along to collect my food. The man behind the metal vat hands me a bowl, his hands tattooed front and back with human eyes. Black-inked wolves snarl and fight all the way up his arms. The food barely covers the bottom of the bowl, and now I understand how the warden manages to get three hundred children out of their bunks and into this hall with only a handful of Peacekeepers around. If we don’t get here in time, we don’t eat.

  I turn around, hoping to find a different route back along the hall, but a sea of downturned faces meets me, and I see no spaces apart from two that have magically materialized on either side of my sour-looking cellmate. They must think I’m her burden to bear. She looks as though she would as soon kill me with her spoon, but there’s nowhere else to sit, and besides, Feliks is sitting on the stool opposite her.

  I’m so glad to see his still-dirty face that I smile as I take my sorry self and my sorry bowl over to sit by my cellmate. Feliks doesn’t smile back. My cellmate has a full bowl, like everyone else at the table.

  The Peacekeeper with the chessboard tattoos stands in one corner of the hall, and Peacekeeper Rurik is in the corner diagonal to him. They look like statues in the ghostly light inside the ice hall.

  “Feliks,” I say. “I’m sorry for what—”

  He cuts me off with a little jerk of his hand. “Keep your voice down. Do you want to cause more trouble? We’ve only been here five minutes.”

  There are a few mutterings and glances from around the table. My cellmate is staring with undisguised horror at Feliks’s grubby face. There are two boys wearing patched furs tucking into their food with alarming speed. A girl with black hair looks away when I catch her eye.

  I touch the mark on my head. It’s dried onto my skin. Feliks glances behind him and says in a voice barely louder than the falling of snow, “You’ve broken one of the rules already—probably the one about doing what everybody else does when everybody else does it.”

  “I don’t think that’s one of the rules, Feliks. And if it is, nobody told me. Even though they could have.”

  My cellmate’s spoon pauses briefly on its way to her mouth, and then she carries on.

  Feliks makes a tiny shrug. “I’m not the one with the mark on my head, am I? I intend to do what everyone else does when everyone else does it.” He gives a little nod as though he’s confirming it to himself, though maybe he’s telling everyone else at the table that he’s not like me. He’s not. Nobody here is. Everyone is dressed in dirty rags, and I still have my fine hunting gear on. I’m doubly out of place.

  I bend my head to the pitiful amount of food in my bowl and spoon it into my mouth in three bites. It’s salty and lumpy and the whole hall smells like pig swill because of it, but oh, how I wish there was more.

  “I’m not going to do anything else wrong,” I say. “But I need to find my sister. Have any—”

  “Will you both,” says my cellmate, eyeing the Peacekeeper nearest us, “shut up, before Valor here gets another infraction.”

  I’ve been awake for two days. I’ve had practically nothing to eat for that whole time, unless you count a date and an inch of slop, which I do not. And I have not found my sister. The way my cellmate says my name is the last feather on an arrow that’s already snapped. I leap to my feet, banging my calf on the iron bar affixing the stool to the table.

  “Clearly you don’t care, and nothing I can say is going to make you, but some of us come from good families who we care about and who care about us.”

  She stares up at me without moving, eyes furious, mouth in a pinched line, and I feel total satisfaction at how angry she is for about three seconds before the red eyes of Peacekeeper Rurik’s demon tattoo appear right above me.

  I sink down onto my stool like a dead bird falling from the sky. But he reaches for the pouch around his waist anyway. There’s audible grumbling as I get a second line of ink on my forehead.

  “No roof tonight,” Rurik’s voice rumbles out, echoing a little off the ice. “Stand up for work assi
gnments.”

  Everyone stands behind their stool in silence. I do the same, trying not to look at the narrowed eyes directed at me. No roof tonight? He can’t mean that they expect us to sleep in our cells with no roof on the cellblock, can he?

  I can’t stop thinking about it as the room is divided into work details—some to the kitchens, some to the laundry or the forge, some to maintenance of the ice buildings, and some to the mines. Since the jobs are handed out in blocks, I’m sent to work in the mines with Feliks. And my cellmate.

  As we file out of the ice hall, Feliks pushes up close to me and says, “Your cellmate—I heard her name is Katia. And if we all have to work together, you should stop making her angry.”

  And just how am I supposed to do that? I think. But I say nothing, because she’s right in front of me. The sun is bright outside, and the temperature has risen a few degrees. A small group of prisoners is walking from the cellblock almost directly toward us. I shade my eyes from the glare of the sun on the snow. They’re a ragtag bunch with Peacekeepers both ahead of and behind them.

  As the first Peacekeeper passes, I keep my eyes to the front, ignoring the explosion of tattoos covering him. I don’t dare think what will happen if I get a third infraction.

  “Mine detail, this way,” calls a tall prisoner. Katia immediately changes direction, and as I follow, a boy from the other group walks past me. Behind him I see a brown ushanka, and then everything slows down and speeds up at the same time. Under the hat is a face as familiar to me as my own. Her brown eyes go wide and her mouth falls open, and then she’s gone before I can even get a sound out.

  Sasha.

  A shot of energy races through my body and speeds my heart up, even though she’s already disappeared, blocked by the Peacekeeper behind her.

  I keep my boots moving through the snow until we near the face of the white cliff, but my head is spinning, and my heart pounds as though I’m on a hunt for a rogue wolf. A million little memories blast into my head—Sasha crying when I cried, laughing when I laughed. Sasha annoyed when one of my arrows ripped her favorite skirt; Sasha sneaking cake out of the kitchen and up to my room when I was being punished and should have had none.

  The prisoner boy at the head of our line calls out a halt, then starts barking orders. We stand in loose formation while he talks. I can’t listen to a word he says.

  “Feliks!” I whisper without turning my head. “Did you see her? That was my sister. She’s here.” The relief buzzing through me is incredible. I hadn’t let myself think that something might have happened to her, but now that I’ve seen her I know, deep inside, I was so scared it had.

  For a second, I don’t think Feliks is even going to talk to me again, but then he pretends to adjust his boot and glances after the little group, which is just heading into the ice hall now. “Why is she with them?”

  I glance sidelong at Katia. She isn’t angry anymore. Some other expression is on her face.

  “What is it?” I ask. Suddenly I feel a bit dizzy, a bit sick. That look on her face is half pity.

  She presses her lips together, considering whether to answer me at all.

  “Please,” I say.

  She sighs a puff of white into the air. “They’re called the Black Hands. All the most dangerous prisoners, kept away from the rest of us. They always have Peacekeepers with them. You won’t be able to talk to her.”

  There’s a buzzing in my ears, and Feliks nudges me. “Face the front, Valor. You’re going to get us all in trouble.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I do what he says, but I only stare numbly, even after the group starts moving toward an opening in the cliff. I’ve finally found my sister, and I can’t speak to her. And if I can’t even speak to her, how can I break her out?

  The sheer face rises almost vertically from the ground behind the buildings of Tyur’ma. The walls of the fortress tower on either side, and the peak of the mountain disappears into the mist far above us. As we near the entrance to the mine, the rock sparkles slightly. There are seams of minerals streaked through it in delicate shades of green.

  A great fissure runs from high above my head, widening down to the ground. There are torches on both sides of the opening, and as we pass through into the mine, my brain starts to thaw. The thrill of seeing Sasha was so brief and bittersweet—but at least she’s alive. I see her shocked face over and over again in my mind. All the words I need to say to her mound up in my head like snowdrifts.

  The torchlight is dim in the cave. Tall prisoner boy stands in front of us again, issuing more instructions, but I can’t focus on what he’s saying.

  I realize I’d been expecting to swoop into Tyur’ma, find my sister, and heroically rescue her. Now I find she’s separated from the rest of us. And every second she’s in here, she’s with the most dangerous prisoners Tyur’ma has. Something’s wrong. Since when is stealing a music box—even such an important one—dangerous?

  A sharp pain in my shin jolts me out of my thoughts. Feliks is staring at me expectantly with wide eyes. He has an unlit torch in one hand and a small leather bag in the other. I look around and see Katia and the rest of the group taking pickaxes and other tools from a rack against the wall of the cave. There’s a Peacekeeper standing by it, watching us. Feliks is right. I have to start paying attention.

  I join my group—five boys and five girls, including me and Katia—and choose a canvas bag full of heavy, clanking tools from the rack. There’s a stack of torches in an ironbound barrel, and I grab one. I fall into line, and we take turns lighting our small torches on the larger ones by the entrance. Katia’s face is lit warm orange as she holds her torch to the flame and waits for it to catch. There are freckles across her pale skin that I hadn’t noticed before.

  As the last of each group ignites their torches, light flares around the cave, throwing shadows all over a cavern that I now see stretches deep into the cliff. We’re standing on a plateau, and below us is a huge, echoing space hewn out of the white rock. Several dark tunnels snake off from it into the mountain.

  “It smells old,” says Feliks.

  It’s true. The air is cold and dry. The cliff must have been here for eons. It makes me feel like we shouldn’t be in here, tiny humans picking away at its insides with our sharp tools.

  The prisoner boy in charge holds his torch high. “You five, this way. The rest of you will be working down that shaft. The spaces are too small for a Peacekeeper, so Katia will be in charge while you’re working.” He looks straight at me. “And for those of you who may not have been paying attention, my name is Nicolai.” I panic, heat rushing up my cheeks, wondering if he can hand out infractions too. But if I’m not mistaken, he’s actually smiling. A tiny smile, not meant for anyone else to see, but still a smile.

  I watch him lead the other group down to the tunnel. He’s about the same height as Katia, but his eyes and hair are dark, like mine. He doesn’t look any older than me, though. I turn to ask Katia about him, but she’s standing with the rest of our group behind her, her arms crossed and an unamused expression on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Please. Lead on.”

  “Oh, thank you so much for your permission.” She shoots off down a narrow tunnel with the others behind her.

  Our torches light the white walls, and the seams of green glitter in the rock as we pass. I think about Nicolai, about him being in charge of the mine detail. He must have earned that responsibility somehow.

  I’m cut off from my train of thought by a green glow ahead. The tunnel opens up, and Katia, at the head of the line, carries her torch into a cave. The rest of the group file through—two girls, then Feliks and me.

  Feliks stares with his mouth open, his broken tooth on show.

  “It’s some kind of mineral,” I tell him. The cave has been expanded by previous miners until it looks like the inside of a geode my father kept on his desk. Around us, the formations of rock glow in the torchlight in every shade of green, from new spring leaf to d
eep moss. Swirling circular patterns burst one next to the other, covering the wall and roof in a mass of texture and color.

  Katia drops her tools to the floor with a clang. Feliks and I follow suit, opening our bags to reveal picks and axes and small metal tools with sharp hooks and blades.

  “Since I’m certain some of us weren’t listening,” says Katia, “this mineral is malachite. It’s rare, it’s valuable, and it’s in great demand by rich folk to make into jewelry and inlay their fancy tables. For you new people, you might think this is easy with no Peacekeeper here, but you’re wrong. We have to produce a certain amount of it by the end of the shift, and they’ll be checking. And there’s nowhere to go but dead ends and unstable mine shafts in here, so don’t even think about it.” She shows us how to use the tools, then abruptly turns her back and starts to work.

  Feliks and I look at each other, and then I hand him one of the silver tools. He sighs and hands me a pickax. Within minutes my hands start to blister, though I’m no stranger to work. I hope Sasha hasn’t been in here. She’s not as strong as I am.

  “Why is she with them at all?” I wonder, then realize I said it out loud. Surely it should be me, not Sasha, placed with them after what I’ve done.

  “What?” One of the girls stops swinging her pickax. Her face shines with sweat, and her hands are wide and strong.

  “Nothing,” I say. Then I realize this might be my only chance to ask the question without a Peacekeeper overhearing. “Do you know why a girl whose only crime was theft would be with the group they keep separate? The Black Hands?”

  The girl’s lip curls. “Maybe she’s like you—a troublemaker. Couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you? Had to earn another infraction.”

  “Leave her alone. She can’t help it,” says Feliks.