by Kate Milford
There were other sounds in the cold and the dark too: she was not alone. But that was no surprise; she’d known she wouldn’t be the only child who snuck out of her room that night. And although they were all technically competing for the first-survey reward, they also all knew that it was much better not to be alone down there when the nick was still settling in.
And then the inevitable happened. Distracted momentarily by the reflection on the ice of something moving up ahead, Mair put a foot down where she hadn’t tested the floor. The ice squealed in protest, a sound so like a scream that Mair dropped her staff in shock. But she recovered herself in a heartbeat and jabbed an iron hook through the nearest hanging loop of rope just as the floor under her feet cracked to pieces. The tether at the other end of the rope was secure on her belt, so she knew she wouldn’t fall far, but she braced herself for the stabbing pain of freezing-wet feet and ankles.
She felt the ice go, felt the beginning of the short fall. But the stabbing cold-wet didn’t come. Instead, her feet scrambled on the crumbling floor and she felt herself yanked hard by the belt toward the nearer of the hull walls. She grabbed for handholds and found herself clinging not to a bumper or a length of cordage or any other bit of boat hardware, but to a boy with wide, terrified eyes. He wrapped his arms around her and held her as tightly as she had ever been held as the floor behind them splintered and reached out with its webwork of cracks in all directions, as if the ice itself knew Mair was still there and it still wanted to see her fall.
With his back to the wall, the boy whistled three discordant notes, and instantly the splintering stopped just shy of the surface directly under her feet.
“How did you do that?” Mair whispered, turning her head to stare over her shoulder and down at the fractured floor of the tunnel.
Instead of answering, the boy asked, “Are you all right?” He looked at the rope that still tethered her to the loop of cordage overhead. “Oh, I see. You were fine all along.”
“Well, you did save me from wet feet and a lot of maneuvering,” Mair said. They were still holding fast to each other, but neither moved to release the other. It makes for a very romantic image, but for her part Mair was occupied with working out the safest way to let go, and the safest direction in which to move when she did. Also, she’d dropped her staff, which she would need in order to disengage the tether hook from the loop it hung from, directly over the center of the radiating cracks—along with her drawing pad, which there was no way she was leaving without.
That is, she was mostly occupied with all that. Because she had never held anyone so closely or for so long, there was a small collection of synapses in her brain that could not fail to notice that out of the corner of her right eye she could see the boy’s cheekbone, and a scattering of frost clinging to his curling dark sideburns. And as for the boy—well. For reasons that will shortly become evident, he was in a state where nearly everything he encountered made his heart ache with wonder and joy, and although he had acted on pure instinct when he’d pulled Mair out of the way of the splintering ice, now he was holding on simply because he didn’t want to let go.
“I need my staff there,” Mair said, nodding back toward the center of the tunnel. The boy had to lift his head to see over hers in order to follow the gesture, and for a moment Mair felt the skin just below his jaw press against her forehead.
Under different circumstances, she might have noticed that she ought to have felt his pulse there. Or then again, perhaps not.
In any case, she let go of the boy at last, reached past him to the hull at his back, and felt around until her fingers found an iron ring. Then she unhooked the end of the rope that was connected to her belt, and threaded the hook through the ring so that now a line ran from the wall to the loop of rope hanging down over the cracked ice.
The boy looked critically from the line to the compromised ice at the center of the tunnel. The staff lay between the two of them and the worst of the cracks. Reluctantly, he let go. “It will hold,” he said. “At least, it will hold long enough.”
“I think so,” Mair agreed. She inched carefully out, both palms curled around the rope overhead, until she could reach the end of the staff with one foot and pull it toward herself. She let go of the rope with one hand, bent slowly, picked up the staff, and, after a moment’s pause to make sure the fissures didn’t seem to be spreading, she stretched her foot just a bit farther and caught the drawing pad she’d been using to map the tunnels with her toe. “Catch,” she called over her shoulder, and kicked the pad back toward the boy.
“Got it.”
“Thank you.” Another pause, then she reached up with one end of the staff and nudged the iron hook out of the loop of cordage. She caught it as it fell, hung it from her belt, and eased herself back toward the hull wall where the other end of the rope still held fast. When she was safely back at the solid verge of the ice, she disconnected the second hook. Then she and the boy edged down the tunnel and away from the cracks, with Mair testing the floor all along the way. At last they came to thicker ice, and then some that was thicker still. Only then did the boy and the girl stop and face each other.
“I’m Mair,” said the young surveyor.
The boy had no name, but he knew the terms for a number of cold things. “Hail,” he said, choosing one at random and quite accidentally picking a word that is both a cold thing and, sometimes, a moniker.
“Hale,” Mair repeated. “Thank you.”
He handed back her drawing pad. “You’re mapping the cold roads?”
“Yes.” She permitted herself a long look at the strange boy. “You’re not, are you?” His eyes were wide and black, with no visible line where the pupil ended and the iris began. Frost dusted his hair, and his eyelashes. He smelled like the cold, but when he had held her, the skin against her forehead had been warm as her own. Mair remembered the flicker of motion that had distracted her just before she had nearly fallen through the ice, and she realized she was talking to one of the caldnicker’s dreams, though she wasn’t sure how he would feel if she asked outright. Would he even know?
(As it happened, he did know—though not all dreams do comprehend that they’re dreams, as you probably understand from your own experiences. And he recognized that Mair was not, but since she didn’t mention it, neither did he.)
They explored the Coldway together for the rest of the night, and when finally Mair led the way back to her own home, they arranged to meet the following evening after she had submitted her survey.
The dream called Hale wandered in a daze until the agreed-upon time. The other dreams in the tunnels watched him with sympathy. It was easy to fall in love when the world was new and everything was wonder, and Mair was fearless and brilliant and resourceful and confident and they had no trouble understanding why Hale would be fascinated by her. But the older dreams—the ones the caldnicker dreamed over and over again, year after year—always warned the younger about contact with humans. You will lose them with the thaw, the recurring ones said. There is no knowing if you will come back, or who and what you will be if you do, because dreams change; and if you do come back, no way to know whether the one you love will be waiting, because people change too. The only thing that is certain is that you will break their hearts, and the only thing that will prevent yours from breaking as well is that we dreams-of-the-caldnicker have slack water in place of hearts. Still, slack water can become a tide, if you’re not careful.
But Hale pretended not to hear, and the next night, he waited for her at a place near her home where a flight of old wooden steps descended from a bulkhead on the surface down into the Coldway. They went on meeting there each night after that, to avoid as much as possible the other human foot traffic in the tunnels, which dwindled to next to nothing when the sun went down. Mair always brought some sort of sweet from the district above, because Hale’s delight at sweets made her laugh. Hale took Mair to places where the ice had frozen in the most interesting ways, because she loved to draw
, and the subtle patterns and shiftings of color in the ice in the strange light of the tunnels fascinated her. Every night, when she first appeared on the stairs, he would reach up a hand to help her down, and every night she took it, even though they both knew she didn’t need it. Sometimes he offered a hand when the floor was uneven underfoot too, and when he did, she took it again, even though they both knew she was surefooted as an arctic hare on the ice. Things like this happened more and more frequently as the winter wore on, until finally they dropped the pretense without discussion and simply held hands as they wandered the tunnels.
And then, one night, Mair stopped walking. She pulled on the hand she held and drew Hale close. He put his arms around her—the first time he had done that since the moment they’d met—and Mair kissed him, and Hale’s heart-that-was-not-a-heart became a tide, just as the old recurring dreams had warned it would.
Winter passes, always.
When warmer currents begin to stir, so does the caldnicker under the ice, stretching its back in waves that send creaks throughout the Coldway. Mair began bringing the tether rope with its iron hooks down into the tunnels with her, and stepping more cautiously when she and Hale walked near the center of the ice. He whistled the cracks together when he could, but it got harder and harder to manage, requiring longer and longer stretches of song that left him breathless and slow afterward. There was no doubt about it: the Coldway was beginning to fail.
“What will happen?” Mair asked at last.
That night Hale had brought her to a place where ice and frost and lichen had made a picture like a landscape on one of the hulls, and they had been sitting on a blanket Mair had brought from home while she painted it with bits of chalky pastel crayon in the light of a lantern. Now and then they heard cracking from down the tunnels.
Hale hesitated. “The recurring ones say we sublimate. When the temperature warms enough, the conditions in the tunnels cause us to go directly from solid to vapor.”
“And then you’re gone?”
He nodded. “And then we’re gone, unless we are dreamed again.”
Mair put down her drawing. “There must be a way to keep that from happening.”
During the hours when Mair lived her life above the tunnels, Hale had passed his time in asking this question of every dream he could find. None of them had an answer, though many had tried to find one. Now he shook his head. “If there is a way, no one knows it.”
“Someone must know,” Mair insisted. “What about the caldnicker? Has anyone thought to ask it?”
“Yes,” Hale said simply. “It’s been thought of. But it can’t be done.”
“Why?” But Mair worked it out almost instantly. “Because the caldnicker stays submerged, and dreams dissolve in the Skidwrack. You can’t ask it because you’d be gone before you could reach it. And even if it were to come up for a breath or a look around, it would be after the ice above it melts, and then it would be too late.”
Hale nodded once. He did not like the emphasis she’d put on the word you. Ice creaked somewhere not far away. “Finish your drawing,” he suggested. “It’s getting late.”
Mair gave him a considering look before she went back to her picture. But it wasn’t long before she set down her pastels again. “Let’s try it.”
Hale shook his head again. “We can’t,” he said as resolutely as possible.
“You can’t,” Mair argued, “but I can. I’m a good swimmer, and I won’t melt.”
Hale knew her well enough by now to guess that if Mair said she was a good swimmer, she was probably excellent—but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the second thing she’d said. “You won’t melt,” he agreed. “But you’ll freeze. Or you’d get stuck, lost under the ice.”
She laughed. “No, I wouldn’t. In the first place, the river is already warming up, or we wouldn’t have this problem; and in the second place, I didn’t spend all that time making a map of the routes down here just to get lost—not in them, and not under them. I know how to protect against the cold, and I know how to protect against getting stuck below. I can do it.”
All of this had occurred to Hale days ago, the moment it had occurred to him to wonder if the caldnicker might know how to keep him from vanishing in the thaw: that he couldn’t swim down to the creature, but possibly a human could; and that if there was anyone who could pull the thing off and come back alive, it was Mair. But he also knew that even her chances were slim, and he knew it was not a chance he was willing to have her take on his behalf.
“Don’t you think,” he asked quietly, “if the caldnicker knew how to make its dreams hold their reality—to make its dreams come true—don’t you think it would have done it before now?”
“It’s asleep,” Mair said simply. “Maybe it would, or could, if someone only woke it up to ask the question.”
Hale kissed her forehead. “The answer is no. Let’s not waste the time we have.”
But Mair could not stop thinking about the possibility. Later that night, when they stood at the bottom of the stairs that would take her back to the surface of Flotilla, she made her arguments for seeking out the caldnicker all over again, and those arguments were devastatingly simple.
“I can do it,” she said. “I bet I can even work out exactly where to look for its head.” She put a hand under Hale’s jaw and, with fingers stained by chalky colors, touched the place where she had once felt no pulse. But now that he had a tide instead of slack water where his heart should have been, there was a beat there. “I love you,” Mair said, and she kissed him again. “Let me try to save you.”
Hale had known this was coming, and he had his answer ready. He didn’t say, “I don’t want you to do that for me,” because then Mair might have told him, “But I want to do it for you.” He didn’t say, “I can’t ask that of you,” because that left room for Mair to reply, “You don’t have to ask.” He didn’t say, “I couldn’t bear it if something went wrong and you didn’t come back,” because then she might have said, “Nothing will go wrong,” or she might’ve even gone so far as to point out that if anything did go wrong, Hale wouldn’t be around to feel anything about it. He didn’t say, “I can’t let you,” because they both would have known he couldn’t possibly stop her. There were so many potential wrong answers, and he had already worked through them all.
So he said, “Mair, I love you,” because it was the true answer. And then he said, “No,” because it was the right answer.
Mair stared at him in disbelief. “Just . . . no?”
“I believe in you,” he said, lowering his nose to hers so they were exactly eye to eye. “But I’m asking you not to try.”
She held his gaze, unblinking. “If you love me, you’ll let me.”
“If you love me,” he said, ignoring the hurt in her voice, “you won’t.”
They looked at each other for a long time, each wanting badly to kiss the other again but neither knowing whether it would help or hurt their respective arguments and both sensing that, help or hurt, it would’ve been unfair.
And then, something miraculous happened. Mair’s face, which had been looking mutinous and angry and wounded, wiped itself clear and reconfigured itself into an expression of resolve. “Then we’ll find another way.”
He smiled, relieved. “You could stick me in an icebox, I suppose.”
“Then I’d better start looking for one that’s big enough.” With no reason not to any longer, they kissed again, and then Mair went reluctantly up into the dawning daylight.
That day in the tunnels, in between asking despairing questions of every dream he could find, Hale whistled the ice together wherever he could, trying desperately to extend the life of the Coldway. Up above, the morning dawned frigid—much colder than it had been for the last week. Somehow this felt like a good omen, and Mair set aside every other task she had and threw herself into the search for a way to save the boy she had fallen in love with. Truth be told, if the stakes had not been so high and the time so s
hort, she would have relished the challenge. Mair was an adventurer at heart, and she was young enough and fearless enough that so far, she had not really come up against her own limitations—all reasons why Hale was desperately lucky to have her on his side, and all reasons why he had been desperate to convince her not to venture under the ice.
First she went to the library and looked up every tale of the caldnicker that she could find. Hours passed while she pored over the stories, but nothing she read suggested any solutions to the problem she wanted to solve. She allowed herself ten minutes of panic and desperation while she figured out what to do next, and then she went to the cartographer who made each year’s map of the Coldway. After all, the cartographer was the first one to hear the accounts of the surveyors who ventured into the tunnels every winter. Surely, Mair thought, she wasn’t the only one who had come back with tales of the caldnicker’s wandering dreams. Surely the mapmaker had heard some of those tales over the years.
The cartographer’s apprentice welcomed her when she knocked at the studio door. “Mr. Oronti is out,” he said apologetically. “Is there anything I can help you with, Mair?”
Mair sat down at the apprentice’s desk and made herself comfortable. “Tell me everything you know about the dreams in the Coldway.”
The apprentice laughed, then changed his mind. “All right.”
He began to speak, and it turned out that Mair had been right: Nearly every year, he and the the cartographer heard at least one tale of a Flotillan encountering one of the caldnicker’s wandering dreams. Some of those tales were love stories; none of them ended happily, and at least one surveyor had never been heard from since. Both apprentice and master suspected that fellow had done exactly what Mair had proposed: he had ventured under the ice, looking for the head of the caldnicker in order to wake it and ask how to bring its dreams properly to life; but he had failed, and the cold river had taken him.