by Kate Milford
“The only thing I can tell you that might help you,” the apprentice said at last, “is that if you’ve read the folklore, you know that the caldnicker’s dreams are said to sublimate in the thaw.” He hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was reluctant. “Do you know what it means for a substance to sublimate?”
“It means to go directly from solid to vapor,” Mair said, remembering Hale’s words.
The apprentice nodded. “That is one meaning. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the process.” He took a piece of paper and a pencil and made a quick sketch of two beakers connected by a tube: one with fire below it, one with ice. In the beaker over the fire, he drew a lump. “A substance can be heated until it evaporates, then moved rapidly into a very cold chamber, where it condenses again.” He drew an arrow from the lump up through the tube and into the empty beaker over the ice, where he drew a handful of dots on the sides. “Chemists frequently do this to filter out impurities; alchemists do it to initiate transitions.”
“So even after a thing has been changed to vapor, that doesn’t mean it’s gone?” Mair demanded. “It can be made solid again? Whole?”
The apprentice put up a warning hand. “Solid again, yes. Whole again, no—the whole point of sublimation is that something is left behind. In alchemy, the point of sublimation was often to reduce the physical to the spiritual—that’s the solid-to-vapor part, if you follow—and then reconstitute the spiritual as a more perfect solid.” He smiled sadly. “A lot of alchemy sounds like allegory when you say it out loud.”
Mair’s excitement faltered. It did sound like allegory, but not like an allegory for anything she wanted to think about in connection with Hale.
Silence fell for a moment. “You’ve thought about this a lot,” Mair said to the apprentice. He nodded, and his face was grim. “Why?”
“Because I used to survey the Coldway too, when I was younger and lighter,” he said at length. “And because I couldn’t figure out how to save the dream I met on the ice. And I have never been able to bring myself to go back.”
The hand that held the pencil shook. Mair took it and held it until it stopped twitching. Then she tapped the drawing. “Did you try something like this?”
The apprentice shook his head. “I was too afraid. The whole thing depends on letting them go to vapor, you see. I couldn’t bear to suggest it.”
And even if it works, Mair thought, something will be left behind.
The clock on the mantel chimed. The sun was going down. “Thank you,” Mair said, and she left.
She didn’t wait for nightfall to go to the Coldway. She went straight from the cartographer’s studio to the place where she and Hale always met. During the day, public-safety officials monitored the entrances and exits to the tunnels, especially as it got closer to spring, and one of them shouted a warning to Mair as she ran to the stairs. “Take care,” he called, and his breath was visible in the air as he spoke. “Feels cold tonight, but it’s treacherous below nonetheless.”
“Thank you,” she called, but she slowed only as much as she had to in order to keep from losing her footing on the frosty wood-plank steps.
He was not waiting there when she reached the bottom, but Mair didn’t worry. It was earlier than they usually met. Still, the creaking of the ice floor and the shifting of hulls was audible right away, and it was coming from all directions. Mair hadn’t stopped home between the cartographer and the Coldway, and she didn’t have her safety equipment with her, so she gingerly tested the surface just below the stairs with the toe of one boot. It shifted. Not much, but enough. Her heart sank. The Coldway was failing.
She forced herself to wait there, and it was no easy feat. At last, she heard his whistle echoing through the tunnel as he approached. The melody sounded weaker than usual, and she wondered how much of the day Hale had spent trying to knit the ice back together all on his own.
But then he was there, and they fell into each other’s arms. Mair could feel how hard he was breathing, and the beat of the tide in his chest pounded against her. All around them, the tunnels protested; the hulls, whose subtle movements were barely perceptible even in warm weather and came to a near standstill when the nick set in, had begun again to stir in the fragmenting ice. Hale was near collapse as well. He’d known this might be his last night in the Coldway. He’d spent himself trying to hold just the one stretch of tunnel nearest Mair’s stairway together, and still it was crumbling. A shaft of sunset fell down the stairway, painting the girl he loved in colors he’d never seen before. He wanted to tell her she was beautiful, and he promised himself he would do that as soon as he could draw proper breath.
While she waited for Hale to get his wind back, Mair told him what she’d learned from the cartographer’s apprentice. She explained the idea that had taken shape as she’d crossed the stretch of Flotilla between the studio and the stairs. Then, as his wheezing breath rasped against her chest and the tide-pulse in his throat thudded against her cheek, she told him the risks: all the ways she feared this vague new plan was likely to go wrong.
As Hale listened, his breath quieted, and the arms around her stopped shaking. By the time Mair was finished speaking, his body and breath were calm. His hands stroked her back, and Mair realized she was crying.
He was silent for a moment, and then, in a voice very close to his normal one, Hale said, “These are acceptable risks.”
Mair punched him in the arm. “Have you been listening to me at all?” she exploded. “I just explained that you have to allow yourself to be reduced to vapor to so much as try this, and even if it’s successful, some part of you will still be lost! How are those acceptable risks?”
“They’re acceptable risks because they’re mine,” he said simply. “My answer is yes.”
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Mair said.
Hale smiled. “I can’t ask this of you.”
She smiled forlornly back. “You don’t have to ask.” Together they looked up into the red rays of the sunset. “Do you think that bit of sun and daylight will be enough?” Mair wondered.
“I think anything other than the freeze of the Coldway will be enough,” Hale said. “As long as you can get where you need to be quickly. I don’t imagine you’ll have much time.”
She swallowed and nodded shakily. “I know where to go.”
“Then take me there.” He took her hand, and together they walked up into the shaft of sunlight. As soon as they were fully above ground, Hale could feel something change: something elemental inside him began to rearrange itself. “Hurry,” he whispered.
Mair exhaled as much air as she could as he pulled her into his arms and she, in turn, pulled his face as close to hers as she could. And then the girl inhaled, breathing the waking dream in as he came apart and turned to mist in the sunset. He smelled of all the cold of the river, and when her lungs were full, she held her breath, though she wanted to sob, and she raced from the bulkhead by the stairs to the nearest frosty window shaded from the sunlight. She leaned in until her nose was a hair’s width from the glass, and she exhaled until there was no breath left in her.
As she leaned back again with a gasp, the frost on the window changed, warmed, faded, recrystallized before her eyes. Layer by layer, an image painted itself over the glass in a starry rime of cold condensate. As Mair watched, a boy’s face took shape. The details were hazy—the effect reminded her of working with her chalky pastels: you had to look at her paintings from a bit of a distance to really see the picture. But she was adept at looking at things that way, and so she had no trouble. Especially when the frost boy smiled at her. A hand resolved itself, pressing against the glass.
There was a bucket full of half-frozen water below the window. Mair took off her gloves, bent, and pressed her own hands to the freezing surface to chill them. When her fingers began to tingle with numbness, she straightened and put one palm to the glass where Hale’s frost hand was. She held her breath.
Five freezing-cold finge
rs curled away from the glass and intertwined with hers, and carefully, slowly, Mair pulled Hale away from the window: first his hand, then his arm, then one shoulder, then his face and head emerged. One foot, leg, and hip climbed over the windowsill, and then the other, and then there he stood, free of the glass, shaking with cold, but solid, and mostly stable.
He was never not cold from that day forward, but the chill was manageable; he was never completely stable, either, but then again, no human is ever completely stable, and it seems unfair to hold a dream to higher standards. Sometimes he felt that there were differences between a small tide and a heart, but those, too, could be worked through.
Neither he nor Mair was ever completely certain what was left behind in the sublimation. Whatever it was, in the long years of their life together that followed that winter, neither of them missed it.
And every year after, from that one to this, they have haunted the Coldway together from nick to thaw: Mair surveying and painting with her pastels, Hale whistling at her side. Now and then they come across another of the caldnicker’s roaming dreams down in the tunnels, and when they do, they are happy to share what they know of how dreams come true.
INTERLUDE
The room exhaled again, and Captain Frost got to his feet. It was time to turn the glass. “You know,” he said as he lifted the sand clock and rotated it, “I rather thought, when you said you would tell a love story, that I knew which one you were going to tell. Or what sort, anyway,” he amended. He set down the glass, picked up his sherry, and said in a tone of mild surprise, “I was wrong.”
“What sort were you expecting?” Sullivan asked, nodding thanks to Sorcha as she refilled his glass of whiskey.
The chair Frost had occupied in between trips out into the rain was positioned by the window a few feet behind the sofa, which was nearer the center of the room. Rather than returning to it now, he crossed the room with his drink and his half-hour glass to the empty chair beside Negret near the display case, from which he could sit and face the young man sitting beside Petra on the couch.
“I rather thought,” said the captain slowly, “that you might tell a tale of the seiche.” At the word seiche, around the room, heads that had been turned toward the captain swiveled back to look at Sullivan with curiosity. Frost took another sip. “But damn me if you didn’t tell exactly the opposite of a seiche yarn.”
“What’s seiche?” Maisie asked, eyes on the handful of court cards, all hearts, that she was using to add a little pergola before the castle.
“You’ve never heard of the seiche?” Captain Frost barked a laugh as he set both his liquor glass and his half-hour glass on the small table between himself and Negret. “What this world is coming to, I don’t know.”
“It’s all right, Miss Maisie,” Tesserian said, taking a fresh deck from his pocket. “I’ve never heard of it either.”
“It’s no ‘it,’ ” the captain retorted. “It’s a ‘they.’ ” He glanced at Sullivan. “Do you want to field the question, or shall I do it?”
Sullivan’s preternatural poise didn’t so much as flicker. “Go right ahead. I imagine you know the legends better than I.”
Frost gave him a long look. “I don’t think that’s true.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll explain, but I’m saving my turn to tell a proper story for something else, so I shall try to make it brief.” He pointed to the huge map on the wall above the mantelpiece. “Have a look, young lady: a good, close look.”
Maisie got to her feet and, carefully avoiding the card castle, stepped onto the hearth. She stretched up on her toes to grip the mantelpiece and peer over it. Sorcha hurried over to carefully lift the music box with the filigree tree out of the way, passing it gently to Mrs. Haypotten, and then going back to move the case clock, the vase of paper spills, and a small stack of books, too.
“The captain will be wanting you to see the creatures at the edges,” Sorcha said to Maisie when she had finished. “Shall I give you a boost?”
“Thank you,” Maisie said, feeling a bit awkward to be the center of all this unexpected fuss.
Sorcha gave her a wink. “It’s good to know about the seiche, just in case you ever find yourself meeting one.” She knelt on a knee on the hearth and offered her hand to help Maisie step up onto her other, bent leg.
The map showed the Skidwrack and its inlets. It was old, with the green-brown of the river and the green-blue of the pine woods on the riverbank painted by hand. The compass rose had been drawn in ink, and to eyes that knew the city well, it was clearly meant to look like old iron. In one corner was the usual warning always found on maps of Nagspeake waterways (which, whether due to a restless caldnicker or for some other reason, could never be trusted): THIS MAP IS NOT MEANT TO BE USED FOR NAVIGATION. And at the farthest inland reaches of the river, where the Skidwrack and its offshoots disappeared off the page, the words HIC ABUNDANT SEPIAE were enclosed in an oval formed by the curving bodies of two sleek river otters very much like the one that had been hidden in her napkin at dinner.
“Otters?” Maisie asked. She turned and looked from Frost to Sullivan. “What’s so terrible about otters?”
Frost crossed himself as he picked up his drink again and took a long pull from it. It looked rather as though he was fortifying himself for a task he didn’t particularly care for.
“I’ve never yet found anyone who could tell me how the two things came to be associated with each other,” Sullivan said, observing Frost’s hesitation, “but for as long as any oldster on the Skidwrack can remember, superstitious folk have always crossed themselves when they see river otters, for fear of the seiche. Except, of course, for the odd foolish romantic who actually thinks he wants to meet one. The seiche are supposed to be beautiful, after all.”
“I thought you didn’t want to tell the thing,” Frost snapped.
“The silence was threatening to become awkward,” Sullivan retorted.
Sorcha stepped into the breach. “Not just beautiful,” she corrected, helping Maisie back down. “Magnificent. Stunning. You hear them spoken of like mermaids or selkies. Perhaps it’s the selkie lore that first tied them to the otters, the way selkies are tied to seals—but of course the seiche are no shape-shifters, nor is there any magic pelt that, hidden, will keep one from returning to the water.”
The captain nodded his agreement. “Nor would there be any point in hiding it if there were. When a seiche girl comes ashore, it’s because ashore is where she wants to be, and from the moment she shakes the water from her heel, her life becomes a search for the one thing that will allow her to remain on land: someone else who’s willing to take her place.”
“Take her place . . . in the river?” Tesserian asked.
“Aye.” The captain affected a portentous tone. “For the water knows what belongs to its kingdom, and it keeps a close tally of its creatures, wherever they are. When one of its citizens tries to defect, the water demands an equal exchange, and until that exchange is properly completed, the water goes in search of what has left it.”
Tesserian nodded and began to lay out the new, blue-backed cards in a wavy pattern of overlapping scales before the castle and its handful of outbuildings, like a flat tide lapping at the worn floorboards. “I see.”
Maisie looked from the captain to Sullivan as she sat cross-legged beside the card castle again. “I don’t. Not exactly.”
“In short,” Sullivan said, his gaze on the encroaching paper sea, “when one of the seiche attempts to leave the water, the waters will rise in the wake of the leaving until either the seiche returns to it—a death sentence, for seiche lose the ability to breathe underwater once they’ve been ashore for a day—or someone else goes voluntarily to take its place, which is also a death sentence, for humans can’t learn the trick of breathing underwater. And it must be voluntary,” he repeated. “The sacrifice can’t be made through trickery, or it doesn’t work.”
It was impossible for anyone in the room to fail to be aware of two things.
The first was that outside, the waters were still rising. The second was that, although for the most part none of those who’d heard of the seiche could remember hearing of one in the shape of a man, if one were to imagine a seiche boy, Sullivan—tanned golden, his face lean and even under longish hair the brown-gray of wet stone, staring at the cards out of eyes the changeable color of the river—might well have fit the bill. He, too, was more than beautiful; he was magnificent, scar and all.
Maisie, fascinated and vaguely disconcerted, glanced quickly around the room to see if she ought to be worried somehow. At their posts by the sideboard, the Haypottens wore wary expressions, but everyone else seemed to be taking this strange possibility in stride, as if it were nothing more troubling than an awkward conversation they might have to redirect if it got too uncomfortable. Closest to her was Sorcha, her black eyes steady and her tiny wooden seabird hanging from the blue velvet ribbon around her neck. The maid’s round face held a fascinating, unfathomable expression. There was a secret there, for certain.
It was harder to draw secrets out of stillness, but Maisie tried anyway, seeking clues in the tiny uptilt at the corner of Sorcha’s mouth, the hardness of her eyes, the interlacing of her fingers. She held her hands that way a lot, but already Maisie understood that there were volumes to be read in the gesture, if you knew what to look for. How tight was the clasp? How white the knuckles? Were her hands clasped behind her or in front, and if in front, did her arms hang long and loose, or were her elbows bent so that they seemed to rest on her hips? Which thumb was uppermost, the left or the right, and was her middle right finger twitchy or still? How did her shoulders and chin tilt?