by Amber Argyle
Elice’s gaze caught on the other woman on the opposite page. Elice thought she could see something of her own face in the lines of her cheeks and the curve of the nose. The woman’s eyes were full of mischief. Elice pointed. “Storm?”
Her grandfather nodded as he looked at his other sister’s face. “I always wondered what she named her baby. If she ever forgave me.”
He shut the book sadly, still holding the beaver carving. “That’s enough memories for one day. Put the rest back. But keep the blossom to remind you of love and loss. They go hand in hand, like the fibers of a rope. Rope is what you need to climb a cliff. But it better be long enough, else you’ll have to jump.”
Her grandfather’s mind was wandering again. “I can’t take this, Grandfather. It’s too special.”
He reclined on the bed and pulled the covers up, the carving clenched in his right hand. “Special—yes. And when I’m gone, you can take the beaver, too. I’d give it to you now, only I can’t bear to part with it. Not yet. Maybe not until I die.”
Tears sprang to Elice’s eyes. “Die?”
He met her gaze. “What is it you think I’m doing, child?”
They stared at each other a long time. Elice couldn’t deny the truth any longer—she’d already denied it for far too long. Her grandfather was ill. And if he died, she would be left alone and in complete darkness for nearly six months of the year.
Elice hurried to her cave and opened the door with her hip. Adar sat before the fire, her atlas in his lap. She put down the food, then swung the furs off her shoulder and onto the table. “What are you doing with that?”
He glanced up at her. “This has the most detailed map of Svass I’ve ever seen. Every other map is just conjecture mixed with lies. But this—”
She yanked it off his lap. “What made you think you had the right to go in my room?”
“You have books. I was bored.”
Try as she might, Elice couldn’t blame him for that. She would have done the same. “Next time, ask. And you better not get ashes on any of the pages.”
“I would never.”
For once, he seemed perfectly serious. Mollified, she checked his shoulder and changed out the snow pack. She was glad for the distraction from her worry and hurt over Chriel. “Have you been taking more tincture?”
“Not as much as yesterday,” he admitted as Elice handed him his plate. He took it with a steely look on his face. He gulped down his cup of blood in five swallows. He set it down hard, a great shudder running through him. “Gah! Do you drink this every day?” She glared at him. “The blood is great,” Adar murmured. “I love the blood. And the raw meat—delicious. I’m just curious, do you happen to have any . . . I don’t know . . . fruit?”
Elice decided then and there not to give him the apple she’d pilfered from the kitchen. “Let me check our garden.” She went to the seal chirping from her pen and started dropping strips of meat into her mouth.
“Fruit doesn’t grow in gardens,” Adar muttered as he dug around on the floor beside him and came up with a long bit of blackened bone with a jagged end. “It grows in orchards.”
“It does?” Elice said in surprise, her anger melting away as she rubbed Picca’s soft fur while discreetly freezing some of the animal’s dung so the cave wouldn’t smell so bad. Studying her seal, she realized it wouldn’t be long before she had to let the animal go. Just like she would have to let Adar go.
She pushed the thought aside. “What about insects? Do their wings make sound like some of the fairies? Or are they silent, like birds?”
Adar burned the bone tip in the coals and then stabbed the meat onto the end and held it over the flames. “Depends. Bees and flies and mosquitoes make a buzzing sound, so maybe the ones with clear wings make sound. Owls are silent.” He shivered lightly.
Elice frowned. “What do owls have to do with it?”
He shivered from head to toe this time. “Have you ever had a decrepit, deranged owl creep up on you?” She shook her head. “Then you could never understand.”
Sometimes she wondered how hard this man had hit his head. “What does a tree smell like?”
“Uh, I guess that depends on the tree. Some don’t smell at all unless they’re in bloom. Some only smell if you break the leaves. Most conifers have a strong, spicy scent all the time.”
Elice edged closer to him, ignoring the pungent odor coming from the meat. “What does a horse feel like—to touch it, I mean? They seem so sleek.”
Adar brought the sizzling meat closer and seemed to decide he wasn’t done burning it yet, as he placed it back in the flames. “You know, you could see all this for yourself if you helped me escape.”
Elice stared in surprise. “Escape?”
He looked at her as if she were daft. “I can’t stay here. The queen or one of her fairies will catch me eventually.”
“The ship—”
“Is not coming. I’m going to have to strike out across Svass. Find one of their settlements and work my way south until I find a ship.”
She shook her head. “You’d never survive. Not alone.”
“Which is why you should come with me.”
Her mouth came open in surprise. “What?”
He cocked her a grin. “Why not? Surely you don’t want to be stuck in this frozen wasteland for the rest of your life. And if your stuffy old princess came with us, she could use her magic to keep us alive.”
He was definitely not getting an apple. “She’s not stuffy and old.”
Adar chuckled lightly. “Prove it.” He pulled out the steaming meat and blew on it. “Let me ask her myself.”
“Ask her? You can’t ask her!”
“Why?” he asked lazily, then nibbled the meat.
Elice scrambled to come up with an excuse. “Because she’d turn you in!”
He cocked an eyebrow. “But you’re always saying how honorable she is—”
“No.” Elice folded her arms across her chest. “I’m saying she does what her mother tells her. She would turn you in without a moment’s hesitation.”
“Maybe you could convince—”
“I said no,” Elice said through gritted teeth.
“Fine. But without her, I don’t know how the two of us will survive.”
“The two of us?”
Adar grinned. She cast a disdainful glance at the meat. “You’re ruining it. Cooking it takes all the strength from the blood.”
“I can live with that.” He brushed his hands together. “Well, then, while the queen’s away, the ward must play.” He stood and pulled Elice up beside him before heading for the door. “Let’s go outside.”
Elice hurried after him, a protest on her lips.
Adar stepped out of the cave and stopped, his mind struggling to match what he was seeing with what he knew of the world. Before him was an entire forest made of ice in a dozen different shades of winter. There were crystal-clear trunks with black ice leaves. Clear ice with bubbles and ribbons twisting through trunks like rivers. Leaves made of white ice. Trees of blue-black and sea-green. In the branches was an almost turquoise bird leaning down to feed a beetle to her chicks. But as Adar went farther into the forest, the trees became less and less like real trees and more and more angular.
“This was here yesterday?” he asked Elly.
“The fog hid it. You should come back inside.”
He peered up through the icy leaves, searching for the glimmer of sunlight on lithe bodies. The sound of wings. But there was nothing. “Stop worrying, Elly. Fairies never take much notice of humans anyway, not unless they have reason to.”
“How do you know so much of fairies, anyway? I was under the impression that the Sight was rare.”
He stumbled a little. “Er, my father is something of a historian—he has studied the lore of the fairies and the records of men.” Adar reached out to touch the flank of an ice bear’s white body, all hard planes and wide angles. “How is this possible?”
Elly didn’
t look back at him—she was too busy staring at the sky, no doubt looking for fairies. “Every winter, during twilight months, the princess and I add to her ice forest.”
He studied her, not quite believing she had created all of this. There was nothing to gain by voicing his suspicions, so he kept them tucked away. “Twilight months?”
She glanced back at him, and he was again amazed by how pale she was—he could see the faint tracing of veins beneath her skin. “One hundred and eighty-seven days when the sun does not set, but instead climbs ever higher on the horizon before falling again. Twenty-four days of twilight. One hundred and sixty-three days of never-ending dark.” She shuddered lightly, probably not even realizing she’d done it. But Adar was trained to notice such things.
He couldn’t really blame her—he couldn’t imagine living nearly six months in total darkness. He turned in a full circle and then headed toward a strange sight. As he came closer, he realized what he was seeing was indeed a tree, or rather, two perfectly flat ones joined in the exact center, almost like they were cut pieces of vellum.
He rested his hand on the side, noting the burning cold even through his sheepskin gloves. “I don’t understand.”
Elly cleared her throat. “Every spring, the queen brings us books about the world—plants, animals, cultures. Whatever she can find. When I was younger, my adoptive father, Rone, would read them to me. Of course, I knew trees weren’t flat, but that’s how I always saw them. And that’s the way I grew to love them.” She rested her hand on the tree, alongside Adar’s. “Whenever I look at these trees, I hear his voice. The feel of his body next to mine, his heart beating against my back.”
Adar stared at her, admiring the passion. “And where is your father now?”
She dropped her gaze. “He died when I was younger.”
He reached out and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry.” Elly nodded and he took a step toward her, snow crunching beneath his feet. “There’s something beautiful about how you see the world.” Their gazes met, and Adar took in her forest-at-dusk eyes and full bottom lip. He suddenly realized he’d been looking too long. And not just looking, but admiring.
She glanced up at the sky. “Can . . . can I show you something else?”
“Please do.”
She tugged off his mitten and took his hand, and he was surprised to realize the wind didn’t feel as cold as before. He let her pull him along, her palm cool but not in an unpleasant way. It was strange to intimately touch this girl he barely knew—in fact, he quite liked it. Which was a bad idea. He hadn’t come all this way to be distracted from his mission.
She led him to a tree that looked to be made of twisting ribbons forced from the sky to join at the trunk. He touched a flat ribbon of ice. “It’s an aurora,” Elly said.
“If no one ever sees it, why do you make them?”
Her expression clouded. “What do you give to people who have everything?”
“The queen? You make it for her? Why?”
Elly looked over the ocean, toward the crimson horizon. “To say I’m sorry.” Her gaze was haunted and full of longing.
Adar looked back at the magnificent palace, enormous and intricate. This was how she showed her adopted family she loved them. But he got the feeling they didn’t appreciate it. “Would you make something for me?” He wanted to take the words back as soon as he’d said them. But with the look of longing on her face, and the way she’d dismissed her art, he wanted her to know it had value.
Elly bit her lip. “Really?”
He couldn’t take it back now, not when she looked so unsure. “Please.”
Her grin widened. “The princess knows how to tie what I make to winter, so it won’t ever melt. I can ask her to help me make you something if you like.”
“Surprise me.”
Her gaze turned inward even as she tugged him up a sharp rise to where one of her trees stood alone. This one was made of thousands of diamond-shaped prisms. It was beautiful, but not as imaginative as some he’d already seen. When they reached the top, Adar left Elly and the tree behind and moved to the edge of the glacier. He noted a beach of seals to his right. Before him, the horizon stretched on as far as he could see. He squinted, searching for any sign of the other ship. But all he could make out was the flat, oblong shapes of the ice floe interrupted by the occasional iceberg, which the ships would give a wide birth.
He thought of his shipmates. The other ship. He hoped they made it out alive, even though they had left him stranded behind enemy lines.
The sun slipped around some clouds. Adar lifted his hand to shield himself from the brightness that made his eyes water. He gasped at the fractured rainbows that covered the back of his hand before scattering across the snow. He turned in a half circle, amazed by the sparks of color in the frost at his feet.
Elly was outlined by the tree, which glittered with color—almost like crystalline wings at her back. The beauty of the tree—the beauty of her—took his breath away.
“It’s a weeping willow,” she said softly. She turned and parted the leaves with a tinkling sound. She slipped inside, her hand resting on the largest prism in the center of the trunk.
Adar was helpless to resist following her. “Have you heard the story about how the weeping willow came to be?” he said softly. She looked expectantly at him through the leaves. He circled the tree slowly, never taking his eyes off her. “Long ago, at the beginning of this age, there was a woman of the desert mountains. She was a skilled weaver, taking the goat wool and dying it into fantastic colors. Then she wove that wool into blankets and coats. Each one told a story.
“From far and wide, people came to buy her coats. The other weavers grew jealous—were their blankets not as bright and beautiful? Were their weaves not as tight? One night after drinking too much, they came to her cave, demanding to know why the people bought her blankets and not theirs. So she told them they weren’t buying the blankets, they were buying the stories.
“This enraged them all the more, and they killed her. Not wanting her family to take vengeance upon them, they buried her body deep in the canyon.
“But weaving was in the woman’s bones. Even in death, her spirit took hold of a seed and twisted and twined until a great tree grew up. One day, the woman’s daughter saw the tree. It seemed to beckon to her with its branches, and it was a hot, miserable day. So the girl lay beneath the cool shade and fell fast asleep. And in her dreams, the branches wove the story of her mother’s murder. The girl arose and told her family what had happened. Her family took their vengeance, hanging the murderers from the branches of the willow tree. And even today, if you lay beneath their bows, they will whisper secrets in your dreams.”
Adar finished circling the tree and parted the branches to step inside. Elly watched him approach, her gaze unreadable. Every inch of her was covered in fractured rainbows, and her skin glistened with a thin layer of frost.
“Where—where did you hear such a story?” she asked a little breathlessly.
He chuckled as he came even closer. Close enough to reach out and tuck some of the curling hair behind her ears, though his hands stayed at his side. “My father collects stories like some people collect coins. He used to dole them out to us kids as payment for not giving him a headache by the end of the day. And I practically grew up in a library.”
“You have a lot of siblings?”
“There are eighteen of us.”
Elly’s pretty mouth fell open. “Eighteen?”
“And that’s if you don’t count all my cousins and second cousins. And third. Never a shortage of sword partners for training.”
“Swords? But I thought you were a navigator.”
“Navigation I learned from the library and from my father. But where I’m from, every man is a warrior first.” Adar’s gaze fell on her mouth. She was smiling—the first real smile he’d ever seen from her. The rainbows from the prisms kissed her skin. He had the sudden urge to touch her face, to brush away the frost dusti
ng her cheeks and see the girl beneath.
“You like it,” she breathed.
Unable to resist any longer, he reached out and tucked her wild hair out of her face as an excuse to brush his fingers across her cheek. Her skin was soft, so soft, like he could sink into her. She closed her eyes at his touch, a soft sigh passing those lips. He leaned toward her.
“Elice!” called a sharp feminine voice.
Adar started, jerking away as if Elly’s touch had burned him. She pushed him behind the tree while simultaneously stepping in front of him. He peeked around her but didn’t see anyone.
“Quick,” she said as she shoved him out from under the tree’s boughs. He resisted—the tree was translucent, but at least it offered some cover. She silenced him with a look, her face screwed with concentration. As soon as he was out in the open, white stormed from her fingertips, forming a cone of snow around him.
He gaped at it openmouthed, the suspicion that had plagued him since he first met Elly snapping into place. Only the Winter Queen’s daughter could have power over winter. But how could Elly be the princess? His reports said Princess Elice was forty years old, unattractive, and mean tempered. Elly—Elice—had been wearing rags when he’d first met her, and she lived in a cave. Or at least he’d thought she did.
He gritted his teeth. He’d been trying to get to the princess to accomplish his mission for days, and she was right in front of him the entire time.
The top of the cone hadn’t even closed when the voice said, “Ah, there you are. I’ve been looking for you. I already checked that cave of yours.”
Adar’s head spun as he tried to remember if there was anything in that cave that pointed to his existence. He had to fight the urge to backpedal. Judging from the queen’s voice, she was only a few steps from his current hiding place. He breathed shallowly, knowing any sound he made could alert her to his presence.