Bitter Frost

by Kailin Gow

  Somewhere in the blare of music that was her bedroom, Kat was taking a lot of trouble over her appearance. Her hair was already right, or at least it was a chin length bob of dark hair with streaks of blue and red that her parents tried very carefully not to disapprove of, but the rest of it hadn’t been easy. There had been the red and black plaid to pick out to go with her combat boots, along with exactly the right amount of black makeup. It had taken ages to get right. The makeup aged her a year older than her sixteen years, but didn’t help fill out her slim figure. She had even cut short her session on the Game to work on it more.

  Let’s see Them think I’m ordinary now, Kat thought. She always thought of her parents as Them, especially when they insisted on calling her Katherine instead of Kat, which they did a lot. They seemed to have evolved a policy of ignoring the more extreme things Kat did, in the hopes that eventually she would fit in, or that she would become the Katherine Kipling they wanted her to be. Well fat chance.

  Kat surveyed the results of her efforts in her bedroom mirror. Despite her Dark Girl outfit, she still looked like a pixie or what people think pixies should look like, the child-like Tinker Bell version. An independent observer might have suspected that black eye shadow, and black nail polish, and black lipstick was probably overdoing things a bit, or was at least a look better suited to someone tall and brooding, not petite and, frankly, cute. Kat loved it.

  She was so busy admiring it that she almost didn’t notice the reflection of the gray cloaked figure- the one who laid an envelope on the edge of the dressing table but vanished the moment she looked round. It could almost have been a dream, except that the envelope was there, sitting rather smugly, Kat thought, as though it knew exactly how worrying its sudden appearance was.

  Still, Kat recovered enough to think after a moment, at least the black went with her nail polish.

  Up in Jackson Zusak’s home in Alaska, things were a little brighter, mostly because his parents insisted on filling the place with the color that the cold tended to leach away outside. Some days, he could hardly get to his computer for the brightly colored throws and coverings that his mom kept leaving around the place.

  He wasn’t at his computer now, for once. Instead, he was sitting in an armchair busy reading a book on the history of the Vikings. That had amused his mom and dad when they had seen it before heading off to the store to buy groceries.

  “You could be a Viking yourself,” Jack’s mom had said. “You’ve got the red hair.”

  They had all laughed at that, because even Jack knew that the image of his small, scrawny figure setting sail across vast oceans just didn’t work. Besides, they didn’t have glasses back then, and a Viking who wandered into things, as Jack tended to do when he lost his, probably wouldn’t do very well.

  “You’re only fifteen,” his mom had said, hugging him. “You’ve still got time to grow to be Viking-sized.”

  Jack hadn’t pointed out that, because people tended to be shorter in the past, he was probably already Viking-sized, for much the same reason that he didn’t tell his dad the answers to the crossword before he’d officially given up on it. Thinking of which…

  Jack found the newspaper in its usual crumpled up heap, smoothed it out a little, and finished off the crossword in a couple of minutes before returning to his book. He’d forgotten to mark his place, and it had closed on the arm of the chair he’d been sitting in. He went to open it again, and almost dropped it when the black envelope fell out. Out of the window, Jack got a brief glimpse of a gray robed figure, hurrying away too quickly to catch.

  Gemma James caught the sound of the doorbell just as she was finishing an assignment for her private school. She was pretty sure she’d aced it. She thought about ignoring the disturbance to go through it once more, but then remembered that there wasn’t anyone else home in her family’s Manhattan house. It might be a delivery, and since her dad was a lawyer, there was every chance that it might be something important that she would need to sign for, assuming that they’d take a sixteen-year-old’s signature.

  Sighing, Gem stood up and made her way through the place’s expensive furnishings, pausing automatically to check her appearance in the hall mirror. It was one of those habits she had picked up from cheerleading, because you never knew when the universe might have found ways to make you look a mess. As usual, she looked perfect, not a hair of her long blonde hair out of place as it framed a face with porcelain skin and deep green eyes. She smoothed out her skirt, then checked the door’s spy hole, because appearance wasn’t the only time you couldn’t be too careful.

  There wasn’t anyone there. Or rather, there wasn’t anyone standing at the door. There was someone walking away, dressed in the sort of robe that didn’t make sense unless Franciscan monks had started making deliveries, but he was gone in a second or two. Gem waited a moment longer before opening the door. She looked around, and found no one there, so she looked down. When she saw the envelope, she smiled very slowly, because some moments deserved to be drawn out, then she picked it up, ripped it open and read it so quickly that it probably set some sort of record.

  Chapter 1

  As the car that had been sent to the airport crunched its way up the estate’s gravel drive and rattled over the drawbridge, Gem found herself quietly surprised. Even though the invitation had said that she and her fellow winners would be staying in the castle at the heart of the Wordwick game, and even though her father, who’d been there on business, had confirmed that it was very much a real castle, she hadn’t really believed it. She’d gone online and looked into English castles, only to find that most of the really big ones were publicly owned, or had been ruined in the various wars since the Middle Ages, or both.

  She’d expected that the “castle” would just be a manor house with a few battlements tacked on, so her first sight of Henry Word’s home left her open mouthed. It was everything its online presence promised; a huge, sprawling circle of stone walls almost totally ringed by a moat and themselves surrounding a square bailey keep at one end, along with outbuildings, gardens, and what looked very much like a maze. From above it would probably have looked like a lopsided archery target.

  Parts of the castle had obviously been updated, such as the ground floor entrance to the keep that the car pulled up to, but mostly it looked like it had stayed untouched for hundreds of years. Except that if it really hadn’t been touched, then the stonework would be crumbling and the whole place would have been overrun with plant life. Someone had obviously put a lot of effort into looking after it.

  Gem got out of the car wondering how Henry Word had managed to get his hands on the place. She knew he was rich- her father had done enough work for him that she had a pretty good idea of just how rich- but even so, it seemed hard to credit. Places like this weren’t in private hands, were they? Maybe he still let visitors in. The ramp for wheelchair access to the front door was the sort of thing that they always had for visitors, wasn’t it?

  The driver handed Gem her bag and wished her a pleasant stay, but she wasn’t really listening. She was too busy staring as she stepped through the doors and into the keep’s lobby. Her private school was quite old-fashioned in its tastes, full of wood paneled walls and old paintings, but this had it beaten easily. There were expensive looking rugs thrown over the flagstone floor, and tapestries on the walls that blazed with color. They were interspersed with painted shields, and displays of swords or fragments of armor that looked like they really were hundreds of years old. Great oak doors branched off from it through small stone arches. It looked like the sort of thing that might result if someone had told a set designer to make everything look as medieval as possible, and then given them the contents of a museum strong room to use for decoration.

  Gem was so busy taking it all in that for almost half a minute she didn’t notice the four other people standing in the hallway, and she started when she noticed them. All four seemed to be around her own age. The one girl among them looked to Gem like s
he had gone out of her way to look as shocking as possible, and she frowned when she saw Gem. Of the three boys, the red-haired one with the freckles seemed even busier looking at the place than Gem had been, while the olive skinned one wearing torn jeans gave her a suspicious look that quickly turned to a smile. The third, who Gem had to admit was good-looking in a far too clean-cut, sure of himself sort of way, strolled over to her.

  “Hi, I’m Stieg Sparks,” he announced in a Texas accent. “Most people call me Sparks. You’re here for the week?”

  Gem nodded, then cocked her head to one side. She had heard the tiny note of surprise in that, and she knew the way jocks like this thought.

  “What? Don’t you think I should be?”

  “No, it’s just…”

  “It’s just that you don’t look much like a gamer,” the girl with the multi-hued hair said.

  “And who are you?” Gem demanded.

  “Katherine. Most people call me Kat.”

  She stuck out a hand like a challenge, and seemed surprised when Gem took it.

  “Gemma,” Gem replied. ‘Everyone calls me Gem. You’re British?”

  “From London. North side of the river. I suppose someone’s got to be.” She paused, looking Gem up and down. ‘So what are you doing here? Daddy buy you a way in?”

  “Ignore Kat,” the boy who had given her the suspicious look said. “It will be nice having someone so good-looking around. I’m Riordan Roberts. Rio.”

  Gem started to roll her eyes to Kat at that line, but the other girl’s expression wasn’t entirely friendly. Kat nodded to the remaining boy, who stood there looking like he couldn’t make up his mind whether to say anything. “Since we’re doing introductions, that’s Jack, which is apparently short for Jackson.”

  Gem smiled at the red-haired boy.

  “Hi. Where are you from, Jack?”

  “A-Alaska. Did you know that this place was built some time in the twelfth century?” The second half of it came out in a rush, as if to make up for the nervous stutter at the start.

  “Some time after 1141, following a charter of King Stephen, to be more exact,” a voice said. “It’s nice that you’ve done your research, Mr. Zusak.”

  Gem recognized the voice instantly as that of Henry Word. After his online announcements, she was hardly going to forget. He must have come into the hallway through a side door. She turned to greet him with the others, expecting to look up into the already half-familiar face, and had to adjust the direction of her gaze when it turned out that Henry Word was sitting down.

  He was sitting down because he was in a wheelchair.

  It was quite a high tech wheelchair, obviously custom made and designed around Henry Word, but there was no escaping the fact that it was there. From the waist up, Mr. Word was dressed conservatively, even elegantly, in a suit and silk tie. From the waist down, his legs disappeared beneath a tartan blanket. They didn’t appear again on the other side.

  “A small accident from my army days,” Henry word said, and Gem found herself wondering if he’d read her mind in the second it took to decide that the others probably looked just as surprised as she did. Gem realized that, in all the pictures she had seen of Henry Word either online or in magazines, not one had shown more than his head and shoulders.

  Henry Word laughed then.

  “I can see I’ve caught you all rather by surprise. Still, before I turn into the main topic of conversation, can I take a moment to welcome the five of you?” his gaze flicked to each of them in turn, and Gem guessed that he was matching names to faces in his mind. “You are all here, of course, because you have turned out to be some of the biggest fans of my little game. Congratulations on that. For the next week, you’ll be staying in what I hope you’ll find to be extremely comfortable surroundings, and you’ll get the benefit of a very special surprise.”

  “What surprise?” Rio asked from behind Gem. Henry Word chuckled again.

  “Ah, Riordan Roberts, I take it? Well, there is nothing to be suspicious about. In fact, I think that as fans, you will all enjoy this particular surprise. I have simply decided to allow you access to the tenth level of my game while we are here.”

  Gem felt her brow furrow.

  “But Mr. Word, aren’t there only nine levels?”

  “That’s true at the moment,” Henry Word answered. “Anachronia is rather new. You will be among the first to play it. Still, let’s not focus on that too much now, shall we? Chef has excelled himself in the Great Hall, and I’m sure you must all be hungry after your journeys.”

  He turned his wheelchair and headed back through the door he had come through, obviously expecting the five of them to follow. Gem hurried to keep up, even though what she really wanted was to demand more details from him. Well, most of her wanted to demand more details. Her stomach was happy to have dinner first. It had been a long flight.

  The Great Hall was everything that the name promised. The ceiling towered upwards, and held a great brass and iron chandelier. Along with a few paintings, the walls held more shields and weapons, as though Henry Word expected an army to pop round for spares at some point, while the floors were wood that had been polished so much it reflected the light from above, making stepping on it like treading over a spray of stars.

  There were two long tables, arranged with one down each side of the hall. Mr. Word showed the five of them to one table, then wheeled off towards the other, where half a dozen men and women dressed with varying degrees of formality.

  “My advisors,” he explained without being asked. “There is always so much to do. Still, at least this will give you all a chance to get to know one another.”

  Gem took the seat nearest to her, watching as the others arranged themselves around the table. Sparks glanced across to where Gem sat, then took the place next to Kat, while Rio wound up beside Jack.

  “So Kat,” Sparks asked, “what is it like living in London?”

  Gem listened to Sparks and Kat talk for a while. She had been prepared for Kat to come off as odd, given how she dressed, but from what she could tell, the other girl was pretty normal. She also got the feeling that Kat would hate it if anyone pointed that out. Particularly if Gem pointed it out.

  “So I was going to get this tattoo, once,” Kat said at one point, “but my mum said no. She said I wasn’t old enough. I…”

  Gem switched her attention to the other conversation at the table. It was half a conversation, really. Jack seemed to be working hard to get Rio to talk. For his part though, Rio seemed to be ignoring the other boy as best he could.

  “So whereabouts in LA are you from?”

  “East.”

  “What’s that like then? I bet it must be warmer than Alaska, right? Everywhere is warmer than Alaska.”

  “It’s OK.”

  Somewhere in all of this, food arrived, carried by waiters who looked like they might have stepped out of a professional restaurant. The food was good, certainly better than anything served up at her school, and Gem kept listening to the others as she sipped at some soup she had to slow herself to keep from gulping down. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

  Kat and Sparks had got onto the subject of sport, where Kat had found out that the boy was a quarterback at his school. Gem could have told her that ten minutes ago. Some things were just obvious. Still, Kat seemed interested enough.

  “Of course, over here, what we’d call football, you’d call soccer. Me, I’d rather just skate. You can take a board anywhere. Still it must be pretty cool.”

  Sparks said that it was, though to Gem, he didn’t sound very convinced of it. Maybe Kat heard it too, quickly taking the conversation off into music. They didn’t have many of the same tastes, but then, Gem suspected that not that many people would have managed to have exactly the same musical tastes as Kat. There were bands there that she’d never even heard of, and Kat seemed almost pleased when Sparks admitted that he hadn’t heard of them either.

  Between the two conversations, not
to mention the arrival of yet more food, it wasn’t easy to give much attention to what was happening on the other table. Still, Gem glanced across. Henry Word seemed to be discussing business with his advisors over dinner, and Gem wanted to see what he was like when he wasn’t greeting visitors.

  He seemed to be almost as friendly with his advisors as he had been with the five of them out in the lobby. He laughed and he joked, but Gem could still tell that he was very definitely in charge. The others deferred to him constantly, and he seemed to be very much the center of attention. Pleased to have found out that much about him, Gem turned her attention back to eating. Some of the other cheerleaders at school might have made fun of her for putting away so much, but they hadn’t just spent hours on a plane, and this food was too good to miss in any case.

  Besides, lurking behind it all was the thought that once they had finished dinner they might get to hear more about Anachronia, Henry Word’s new Wordwick level. It was a thought that made Gem’s fork practically fly over her plate.

  Sparks tried to keep up as Kat talked, but it wasn’t easy. He found himself glancing hopefully at the other girl, Gem, but she just seemed happy to sit and watch the whole thing…

  Rio watched her too. He wasn’t sure what a little pretty rich girl like her was doing there, but he was certainly glad she was…

  Jack was surprised that the other boy didn’t have more to say. Hadn’t he looked up the history of the castle before he came here? Jack kept going anyway, hardly noticing that Rio wasn’t listening…

  Kat kept talking, hoping to find a way through, before finally giving up. It wasn’t like she cared. She was there to win a game, after all…

  Through it, Henry Word watched them all. They were young, of course, but everything said that they should be perfect. Even so, he hoped that this would work…