Heart of Ice (The Snow Queen Book 1)

by K. M. Shea

  She coated their weapons with layers of ice, making them heavier and cloaking the blades and sharp ridges. When this made them howl in rage, she iced over the greaves of their armor and edged their beards and helms with crystalline hoarfrost. She created walls of packed snow that lined a path out of the village, and then funneled a horde of the invaders within. As she started closing the massive walls in, the invaders fled, deciding the fight was not worth being crushed.

  She froze the feet of the men attacking the Verglas soldiers, searing them to the ground, and staked them with icy spikes.

  She drew blood, but she was careful to kill no one as she drove them from Fyran. As she glanced at the clear sky, the winds picked up and clouds formed, dropping balls of ice and sharp snowflakes that pelted the invaders’ eyes and faces, but left the villagers untouched. Her shoulders were stiff. She worried a fellow magic user would suddenly burst out of the ranks, but it seemed that Oskar had accurate information: only mercenaries had been sent to destroy the small village.

  The snow that already blanketed the village began to move, snaking along the ground like a living thing. It twined around the remaining invaders, pulling them down, covering their eyes, and plugging their noses.

  The screams of the villagers stopped, and soon, it was the yells of the invaders that pealed in Fyran.

  The Verglas soldiers shouted a war cry and ran forward, falling on invaders. The civilians rejoined the fray, thrusting their weapons at the enemy.

  When Rakel lifted her arm straight up, extending a finger, and a huge glacier started to form behind her, the invaders fled.

  Rakel smiled—a real smile, not one of bitterness—and lowered her arm. Her icy magic twined around her like a cat as she dismissed the snowstorm she had called up and fractured the walls and spikes of ice and snow she had wielded like weapons.

  When she turned her eyes to the villagers and Verglas soldiers, the joy that thumped in her heart shriveled and died.

  The villagers cowered against their homes, their eyes glazed with terror as they stared at her. The soldiers stood in front of them, their weapons still out, even though the invaders were gone. Their stances were stiff and their faces grim.

  “Princess,” Oskar said, from somewhere in the group of soldiers.

  One of them took a step forward, and Rakel flinched. She heard the scrape of a sword blade and threw her arms in front of her, summoning a gust of wind laced with sharp shards of ice. With the wind to cover her back, she retreated to her castle, her ears straining for any sound of pursuit. When she reached the safety of the wooden wall, she threw herself inside, shut the gate, and reinforced it with ice.

  “Try to kill me now,” she gasped for air. She gave the gate one last appraising glance and staggered inside.

  No matter what I do, she thought as she slipped past the cold but safe walls of her castle, they will always fear me.

  CHAPTER 2

  GERTA & KAI

  Two days later, Rakel was perusing a book when she heard a thud, followed by an “Ow!”

  She was so surprised she set her book down and listened to the usual silence of ice and snow. That sounded like it was outside…

  She left the library and slipped out of her castle, staying behind the low walls of ice she had made when she’d fashioned her ice garden years ago. She followed the sound of raised voices, her stomach squeezing oddly. When she found the home-invaders, she was struck dumb.

  Just inside the walls of her fortification were two children. One was a little boy. He sat on the snow-coated ground and rubbed his back as he squinted in the bright sunlight. His companion—a little girl, the one she had saved—hung from the top of the wooden wall, her bottom wriggling and her feet kicking as she tried to get a foothold. Neither of them could have been older than ten.

  “Just drop down.” The little boy adjusted his blue scarf. “It doesn’t hurt too bad. There’s lots of snow.”

  “Catch me!” the little girl laughed.

  “What?” the boy said, his brow puckering. He looked up in time to watch the little girl land on him, knocking him back into the snow with an “Oomph.”

  “You’re right; that wasn’t so bad,” the little girl said in satisfaction.

  The boy groaned.

  “Let’s go find her,” the girl said, crawling off her friend.

  Rakel considered slinking back into her castle—she didn’t feel like facing their fright and hearing their shrieks of terror—but it would be faster to face them immediately and end the game. “Whom do you seek?” She stepped out of the shadows, joining them in the sunlight. She clasped her hands together to keep from self-consciously reaching for her hair. She had braided only the sides, allowing the rest of her hair to tumble like puffy white clouds. The style was a great deal less work than braiding all her hair, but it unfortunately shattered her attempts to appear harmless with its wildness.

  “Ah, Princess!” The little girl threw herself into a clumsy curtsey. The boy bowed. “How good of you to see us,” she recited, as if repeating words she heard adults speak without understanding what they meant. “We wanted—er, wished—to speak with you!”

  “And you are?”

  “I’m Gerta; he’s Kai.”

  The boy bowed again. “Pleased to meet you, Princess…” he trailed off with a frown.

  “Rakel,” she said, surprised by their manners. I thought they would run screaming at the sight of me, not act like miniature court officials.

  “Pleased to meet you, Princess Rakel. Will you listen to our request?” Kai asked.

  Rakel raised an eyebrow and considered them. Why would they wish to speak to me? “Very well. Follow me.” She led the way into her castle, taking them through the maze of silver corridors and passing through ice-blue rooms.

  “This place is so big,” Gerta said, giving a frosted spiral staircase an awed look. “It must be bigger than the royal palace in Ostfold!”

  “Perhaps,” Kai said.

  Not knowing what to say, Rakel awkwardly kept her silence. She’d built her castle over years and years of reading architecture books and testing building methods with ice. She had no way to gauge her castle and compare it to others—she could barely remember what the Verglas royal palace looked like, much less know how big its innards were. She had, however, built it to be quite large in comparison to the architecture plans laid out in the books and was quite proud of it. Resting just atop the mountain, it was built out of ice so pure it glowed the gold of the sun, and its shadows were the blue of the sky. Many of the castle towers were topped with pinnacles—icicle-like caps—and were supported by flying buttresses.

  The inside of the castle was ornamented with painfully constructed archways; precisely cut support columns that glittered like crystal; and snowflakes and reindeer that were artfully carved or beveled from the ice walls depending on the room.

  Rakel led the children deeper into her castle, taking them to her small library, which was packed with books, models, and maps.

  “Wow,” Kai said, gawking at a model of a Ringsted ship encased in a bottle.

  Gerta was more entranced by a number of flowers Rakel had preserved in ice. “Pretty!”

  The library was one of Rakel’s favorite rooms. Not because it was a masterpiece—she had other quarters that she had made a thousand times more exquisite—but because the library was the only thing that proved, on a distant level, someone cared about her. Why else would she receive a monthly shipment of books and novelties to study? It was this distant token of love that had pushed her into becoming a prodigious reader.

  Someone had even gone through the trouble to give her several books about the history of magic users. Reading of the horrors her fellow users were forced to experience made her appreciate that her parents and brother allowed her to live, even if she was alone and isolated.

  Rakel watched the children, waiting to see what they wanted. “Has Fyran recovered?” she asked after waiting for several minutes.

  “Not yet,�
� Gerta said, hopping away from the flowers. “They were still repairing homes when we left.”

  “They buried the dead yesterday,” Kai said in a much more subdued tone.

  Rakel warily studied Gerta. “Your mother…?”

  “Hurting, but she’s awake. She’s very thankful you saved us,” Gerta said, nodding vigorously.

  “I see,” Rakel said, not believing her for a moment. “If the village is well enough, why, then, have you sought me out?”

  Gerta clasped her hands together and bowed her head. “Please save Vefsna.”

  Rakel blinked. “Who?”

  “It’s a village,” Kai supplied, pulling himself away from the model ship. “It’s on Ensom Peak, but it’s more than halfway down the mountain.”

  “My grandmother lives there,” Gerta said.

  Rakel placed her hand on an ice sculpture of a reindeer—it had taken her months to learn how to get the antlers right—and tapped its back. “Vefsna was taken over by the invaders?”

  Kai nodded.

  “Can you free it, like you kicked the invaders out of Fyran?” Gerta asked, moving in alarmingly close to Rakel.

  “No,” Rakel said. Privately, she considered the idea. Could she? How hard would it be?

  “Why not? Does your magic not work off mountains?” Gerta asked.

  “Vefsna is still on Ensom—it’s only near the base,” Kai said.

  “It has nothing to do with my magic.”

  “Then what is it?” Gerta crowded even closer.

  Flustered by the close scrutiny, Rakel took a step backwards. “It’s because I’m not going to embark on a campaign to save all of Verglas.”

  “But you’re the princess,” Kai said.

  “In title only.”

  “What does that mean?” Gerta asked.

  “It means I’m not really a princess.”

  “Your parents weren’t King Ingolfr and Queen Runa?” Kai asked, scandalized.

  “They were, but they discarded me.”

  “And that means you can’t save Verglas?” Gerta asked.

  “It means I won’t,” Rakel said, even as she continued to weigh the possibility. Without Oskar there, would the villagers kill me once I rescued them? It seems fairly likely…

  “But the people need you!” Gerta argued, waving a mitten-clad hand in the air. “Mommy says all the other villages are a lot worse off than Fyran. She says the invaders have got their teeth in our throat.”

  “So many have died,” Kai said in a small voice. “You can’t do anything?”

  Rakel remembered the crossbow bolt and the scrape of the sword. She didn’t want to die like that. “No.”

  “You saved my mommy…why not my grandmother?” Gerta asked, her voice shaky with unshed tears.

  Rakel exhaled, knowing she wouldn’t be able to explain her reasoning. “I will show you out,” she said. She led the children all the way to the wooden gate of the wall. With a flick of her finger, the ice barring the gate fractured, allowing Rakel to push it open.

  “Thank you, Princess,” Kai said as they left.

  “Yes, thank you,” Gerta said, drooping like a wilted flower.

  “I’ll go get the sled. You stay here,” Kai said.

  “Alright,” Gerta agreed.

  When Rakel closed the wooden gate behind them, she could hear them no more. They weren’t, however, so easily banished from her thoughts.

  She sighed. “I wish the world were the kind of place they think it is.”

  Hours later, Rakel was laboring over a fox ice statue—an attempt to quiet the racket her mind was raising—when she heard a man shout “Princess?”

  She was so shocked someone had ventured deep enough into her castle that she could hear them that she almost yelped.

  “Yes?” Rakel clutched the fox to her. She belatedly realized it could be viewed as a weapon and thrust the sculpture onto a table, rapidly backing away from it as Oskar and a gruff man she recognized as Captain Halvor—another person who had likely angered someone powerful, for he had served as the captain of her guard for five years instead of the usual three—entered the library with four villagers on their heels. Captain Halvor stood out like a wolverine among chickens. He was much shorter than Oskar as well as a few years younger, but he was more wiry and tough. His ash blond hair gave him a bland appearance that his perpetual shadow of whiskers belied.

  Rakel inspected the villagers and placed the woman with a bruised face and bandaged head as Gerta’s mother.

  What is she doing here?

  “Princess, have you seen two children today—a little boy and a little girl?” Oskar asked. He smiled at her, dripping of charm and goodwill.

  “Gerta and Kai?” Rakel brushed slivers of ice from her dress.

  Oskar’s smile widened. “They’re still here, then?”

  “No. They arrived late in the morning and left shortly after.”

  “Did they say anything to you?” Oskar asked.

  “Yes.” Rakel reflexively clasped her hands together and held them against her waist. “They wanted me to free Vefsna.”

  Gerta’s mother cried out like an animal in pain.

  “They left in the morning, you said?” Oskar’s pine-green eyes were grim and hooded with worry.

  “Yes. The boy said he would go get their sled.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Oskar said, running a hand through his normally well-groomed hair.

  “They must have gone on alone,” Halvor rumbled over the sobs of the woman. His voice was gravelly and rusted, but warm. “If we leave now, we might be able to reach them before the invader scouts.” The captain left—his fur cape curling behind him—and the villagers scurried after him.

  Rakel turned her attention to her attendant, who had stayed behind. “You cannot find them?”

  “No. We suspect they went down to the mountain to Vefsna,” Oskar said. “They spent the morning asking soldiers and other villagers to band together to free it.”

  Their loyalty to Gerta’s grandmother is touching, though I’m not surprised I am a last resort. Aloud, Rakel said, “I see.”

  “Gerta is as brave as a windstorm, and we knew she was plotting—last night she and Kai begged us to bring them to you—but with all the rebuilding and clean up…” Oskar sighed.

  Rakel pushed her hands together until they shook and her knuckles turned white. It’s not my responsibility. It’s not my— “Take me with you.”

  Oskar looked up. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You will go with Halvor?”

  “If you wish me to.”

  “Then take me with you. You can bring soldiers, if you must, to guard against me—”

  “The guards aren’t necessary, Princess. They would be an insult to you—they’ve always been an insult to you—but after Fyran…I think everyone would agree it is unnecessary to guard you.”

  Rakel didn’t believe a word of this but thought it was clever of him to pretend it was so. “Thank you. Will you inform Halvor?”

  “I will, and I’ll order the sleigh to be brought around. Thank you, Princess.” He smiled warmly and made a quick exit from the library. “Halvor!” Oskar shouted.

  Rakel watched him go, thinking, the sleigh?

  CHAPTER 3

  VEFSNA

  Rakel sat in a tiny sleigh, crammed in behind Oskar, who snapped the reins and kissed at the two reindeer that pulled them.

  “I was unaware Fyran kept reindeer,” she said, unable to keep her tongue still in her shock.

  “Halvor had them brought to Ensom Peak,” Oskar said. “He got them so they could pull the supplies between Fyran and your home.”

  “They are army animals?”

  “Of a sort. They’re listed as supplies.”

  Rakel hesitated for a long moment, thinking through her request. “Could I get a reindeer?” she finally asked.

  Oskar twisted around to offer Rakel a smile. “I can promise that softy Halvor is already planning to buy you one since he saw that
charming smile of yours when you set eye on these proud beasts.”

  Rakel stared at him and wondered what her smile had to do with anything as he tugged on the reins, redirecting the reindeer so they more closely followed the sled in front of them—the one Captain Halvor occupied.

  It was an hour or two from dusk, but birds chirped and sang as they settled into their nests. It had taken them the better part of the afternoon to arrive, but they were nearly to Vefsna. (Rakel had spent the majority of the ride gawking. Even though the trees all looked the same, the mountain trail was an unfamiliar sight to her starved eyes.)

  Captain Halvor pulled his sleigh to a stop and leaped out to approach a man who had scouted ahead. They held a heated exchange, then Captain Halvor trudged to Rakel and Oskar’s sleigh.

  “We’re too late,” he said, directing his comment to Oskar. “Snorri picked up the trail of their sled. They came straight down the mountain, beating us by a long shot. Judging by the tracks, they were intercepted by an invader and dragged off.”

  “How do you know?” Oskar asked.

  The captain hesitated, and then gestured for his scout to come forward. The scout offered up the blue scarf Kai had worn that morning. The scarf was crusted with snow and frozen blood.

  Oskar took the scarf, his eyes crinkling with sorrow. “Captured,” he repeated. The single word was frost-bitten with defeat. “Will you mount a rescue?”

  Captain Halvor flattened his lips.

  “You’d like to,” Oskar guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t have enough soldiers. If Fyran isn’t attacked again, it will be a miracle,” Oskar said.

  Captain Halvor bowed his head.

  “Where is Vefsna?” Rakel asked, sliding from the sleigh. She had a cramp in her legs and almost staggered when she was free of the heavy—and unnecessary—furs Oskar had given her.

  “Southwest, Princess,” Oskar said, his brow furrowed and his voice distracted as he pointed out the correct direction.