by E. Archer
Daphne knew she would have to start moving, or risk losing courage, not to mention all feeling in her toes. So she threw herself off the ridge, rocketing through the packed snow, all the way to the bottom of the crest. By the time she slowed to a stop, she was soaked through, her skin red and chapped, and she felt more miserable than she had ever yet felt. And the Snow Queen’s tower was still far off.
There were trees growing beneath the gray sky, she was certain. But all the greenery was blanketed in so much snow that their true forms were long-hidden — they might as well have been old men frozen in mid-step. Daphne eased between them in the eerie quiet, surrounded by a smooth whiteness broken only by her own footprints.
The swirls of snowflakes began to thicken into shapes that grew more and more pronounced. They did not fall from above, like proper snowflakes, but hurtled along the ground. All the singular loveliness of the flakes grew grotesque; no sooner had Daphne set her eyes on one than another ripped her attention away with fresh shivers of fright. The patterns thickened so transfixingly that a squadron of snowflake soldiers formed before she realized what was happening.
These were the Snow Queen’s guards. Some were little men with spears and crystal bellies that you could peer through to the snowy landscape behind; some were bears with great silver teeth; some were birds with sharp, rhomboid wings. The scariest guards had no shape at all. They were rolling figures of ice that shifted to fit the landscape as they hurtled toward her.
Snow Guards cannot be effectively attacked by any but the most proficient warriors, for how can one kill something animated through magic? Cut off a foot and that foot will still float and advance, slice through a heart and the organ will function as well in two pieces, for snow creatures don’t need anything hot and basic like blood to sustain them. That Daphne stood no chance against these creatures was obvious to any beings who happened to be watching.
And there were some very important beings watching.
Her tale had attracted no small amount of attention, as will the story of anyone who has great odds stacked against her. As I’ve transcribed this quest, pages have been nicked and spread throughout the wish’s realm, and now all the fantastic creatures are clamoring for copies of pages.
Most of them will be of no use in aiding Daphne. But a group of retired golden angels has been following her story. They watched Daphne struggle with this cold legion of magical snowflakes. Though these heroes had once been speedy indeed, they were fat old men now, and it took them some time to fasten their hero costumes. It wasn’t until now that they arrived, the very moment a guard was about to run Daphne through with his ice lance.
When they hurtled onto the scene, the angels were each no bigger than an egg, golden pellets that slammed, sizzling, into the snow. They swiftly grew to the size of vanity chess pieces, then finely featured beavers, and finally came to look like large men with wings and shields and spears and helmets that extended down to protect their noses. Their weapons were hot, which made all the difference — they smote the Snow Guards until the last one melted, screaming, into the snow.
Then the angels rubbed their hands over Daphne’s numb feet until they began to feel warm and snug, as though she had her furry boots back.
The old winged men flew away before Daphne could thank them, for they, too, knew that her powerlessness was her best hope. She waved them farewell and trudged on to the Snow Queen’s palace.
CHAPTER XXXVII
The tower didn’t have any doors. Instead, there was a gaping hole in the front. It would have been easy enough to stroll through, had it not been crossed by cutting winds. Should Daphne have tried to enter, her flesh would have instantly frozen and shattered.
It was frustrating, really. She could see deep into the palace’s blue-tinged expanses, but she couldn’t approach the entrance by more than a few feet before the cold grew too fierce. She teetered at the edge of the portal like at the tip of a diving board, gearing up the courage to dash through, even if it meant certain death. For what other option did she have?
She figured the less time she spent under the cutting winds, the better, so she backed up to get a running start. She started sprinting … and then stopped.
As she had begun to run, her feet had shifted on invisible currents of slippery ice, streams frozen beneath the snow. If she could only … and then she reached her hand under the snow and located one of the currents. She traced it back to where it began, halfway up the ridge. Then she blew on her little red fingers, curled her body up into a tight ball (a trick seven-year-old girls who have lost their boots and cloaks are particularly well suited for), and began to slide.
It was slow at first, but then how she did fly! A pink blur on the wide expanse of white, she was turning and spinning and rolling and wheeling until she had no idea where she was hurtling or even who she was.
What she was aware of, however, was that the cutting winds were bound to destroy her, no matter how fast she may be speeding when she finally crossed the threshold. It would be a very silly Snow Queen, after all, whose tower defenses could be defeated by a little girl, even an astoundingly quick one. As the blue ice and gray sky whirred about her, she gave in to the motion and almost began to enjoy it. This, she realized, would be her final fling.
But all that turning and spinning … soon she felt a pleasant buzz inside. Then the glow intensified until it was … not unpleasant, really, but rather so very pleasant that she wouldn’t want it to last more than a few seconds.
She would have liked to get outside herself to see what she looked like, but unfortunately seeing outside of themselves is something seven-year-olds are unequipped to do. Warm pink flames came to bathe her until she was a meteor hurtling down the ridge, leaving behind a brook of yellow-green grass.
Her course was leading her nowhere near the palace entrance, as a flaming little girl rocketing down a hillside is a frenetic and directionless projectile. She veered every which way, zoomed down hills only to round the base and zip back up, flip into the air, and land half a mile away. As she went faster and faster, she crisscrossed the whole expanse of the Frozen North, going miles out of her way only to pass over an ice mountain and double back. Pinball would make an apt metaphor, if a narrator were earnest and modern and inclined to such descriptions.
Daphne reached the tower at the approximate speed of a thought. She missed the portal entirely and instead pierced the structure’s icy hull, sliding easily through and leaving a clean hole, as though a chef had gone after the tower with a Daphne-sized cookie cutter.
She was lucky she didn’t enter through the front entrance.
Not for the cutting winds, but for the bevy of Snow Dragons. The Snow Queen had stolen their hatchlings and lodged them in nets at the top of the chamber, which made the dragons cranky beyond their general orneriness. Behind the dragons were Ice Worms, any one of which could have swallowed Daphne in a mouthful. And Ice Worms, of course, never travel unless in the company of Sleet Mermaids, which aren’t particularly menacing on their own … only, they refuse to travel without their Cold Trident Housecats, which would have been dangerous but not overly so if it hadn’t been for their Deep Freeze Fleas. Oh, and the Snow Queen had ordered the floor ripped out and replaced with spikes of chilled aluminum. Whether frozen spikes would have been a danger to a pink-clad little girl rocketing at one-fourth the speed of sound is debatable, but that debate need not be joined, since Daphne did not enter through the entrance portal but rather penetrated a large closet sideways, coming to rest in a puddle of steam next to an old mop that had turned stiff and gray and had therefore been placed with the other items no longer useable.
It is taxing enough to rapidly decelerate from a speed of hundreds of miles an hour to zero. Add to that simultaneously dropping from four hundred degrees of body heat to ninety-eight point six, and slowing from spinning at four revolutions per second to not spinning at all, and you’ll have an inkling of Daphne’s disorientation. The mop she came to rest against was the most w
elcome companion in the world. She sank her lips into its nasty old fibers and clutched it like a teddy bear.
She wept bitterly again, but only for a moment this time, because she knew Ralph was near. Realizing that her entrance hadn’t been overly subtle and someone was bound to come hunting for her, she threw open the icy closet door before some wicked animated snowflake could do it first.
Daphne, of course, had no idea of the most recent mayhem in the entrance chamber — as, I startle to report, neither did you. My apologies: Let me take you there now.
The Deep Freeze Fleas had discovered the Snow Dragon Hatchlings on the roof, and, as dragon hatchling blood is quite sweet, had flocked to them. The Snow Dragons had risen to protect their children, in the process spraying the Sleet Mermaids with frost and ticking off the Cold Trident Housecats, who are infamously fearsome when agitated. The resulting melee shook the walls of the tower and bathed everyone in crimson slush.
But since Daphne prudently avoided the entrance chamber entirely, we will return our attention to her closet.
The narrow door opened onto a large ice hall that stretched farther than she could see. There was no regular shape to it, just a cavern formed by the currents of snow. It was a wide open space, as gaping as the Snow Queen’s heart and lit only by whatever glittering reflections of the northern lights managed to pass through the murky ice walls.
Daphne passed over the cold floor and found, once she reached the far wall, more caverns of a similar type. While she started out with determined footsteps, leaving steaming puddles beneath her angel-warmed feet, she eventually began to slow and lose hope. For while she had an idea of how to fight something that was there, how could she possibly fight emptiness?
Though it may seem dumb in retrospect, we shouldn’t really fault the Snow Queen for placing every single one of her guards in the entrance chamber. There was only one way into the tower, after all — who could have foreseen that some obnoxious little girl would coast through a twenty-foot wall of ice and invade an unused closet?
The truth was that, for the first time in centuries of Royal Narratological Guild storytelling, the Snow Queen was worried. She wasn’t fearful, mind you — she was far too powerful to be fearful — but she was undeniably concerned. Daphne had somehow escaped the Flint Robbers and made it across the frozen wastes, had then defeated the royal Snow Guards, who had never before been defeated — so the Snow Queen figured she was dealing with some weird and demonic gremlin, and placed all her minions in the entrance hall as the surest way to defeat her. A titanic initial offensive, if you will.
And it hadn’t worked.
The door to Ralph’s cottage prison opened. In walked the Snow Queen, her face drawn and stony.
“Matters have gotten worse,” she said. “I’m afraid Cecil can’t remain here with you.”
“What are you going to do with him?” Ralph whispered. The Snow Queen’s poison had been stronger of late, and he was too weak to move.
“You won’t need to worry about Cecil anymore,” she said.
Meanwhile, Daphne passed through a hundred chambers as empty as the one she first encountered. In each she found only eerie torches, their cold white flames illuminating little more than themselves.
As she trekked, Daphne came to realize that she was progressing through an ever-narrowing sequence of curved caverns that spiraled inward like the chambers of a nautilus. They shrank in breadth as she went, until she had no sooner entered a chamber than it landed her into the next. Soon the chambers were only a few feet of empty space until the next door, and then they were nothing more than doors, the icy surfaces grating as she opened one against another. Finally she skirted through a narrow portal and came to a door so imposing that it made all the others disappear. It was a tall slice of glacier, its doorknob a chill globe of brass barely within her reach.
Daphne slowly placed her fingers around the searingly cold metal. The portal shivered once and then opened.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
She found a boy sitting at the center of a frozen lake, swaddled in thick white furs and staring into the surface of the ice.
Daphne stood in the midnight doorway, staring. The boy never moved, only stared at his reflection. Daphne leaned down and peered into the deep blue surface to try to see her own image.
But she didn’t find herself. Swimming beneath were what Daphne first took to be fish, the kind you find in pet stores that would be completely see-through if not for the flashes of their scales when they turned. But then she saw they were actually words, glinting words. She couldn’t read them through the scored ice, but when a word swam near the surface she would see an f tail curve, the twist of a backbone V before its owner shot away.
“Hello?” she dared to call. “Boy?”
He was too far away to make out clearly. But she recognized him somewhere deep inside. Her ribs gave a flutter when she first saw him; he was something grander than ordinary.
“Hello?” she tried again.
But he wouldn’t look up, so she started across the ice.
The surface was solid, and scored enough that there was a bubbly roughness under her bare feet. She felt secure hobbling across as the swimming words flashed beneath her.
When she neared the boy, however, she saw the blue of the ice beneath her deepen, until she seemed to be crossing an invisible membrane across a night sky. The swimming words stuck to the shallower waters and didn’t approach her anymore. She still had a dozen more feet to go to reach the boy, and beneath her was infinity.
“Look at me,” Daphne pleaded. And then, fractionally, he raised his head. Daphne gasped. It was Cecil, so sick he could barely move, but staring back at her in feeble panic. His eyes were no longer the tangled molten brown long since fixed in memory, but the gray clarity of clean riverstones, of reason itself. And when his eyes met hers, the ice beneath their bodies cracked open.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Plummeting through ice clogged with silvery words is like jolting awake and gasping after one of those falling dreams. Except, of course, that the shock lasts for whole seconds and is accompanied by syllables quivering against your cheek. And instead of waking up, you land in a cascade of ice onto a mirror.
Daphne and Cecil fell near each other on the glass but skated in opposite directions. Words carried in the deluge of cold water tumbled about them and lay flopping on the surface, their embedded letters warping as they gasped for air. As she tried to work through her shock, Daphne lay on an ice floe and stared at the gills of BRINK as it rose and fell in the steel light of the mirrored cavern.
She couldn’t find her brother anymore, and no matter where she paddled her floe, no matter how loudly she called his name, there was no answer.
Daphne dropped a single tear. And when her tear hit the water the ripples it made, slight as they were, added just enough tension to the lake that the mirror beneath the surface shattered, and she tumbled through.
CHAPTER XL
This fall wasn’t nearly as peaceful as the previous one. First, she fell a long way — the length of a suburban home’s driveway, say, if stood on end (presuming one could do such things to driveways). Second, she was falling through pure darkness. And third, the air around her lacked all warmth. It was so cold, in fact, that if she had fallen much farther, say the length of a cul-de-sac, she would have perished from the chill and then shattered at the bottom.
But as she fell a shorter length and struck a thatched roof rather than a hard floor, she survived. She and Cecil whipped through the musty hay and tumbled onto a bed.
And, of course, they toppled on top of Ralph. He had watched their plummet on the bear’s paw, eventually decided that the cottage they were heading for was his own, and scurried to hide under the bed. He stuck his head out so he could stare at the roof. It was as frosty and motionless as ever, until it disintegrated in a flurry of hay fibers. The two Battersby youths fell hard, struck the bed, and were flung by the protesting springs to the far corners of the room.
“Daphne?” he called. “It’s me, Ralph!”
Daphne had the admirable presence of mind to nod from her perch.
“Thank God,” Ralph said, trying to get to his feet and then collapsing, shivering on the floor. “I’ve been following you this whole time; I saw everything, and we have to get out of here!”
At which point Ralph tried to pull himself back into bed and fell, winded, onto the freezing floor. “Or at least you have to get out of here. She keeps feeding me those scones, and they make me weak.”
Daphne disentangled herself from the tapestry, hit the cold floor on her angel-warmed feet, stood, and straightened her pink dress. Ralph felt her eyes on him.
“I missed you,” she said.
Ralph was about to say thank you when a woman’s voice boomed from above.
They peered up through the torn roof at the full radiance of the Snow Queen.
She was Regina and Chessie and a goddess. Gone were the lines of pearls and the masses of ringlets; gone were the practical cap, the apron, the hovering demeanor. Instead she was a cold sun. Tendrils of her frost snaked around the walls and the sundered roof. When she spoke, she jerked about, propelled by the power of her voice.
“You have been wicked,” she intoned. She slammed the ice wall on “wicked.” It shivered and dropped shards that shattered on the floor, splattering Ralph and Daphne.
Daphne peered up, shielding her eyes against her aunt’s chilly radiance.
“Come and speak to me,” the Snow Queen continued. She pointed at the girl’s rib cage and levitated her into the air heart-first, her head and limbs dangling. Daphne brushed through the thatch and was soon beside the Snow Queen.
“Auntie Chessie, what are you doing?” she asked.