by Aria Noble
Queen of Frost
Frost Book One
Aria Noble
Copyright © 2021 by Sterling & Stone
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
A Quick Favor…
About the Author
Chapter One
Ember couldn’t see. She’d been squinting through glare and blizzards, snow and ice, for her entire life, but she’d never been in a whiteout as complete as this. The wind tore into the ground, picking up snow and ice that had already fallen and adding their particles to what was falling, and had been falling, from the sky for three days. When she held her black thermal mitten out in front of her face, it vanished behind a wall of blowing, biting snow, as completely as though she hadn’t lifted it at all.
The rope around her waist went slack. She tugged at it, suddenly afraid that something happened at the other end, that it came unknotted from Eli’s waist, and they were about to be separated. Half-panicked scenarios starting whirling around in Ember’s head.
In storms like this, with whiteouts so bad one can’t see their mitten in front of their face, a person could be just steps away from shelter and freeze to death before they could find it. Companions could be lost only feet away from each other.
There was an answering tug on the rope, and Ember could breathe again. She followed it forward. She could only tell she was moving by the feeling of her boots crunching through the icy crust of the snow. Eli shimmered into view an instant before she ran into him. He stood still, his head and shoulders hunched over. His face was hidden behind a thermal scarf, hat, hood, and goggles, but he appeared to be looking down at something in his hands.
Ember put a mittened hand on his shoulder to let him know she was there and leaned against his arm to see what he was looking at.
It was the compass.
She’d let him take it for a while, mostly because she was tired of being in the lead. They’d been following the compass needle since first setting foot beyond the walls of Dusk, but now it was spinning again.
Ember pressed closer to him so she could speak through scarves and hats and blizzard winds. Even with her head practically shoved against his, she had to shout to be heard over the wind. “We should stop. Let the weather die down.”
Eli looked up from the compass. Ember couldn’t see his face, but she could hear the frown in his tone. “I think this means we’re almost there.”
She glanced over her shoulder, though the gesture was useless. She couldn’t see anything past the little bubble of space before the falling, blowing snow turned everything to solid white.
The movement in the corner of her eye, the dark shape she thought she saw whenever she wasn’t looking at it — she knew it was all in her head. She’d heard of such things happening to people caught in whiteouts, how the lack of visual stimulation could cause them to start seeing things that weren’t there. Shadows lurking at the corners of their vision, monsters padding along behind them and disappearing whenever they turned to look directly.
She knew it was because she’d spent the last who knew how long trying to see a world that was completely wiped away, but the feeling of something following them, the momentarily glimpses of the shadows lurking in her vision, still frightened her.
“Eli, please. Let’s stop. The weather’s been getting worse since morning, and I’m tired.”
She hated to admit it, but it was true. Her body ached with the effort of walking across the knee-deep, ice-crusted snow, and her head ached from trying to see through the walls of white that pressed in around her like a shifting cocoon.
“Okay,” Eli agreed. It would be unthinkable of him to argue with her plea. Tired equaled dead out here. “The next drift we find, we’ll dig in for a rest.”
It took only a few minutes to stumble across a suitably large drift; they were common on the lee side of every bump and mound of the ground out here. This one was as tall as Eli’s head, and though they had to break through the crust of ice on the top of it to make their opening, they’d soon dug a nook big enough for both of them to fit inside.
It was better inside the drift, out of the wind and away from the blinding blanket of snow. Ember unhooked herself from her pack and pulled off her goggles. The air bit into the exposed flesh around her eyes, but out of the wind and snow, the cold was barely even remarkable, hardly any colder than stepping outside her house at home.
Her goggles were crusted with ice inside and out. She scraped them clean with her mittened hand while Eli wormed his way into the hole and took off his pack and goggles too.
He reached for the layers around his mouth and tugged them away from his face. They had a thin crust of ice on them, too, a crust Ember could feel beginning to melt into her own knitted wool beneath the thermal layer on the outside.
Dusk didn’t have much, but it did have thermals. Even Before, Dusk had been so far north that the climate was cold and unpredictable, so a lot of people stockpiled thermals. After the Great Death, thermals became every person’s most carefully maintained possessions. Ember had even heard stories, though mostly from Eli, that Frost might be producing them again.
Of course, everything she knew about Frost came from Eli’s stories. “Frost has warmth. Light. Even industry,” he’d say. Or, “I’ve heard you can get milk — real milk, like from animals — in Frost. They grow animals down there!”
Did she believe him? On some level, Ember figured she must. Dusk couldn’t be the only place that had survived the Great Death, and Frost had been the crown jewel of Steppe Before — or so she’d been told, as neither she nor her parents, or even their parents as far as she knew, were old enough to actually remember it. There had to be something beyond Dusk. There had to be, and that was why she was here. Why she let Eli talk her into this trip.
Besides, if she didn’t come, Eli would die wandering around in the tundra. There was only one real rule about traveling alone outside of Dusk’s walls, and that was don’t.
But Ember knew, as she trudged along through the snow and the whiteout, tugged onward by her own curiosity, that keeping Eli alive and safe wasn’t the real reason she’d let him convince her to come. There was something else beneath the rationalizations she gave herself, reasons she didn’t fully understand — and that sometimes, like now, began to feel inexcusably stupid.
She was supposed to be the cautious one, the levelheaded one, the one who talked Eli out of his wildest ideas and most absurd desires. She wasn’t sure how she’d let him talk her into this.
“I think we’re almost there.” His voice was soft. He no longer needed to shout over the wind and thick layers of clothin
g.
Ember didn’t answer. He’d been saying that since the snow started three days ago.
“Ember?”
“I heard you,” she mumbled into her scarf. She kept her eyes on her hands and continued to scrub at her goggles, even though the coating of ice was long gone.
Eli watched her. His gaze pressed into her skull like stones, hard and heavy. Eventually, he sighed and turned to his pack. He pulled out the thermal bag folded and tucked neatly into an inner pocket.
Thermal sleeping bags were things Ember had only ever seen in a store window. The first night Eli had taken it out of his pack, she realized just how long he’d been planning and preparing for this trip: the only thermal bags she’d ever seen cost as much as Eli could make in a year at his job of keeping Dusk’s streets clear of the snow and ice that forever threatened to bury their homes beneath the weather.
Now, Eli unrolled the bag. It was thin and matte black like all thermals and just large enough for the both of them to snuggle in together, sharing their body heat as the cloth reflected it back on them. He stretched it out on the hard-packed snow floor of their little cave, then looked up at Ember and grinned with half his mouth. “Bedtime?”
Ember shed her outermost layers, setting the thermals and wool aside to dry, then quickly slid between the two layers of the bag. Eli did the same, and in a couple of minutes, Ember was finally able to feel her toes again.
She wiggled them, relieved when they moved, however painfully, under her command. Snow had slipped into her boots at some point and soaked her socks; she peeled the socks off, knocking Eli with her knee as she pulled it up to reach her foot.
“What was that for?” he asked, shifting away from her accidental kneeing.
“Sorry,” she whispered back, then, fighting down a grin, stuck two of her toes against the bottom cuff of his pants, against the warmth she could feel radiating from his leg.
He twitched and yelped as her cold toes connected with his warmer ankle.
Ember bit back a chuckle. For someone who grew up in a place forever covered in snow and frozen in ice, who spent his days trudging through drifts up to his hips or higher, he was surprisingly sensitive to the cold.
Then she sighed. “Almost there, huh?”
He nodded and snuggled down a little further into the bag so that only the top of his head and his mop of overgrown, dusty black hair stuck out. “I’m sure of it. We haven’t made great time because of the weather the last couple of days, but you’ll see. There’s more beyond the tundra.” A yawn, wide enough to make Ember’s jaw ache just looking at it. “There has to be.”
Ember snuggled down, too. Eli was so warm, probably the warmest boy she’d ever met. Dusk tended to make people like her: cold from skin to bone, hardened by life at an age that she felt must be far too young. But Eli had never been like that. Both his body and his demeanor stayed warm to the touch no matter how brutal the weather got, and somehow, through the years, through endless winter nights, the illnesses and accidents that haunted every footstep, the ice and snow that never relented even when the sun came back for the summer, Eli never lost that warmth.
Her father had described him as a candle flame once before he disappeared into the tundra and never came back, and the image had stayed with Ember ever since. Eli was a flame, and she had always been drawn to him.
They were a team, the two of them. Ember kept them smart, and Eli kept them warm.
She must’ve dozed off because she woke with a start to Eli snoring softly at her back and a pale bluish light coming into their little burrow from the hole where they’d dug into the drift.
Her nerves jangled. Something tugged at her in that deep-down space she had spent a good portion of her life trying to ignore, but that never really went away.
Ember rolled over and prodded Eli in the shoulder. He flopped onto his back, away from her finger, but then opened his eyes.
“G’morning, sleepy,” Ember muttered. “It looks like the storm has stopped.”
Eli lifted his head to look out from the drift, then settled back against his pack, which he was using as a pillow. His eyes closed again. “Just a few more minutes.”
She let him have that. She wasn’t in a hurry, after all. This might not even be the worst place to spend the night. They had shelter and a warm thermal bag, and enough ice to suck on when their mouths got dry.
But she couldn’t close her eyes. Her attention kept churning over the opening of their little cave and the light outside of it. It was strange. Too blue. It bothered her.
Eli was already snoring again, and he didn’t shift when she slid out from the bag. The cold stabbed at her now-warm body, her exposed hands and face and toes, like the very air was made of shards of ice. But that was normal. She slid her feet into her boots and her arms into her coat and scrambled toward the hole in the drift. The ice gathered at the edges was thin enough to break away with her elbows and forearms. She kept her unmittened hands tucked inside the sleeves of her coat. She was just stepping out to see what the strange blue tint to the light was about so she could stop worrying about it and go to sleep, not preparing to walk on — and after a minute of shoving aside some ice and snow, she was able to wiggle her way free of the cave.
The storm had finally stopped, and the wind had whisked away much of the snow, so the ground around their cave was pretty well empty and flat, coated in a thin but treacherous sheet of ice. It was hard to tell with the clouds still so low and thick, but Ember thought by the quality of the gathering darkness that it was coming on evening. For the first time in three days, the air was still. The blueness of the remaining light was diffuse and transparent, but she wasn’t sure where it was coming from or why it was there. Everything before her stretched out in near-perfect whiteness for as far as she could see.
Maybe it was like the shadows she’d seen skulking around the corners of her vision during the whiteout. Now that visual information had returned, and her mind was struggling to adjust and colored everything a faint blue that wasn’t actually there. Maybe Ember was making something out of nothing again.
She did have a tendency to do that. She guessed that was only because she grew up as a girl alone in a world that thought of lone girls as little more than meat to be stolen at any opportunity. She had to be on her guard — she hadn’t had a father to protect her since she was seven. Eli helped, of course, but he was only a few months older than her; if someone decided they liked the looks of the little girl walking down the street, there wasn’t much the little boy beside her could do.
Eli could call her paranoid all he wanted, but it was that paranoia that kept her alive for the last ten years.
Ember turned back toward the drift, ready now to believe that the blueness of the light that was so disturbing her was only a trick of her mind and not some indication that something was wrong around her. She could use a little more sleep, and night was falling — there was no point to continuing on now, not when they had decent shelter. But as she turned, something caught her eye. There was something large and spiky poking out from behind the drift.
Ember stepped around the hill of snow to take a better look and gasped. The cold air rushed into her, stabbing its way down into the center of her chest and momentarily freezing her entire airway. She buried her mouth down into the collar of her coat and sucked in air warmed by her own exhale.
But her eyes stayed fixed on the sight before her. The air shimmered faintly blue, reflecting the light that sparked off the walls and spires of the buildings that seemed to go on forever in either direction in front of her.
She didn’t want to believe it, but there was nothing else she could make of the sight.
They’d done it. They found Frost.
Chapter Two
For a long moment, Ember just stared, her thoughts struggling to grasp what her eyes were telling her.
It was real. It was here.
They’d found Frost.
She knew it had been a real place once. A thriving,
vibrant city, the epicenter of culture and industry and art, nestled inside an endless forest. Ember knew this the way everybody in Dusk knew such things because stories of Before were a particular favorite pastime, a way to while away the endless winter nights.
But there was only one person left in Dusk who could even claim to remember Before, and old Korrah was probably mad with age by now. Ember knew Before existed, but only in the way a child who’d grown up in war knew the concept of peace. It was possible, sure, but dreaming of the possibility didn’t help survive in reality.
Eli was the dreamer, the one who believed that the world could be different from the way it was. The one who sat at old Korrah’s feet and listened with hope and desire brimming inside him for the things she said.
Ember wasn’t a dreamer. Not really. Not like Eli. She’d come because … well, because. Because she couldn’t help it. Because Eli needed her. Because if he died out here, there would truly be nothing left in all the world for her.
Because, deep down in that place that tugged at her, she knew she had to.
But she didn’t actually expect to find anything but tundra and more tundra. The part of her she couldn’t help might insist that there had to be something beyond Dusk, but the practical part of her knew there wasn’t. At least nothing of meaning. Nothing they could find, at any rate. Eli’s stories were just that: stories and nothing more. Frost wasn’t real. Her compass wasn’t actually pointing to something — it was just an old manufactured artifact that she couldn’t figure out how to realign.