Queen of Frost Read online

  “The Envoy office,” Ember repeated slowly, certain that she’d heard the words before. “Isn’t that where your father works?”

  Felix grinned his acknowledgment.

  Ember felt something click into place inside her thoughts. It wasn’t that she was necessarily bad at spotting something like the fact someone was following her — it was that Felix was particularly skilled at it, probably because it was his father’s job to be or assign people to tail others. The heat in her face lessened somewhat, cooled by a flash of relief.

  She hadn’t thought to feel lucky about meeting this particular Frost boy, but now she suspected she might be. What were the chances that someone who knew about how the city actually worked was the one who’d approached her in the square the other day, the one who’d become her…

  Friend, she decided. That’s what they were, friends.

  It warmed something deep inside her to allow herself to think that. She didn’t go around applying that label to people who didn’t deserve it — to date, Eli, and maybe old Korrah, were the only people she could use the word with.

  It felt good to use it for Felix.

  The drifting crowd around them was peeling away noticeably now, people turning off the southbound street into buildings or other streets, and before Ember was quite ready for it, they were the only two people left heading south. And then the buildings stopped, and they were facing a giant wall.

  At first, Ember wasn’t sure exactly what it was she was looking at. Unlike every other built thing inside Frost, it lacked the sort of perfection she was getting used to seeing. Lumpy and whitish and so massive that it took a moment for her brain to catch up with what her eyes were seeing and put a word to it.

  It was a wall. A wall of ice — but not the clear bluish ice smooth as glass like the palace was built from. This ice was more like the sort she was used to seeing: a dirty off-white studded with lumps and seams where bricks were laid on top of each other and gaps filled in with snow. The entire thing rose straight into the air and disappeared through the shimmer of the force field. To both sides, right and left, was an apparently endless expanse of the same dirty ice wall.

  “What…?” she began, but then found that she didn’t have the words to finish her question. She stared down for a moment in one direction, trying to find an end to the wall, then in the other when that way disappeared over the horizon before ending.

  There was, as far as she could tell from here, no place where the wall actually stopped.

  She took a couple of steps forward, crossing the sudden edge of the city buildings with her hand raised as though to touch the wall, perhaps just to reassure herself that she was actually seeing a thing she thought she was seeing.

  Felix pulled in a sharp breath. “Don’t,” he said suddenly, grabbing Ember’s arm.

  Ember looked back at him; his eyes kept shifting around as though he wasn’t sure what he could or could not safely rest his gaze on. She turned completely toward him, letting her raised hand fall back to her side. “Felix? You okay?”

  His shifting eyes wouldn’t settle. He shook his head.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You promised not to get close.”

  She didn’t recall making any promise of the sort, but she didn’t push it — he was obviously nervous, maybe even afraid, and she sensed he’d taken some kind of strange risk already just bringing her here that she didn’t want to reward his bravery, or curiosity, with regret.

  She stepped back into the safety of that invisible line, and the tension in Felix’s shoulders and jaw visibly relaxed. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m not going to touch it.”

  “We can’t interfere with the queen’s magic. If the wall falls, we all do.”

  Ember looked back at the wall. It was a shocking sight, but Frost was full of shocking sights. And this one, though too big for her mind to comprehend, was almost shockingly normal aside from that fact. Blocks of ice — and not even flawless blue Frost ice. Just regular, everyday, dirty white ice plastered together with melted and refrozen snow, built just the way that every wall and home in Dusk was built.

  She couldn’t see any cracks, besides the ones mortared up with snow and ice, but she couldn’t see it all, either, not the top nor the ends.

  And she knew that her not being able to see cracks didn’t mean there weren’t any there.

  “Why?” she asked at last, her voice falling to a whisper. “What’s behind it?”

  “Nothing.” The answer came too fast, like a rehearsed and regurgitated answer. But then Felix repeated it, perhaps in response to the frown Ember could feel forming on her face. “Nothing. The world ends here.”

  Felix’s gaze finally settled, and it settled on Ember. He stared into her eyes with a fierceness she couldn’t quite interpret, something that was clearly meant to mean more than he was saying, but she didn’t know what. “If the wall falls, we all do,” he repeated.

  And then his voice fell, his whisper turning to barely more than a breath. “Here, there be dragons.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  There were half a dozen dolls waiting for Ember in the workshop that day. Three of them were sitting quietly in chairs and smiling blankly at nothing; the other three were standing or pacing and muttering to themselves despite Vallenovich’s order to sit down and be quiet. One of them was clawing at the walls of the workshop with its fingers as if trying to dig its way out of the room.

  Ember balked. The dolls yesterday had been a disturbing sight, but they’d sat still and said very little.

  Whatever was happening to them, it looked like it was getting worse.

  Vallenovich waved Ember toward her charges. “Go on, devushka.”

  Somehow, strangely, his tone reminded her of Felix’s earlier that morning, whispering to himself.

  Here, there be dragons.

  Ember grabbed a pair of pliers so that her fingers had something to hold on to, and she marched toward the dolls with all the boldness she could summon.

  They were mechanical people. Surely, they couldn’t hurt her.

  She started with the moderate dolls, the ones who were sitting and smiling. It only occurred to her after the first doll crumpled to the floor that perhaps it was a bad idea.

  The wild doll, the one clawing at the walls, actually paused and turned to her when the first mild-mannered one dropped. Its eyes widened, and now, looking them in the face, she realized something she hadn’t noticed before.

  It was Maudie.

  But that didn’t make any sense. Maudie had brought her to Vallenovich just a few minutes ago.

  Had the doll madness taken her so fast? Or — and Ember shuddered to think it — were there many Maudies in the city? Dolls who all looked exactly alike, and the only way to tell one from the other was by which ones had gone mad?

  “What are you doing?” the Maudie doll asked, eyes skipping from the deactivated doll at Ember’s feet to Ember herself. Its face seemed pale. Afraid.

  Ember stepped toward it, being careful not to bump the doll at her feet as she did so. She held out a hand. She couldn’t say why, but the gesture felt right, an extension of peace, an attempt to understand and help. “Maudie?”

  The doll frowned. The expression looked very odd on a face that she was used to seeing covered by a dazzlingly bright smile. For all that its actions, the desperate, barely audible mumbling, made the doll seem mad, its voice was now level. Sane. “Ember Mikailanova.”

  She glanced over at Vallenovich. He’d taken a seat on the other side of the room and was watching her, but with a disinterested glaze over his expression, like he wasn’t actually paying much attention. She took another step toward the Maudie and let her voice drop to a whisper, too quiet for her handler to overhear. “How do you know my name?”

  The doll blinked. Once. Twice. “He told me. He said you’d come.”

  “Who did?”

  “The prince of Sand. He’s waiting for you.”

  “You’re not here to talk to them
!”

  Vallenovich was at her side, his voice booming in the quiet space. He grabbed Ember’s arm, fingers tight and shaking, and yanked her back from the doll, turning her halfway around to face him, and pointed at the doll. “Turn them off.”

  “Let go of me,” Ember snapped back.

  “Turn them off!”

  She wrenched her arm out of his grip. All the dolls were watching them, faces blank, even the ones who were standing up and muttering to themselves.

  Vallenovich snatched the pliers out of her hand, spun hard toward one of the sitting dolls, and jammed the plier tips gracelessly into the back of its head. The doll’s face went completely slack for a moment, even its blank smile dropping away from its lips, and then it slumped over into the lap of the doll sitting beside it.

  “I don’t know why we even have you here,” Vallenovich said. His voice was rough. “It’s easy enough to turn these things off.”

  He jammed the pliers into the next doll’s head.

  The Maudie doll shrieked.

  “No! What’re you—” A stupid question; Ember cut herself off before finishing it. “You’re hurting them!”

  “You should be fixing them.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with them!”

  The third quiet doll collapsed under Vallenovich’s frustrated jabs. Through the curtain of hair at the backs of their heads, Ember could see something sparking, some of their electrics damaged.

  Vallenovich spun around, reaching now for the pacing couple of dolls, who had stilled at his actions and watched him with fear blazing out of their human-like eyes.

  “Wait! Wait. Is there some place where we can look at their … their coding or something? Maybe we can figure out who’s sending the signals that are making them malfunction?”

  It was a desperate idea, not so much a plan as a stray thought — Ember didn’t even know if the dolls ran on signals or programming or what, and she certainly wasn’t equipped to figure things out looking at software — but it stopped Vallenovich’s rampage in its tracks, and when he looked at her again, there was something other than annoyance in his face.

  Hope sparked in Ember’s head. Maybe there was something to that — maybe there was some kind of signal targeting the dolls. Maybe they were malfunctioning not because of some hardware problem, but because something was messing with their programming.

  “Where are the logs kept?” she asked, like she knew there had to be logs. It was a trick she’d learned some time ago about making herself seem like she knew better what was going on than she actually did: to speak an assumption or suspicion like an obvious fact.

  And it worked. Vallenovich didn’t dispute the idea of logs, and he lowered the pliers. The Maudie doll quieted at the end of his rampage, went from shrieking to staring — which wasn’t exactly less uncomfortable, but at least wasn’t adding to the panic racing through Ember’s limbs.

  Ember took a breath, tried to gentle the frantic pace of her heart. “Maybe it isn’t something wrong with their heads,” she offered, mostly to keep Vallenovich’s attention on her. “Maybe there’s a signal that’s the problem. Where do the dolls’ orders come from?”

  Vallenovich blinked. “What do you want with their orders?”

  “I want to see them. Maybe there’s something there.”

  He came toward her, pliers half-raised like he was thinking of jamming them into the back of her head. His eyes flashed, and his voice had fallen to a rough whisper. “You’re not authorized.”

  Ember didn’t groan, but only because she caught the noise on her teeth and forced it back down. “Well, who is?”

  “No one.”

  “So how do you keep track of the dolls’ orders? Their programming?”

  Vallenovich brandished the pliers, waved them like a threat in front of her face. “It’s not necessary to track their orders. They do as they’re told.”

  But Vallenovich’s reaction had already told Ember what she wanted, that there were logs. Someone in Frost tracked the dolls’ programming.

  For the first time, Ember had something to try — something that wasn’t just crumpling the dolls to the floor.

  Vallenovich lowered the pliers. “Back to work, devushka.”

  Ember held her hand out for the pliers, and he gave them back to her, then turned and went back to his usual place watching her from the middle distance.

  Fingers touched her arm. Ember looked up at the Maudie doll standing beside her. The doll’s eyes were blank, staring, not seeing what was in front of it but focused on something Ember couldn’t make out. “The prince of Sand,” it whispered, too low for Vallenovich to hear. “He’s calling for us.”

  “What—”

  “The wall is cracking,” the doll interrupted, unhelpfully. “It’s time to go.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  There were monsters everywhere.

  Ember was pretty sure this was a dream, because she was pretty sure monsters weren’t real. But it was hard to tell, because the monsters looked very real indeed.

  They were made of swirling, insubstantial shadows, and they refused to settle into any coherent shape — their edges shifted and blurred, morphed in and out of view, bumped against and separated from the others. They didn’t seem to notice Ember there in the center of their circle, but even though they weren’t trying to close in on her, they remained, an impenetrable wall of shifting shadows in every direction.

  She opened her mouth, hoping she could talk to them, wondering if it was possible to reason with monsters in what she was still pretty sure was a dream. But no words came out.

  She felt the shadows’ curiosity suddenly directed at her, as if the simple movement of opening her mouth had attracted their attention. What are you?

  The same question she hope to ask of them. She could feel it directed at her now.

  What are you?

  Here, there be dragons.

  What is a dragon?

  A monster. Not real.

  The last words were her father, answering her childhood question as the two of them looked at those words written in the space between two jagged lines. She was small, barely able to talk, and he was holding her in his lap, a book cradled between his hands.

  “What’s a dragon?” she asked.

  The room was warm, lit by a fire that gave an occasional pop as if wanting to join the conversation. Ember didn’t know how it was burning — rations of firewood had run out long before she was born.

  But maybe it didn’t matter, because this was a dream. She sank into it happily, grateful for a moment with her father again, even if just a moment reconstructed from a long-forgotten memory.

  “It’s a monster,” her father answered. “Not real.”

  “So why is it written on the map?”

  “Because that’s where they live.”

  This made sense. Of course a mapmaker would label the shore where dragons lived. She felt silly for even asking the question.

  (But why would a mapmaker label the home of a monster that didn’t exist?)

  Ember traced the jagged line across the paper with one pudgy little-girl finger. “Where is this?”

  (Beyond the edge of the world.)

  Her father touched the paper. There was something written there, too, beyond the line of the dragons. Ember tried to see it, but she was a small girl. She couldn’t read.

  (Beyond the wall. Forest. The Leshii.)

  The words made no sense.

  The wall of home faded away, the warmth of the fire blinking out of existence. It was replaced by some kind of machine, a giant thing partially covered in rusting metal plates. Where the plates weren’t covering up the interior of the machine, Ember could see giant cogs and gears and pistons, all of them coated with a thin layer of rust like it had been many years since the machine had worked.

  But past the rust and age, Ember could only begin to see the perfect beauty and intricacy of the machine.

  She touched it gently on a bit of plating that was rel
atively smooth and not dangerously rusty. Her eyes moved up and down the lengths of the pistons, noting the notches where the cogs and gears interwove. The fits were perfect, better than any old watch or engine she’d ever seen — the coating of rust couldn’t hide the elegant construction of the thing.

  Her chest felt empty and tight, and tears stung her eyes. A machine this beautiful should’ve never gone still for so long.

  As if responding to her touch, or maybe her sadness, something inside the machine began to shift, grinding like a gear struggling to shake off too many years of immobility. The plate beneath her fingers began to shiver.

  You must wake the Leshii.

  Ember’s eyes snapped open, and for a moment, she was blinded by the lingering fragments of the dream, the slight vibrations of the metal plating beneath her fingertips. The image, the feeling, clung to her thoughts like snow in her hair.

  And even as those fragments melted like snowflakes, a smear of sadness and the final words remained.

  You must wake the Leshii.

  She didn’t know what it meant. She didn’t know what the Leshii was or why it needed waking. She was just dreaming, after all, and dreams meant nothing. She was as likely to wake the Leshii as she was to return to her childhood and sit on her father’s lap as he showed her the book of maps.

  As likely as she was to find her father, who had died out in the tundra.

  It took a few long, sleepy blinks for Ember to become fully cognizant of the space around her.

  At first, she thought the trembling in the bed was her own body, reacting to whatever leftover stress remained in her muscles. But then she felt the tremor even in her temple and toes, places that didn’t tremble no matter the reason, heard the rattle of glass from across the room, the faint but rising sound of people screaming from the streets, and understood.

  It wasn’t her that was shaking — it was the ground itself.

  Ember didn’t move, frozen between the urge to get up and see what was happening and the desire to bury herself into a ball beneath her fluffy white blanket and hide from the idea that the ground itself could tremble. She peered over at nothing, and wondered if the nothing could stare back.