Queen of Frost Read online

  The tremor died after a minute, and slowly, Ember peeled herself off the couch and looked out the window. A small crowd of people hurried down the street, their expressions tense and uncertain. Probably aiming toward the palace, if Ember had to take a guess at their destination.

  Which seemed as useful an idea as any, so she left her room and slid into the crowd, allowing herself to be pulled along by the force of bodies moving in the same direction. The screams had died with the trembling, but there was still a tension in the air, a silence full of fear, broken only by the occasional sob or whisper.

  They did indeed end up in the square, pressing into an increasingly large crowd of people who were looking, wide-eyed and pale, at either the palace or the statue of Atalanta. A flash of orange to her left caught Ember’s eye.

  “Ember!” Felix called over the hum of the crowd. He shoved past the last few people — dolls, still somehow smiling — between them. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.” Ember scanned Felix from head to foot. From what she could tell, he seemed unhurt. “You?”

  “I’m fine. A little rattled.”

  “The wall is cracking!”

  The voice, nearly a scream, lifted above the panicked hum of the crowd.

  Ember turned toward the sound, and so did a number of others. It was a doll speaking — that didn’t surprise her — a female-presenting one who was scrambling now to climb the Atalanta statue in the center of the square.

  “The wall is cracking!” it yelled again. “It won’t be long now.”

  Several hands reached for the doll and tore it off the statue. They all disappeared into the crowd, though Ember could still make out the sounds of the doll trying to repeat its message, though now its words were strangely mumbled and incoherent, the sounds that made up those words switching places with each other so nothing made sense from its mouth.

  Beside her, Felix frowned. Fear crept into the expression.

  The doll he had pushed aside turned its smile on them. “There’s no need to fear. The queen protects us.”

  Felix blinked, and a little of the tension in his face relaxed. “I know. I trust the queen.”

  “As you should,” the doll agreed. Its voice was low, even, soothing.

  But Ember was not so easily pacified by the assurances of a doll. She frowned at it. If she opened up its head, would she see something different from the dolls that had gone mad, the ones she’d deactivated inside the palace?

  She doubted it. She’d never seen inside a working doll’s head, but from how well-made the malfunctioning ones looked, she still wasn’t yet convinced the issue was their parts.

  The doll smiled back at her. “It’s all right. There’s nothing to fear.”

  Nothing but the ground becoming unstable under people’s feet and the dolls screaming for some reason about cracks in the wall, she thought, though she didn’t speak the words aloud.

  The crowd shifted, stilled. The palace doors opened, and the queen, accompanied by an impressive entourage of guards and white-suited men crossed the bridge toward the square.

  The crowd parted for them when they reached the other side of the bridge, obeying the silent gestures from a couple of dolls. The one who’d been talking to Ember spread its arms and stepped back, forcing Ember and Felix to do the same as the queen and her guards passed them.

  The queen walked silent and graceful through the parted crowd, her head up, her eyes forward, never looking around, probably not even making eye contact with anyone around her. She reached the Atalanta statue, held out one hand toward a guard, and took the spear the man offered her. Then, just as slowly and gracefully as she’d walked, she got up on the pedestal and finally turned to face the crowd.

  The whole square had fallen eerily silent the moment the queen had stepped out of the palace — now, faces lifted, and the silence turned from awed to anticipatory. The queen lifted the spear, and her position mimicked Atalanta behind her so perfectly it could only have been an intentional gesture.

  Ember bit the inside of her lip, all too aware of the doll just in front of them and the worshipful crowd pressed at their sides and backs. Even Felix, who Ember thought had more sense than many of the other Frost citizens, was staring at the queen like one might expect a priestess to stare at the face of Mother Atalanta herself.

  Ember wasn’t religious, but even Dusk had its priestesses, and she’d seen that look on their faces before. It disturbed her to see it here, for the queen of Frost who was so forcefully usurping Atalanta’s rightful place.

  “My people,” the queen began at last, and one woman just behind Ember began to sob. “There is nothing to fear here. Have I not always protected you, cared for you, loved you?”

  She paused, and a flurry of noise answered her. Words were dulled by the sound, but it was still unequivocal agreement. Felix beamed, his smile as wide as any doll’s, and his eyes just as strangely blank.

  Ember found herself focusing on her friend more than the queen. She’d often thought of him as having a switch inside him that sometimes flipped, turning him from the warm and curious boy she liked to a dutiful citizen that didn’t ask questions or wonder about any of the oddities around him. The queen’s appearance had done something similar, only instead of a flipping switch, it was like he was possessed by the mindless programming of a doll.

  “I will never fail you, my people. You have put your trust, your faith, in me, and I am grateful and humbled by that. We are safe.”

  The woman behind Ember sobbed a little louder. A few other people cheered. Felix stared.

  Ember touched his arm. “Hey,” she whispered, pitching her voice below the hum of the crowd to avoid notice. “You alright?”

  He didn’t answer her, didn’t even seem to notice she was there.

  “Felix?”

  “As long as the wall stands, nothing can harm us,” said the queen above the crowd, the spear once again hoisted in the air like Atalanta over the boar. “We are strong. We are brave. We are Frost!”

  A cheer, thick with emotion, ripped through the crowd as the queen came down from the statue pedestal.

  The crowd parted again for her. The nearest doll spread its arms and pushed them back as the queen and her entourage started back to the palace. Felix, as if on instinct, lifted a hand towards her, and she brushed his fingers with her own as she passed.

  “All’s well,” the doll murmured to no one in particular. “The queen will protect us.”

  Vallenovich, a part of the queen’s tail, paused in front of them. He grasped Felix’s still-outstretched hand with a smile warmer than anything Ember had seen on him before. “All right there, son?”

  Felix nodded, his eyes still far away and not apparently seeing anything.

  Ember wasn’t sure if she should be surprised to hear the fatherly concern in Vallenovich’s question. She hadn’t exactly thought that Vallenovich could’ve been Felix’s father, but it didn’t strike her as odd or surprising that he was. Felix had mentioned his father was an Envoy, the head of the doll department, and seeing them next to each other, their similar shades of red hair and facial features made their relatedness impossible to miss.

  Vallenovich patted Felix’s hand, then turned slightly to catch Ember’s eye. “Come with me, devushka,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The stream of dolls didn’t stop that day.

  Ember had almost gotten used to the idea of deactivating dolls. Even half a dozen dolls like had been there just the day before. But when she and Vallenovich stepped into the workshop and found it almost as crowded as the square outside had been, all with dolls that were screaming over top each other that the wall was cracking until the walls were quite literally shaking with their voices, well — even Vallenovich looked disturbed by this turn.

  He tried to stifle it, though. Tried to clear his throat and straighten out his expression so it looked like he wasn’t at all worried about anything. “Get to work,” he ordered,
as if it was at all that simple.

  There wasn’t much else Ember could do, so she went over to the dolls and started turning them off, one by one.

  And the moment one of them was taken out of the room, another was brought in to replace it.

  There’d never been a moment when Ember liked what she was being asked to do. Never a day when she wasn’t forced to wonder if she was being a serial murderer by turning off the dolls. But she’d never felt so much like a monster as she did today, as doll after helpless doll dropped to the floor at her feet and more came in as fast as others dropped.

  She lost count of them somewhere in the twenties. She lost all ability to feel somewhere in the forties. The only thing that kept her moving at all was the promise of an idea burrowing its way out of her brain. A spark of hope, the first corners of a thought.

  Perhaps it was all connected: the mysterious doll madness, the dreams, the cracking wall. All of it, coming from a single source.

  The Maudie doll she’d spoken to yesterday had mentioned someone. The prince of Sand. He was, apparently, waiting for her.

  The timing of it all, the strange coincidence of all these things happening at once — it didn’t escape her notice.

  If she could just get over the wall, find out what was behind it that the queen was so determined to keep hidden that she had everyone in her city convinced that the world ended there, maybe some of this would start to make sense.

  But she’d seen the wall. It was huge. Impenetrable. There was no way she’d be able to climb it, or burrow through it, or under it. And it wasn’t as if she could fly over it.

  Unless…

  Unless she could get her hands on a copter.

  The thought nearly stilled her hands, nearly interrupted the grim flow of her work, stunning her into immobility.

  She knew where she could find copters. Lots of them. And yes, they’d looked broken from the view she had of them through the window of the cathedral, but there were so many of them — perhaps one or two weren’t unfixable. Maybe there were parts enough to scavenge up an entire working copter.

  And if she could get one of those copters working, she could fly over the wall and finally see what was on the other side.

  * * *

  Ember expected the door to be locked. It was clear to anyone who wanted to look that these copters were being set apart from the public, and it seemed to her that if they had the capacity — solid doors, working latches — it was foolish to not lock those doors.

  But the door pushed open under her hand with only a little bit of applied force. The wood nearly splintered at the edges of her hand and didn’t move again once she’d wedged it open far enough for her and Felix to slip through.

  They were in the main room with the copters. There was a lot more space inside, between the almost-touching passenger bubbles, than she’d thought looking into it from the window, and she ducked between two copters toward their fronts.

  Felix followed. His eyes were strained wide, his face pale, but still a grin tugged relentlessly on one corner of his mouth. “We really shouldn’t,” he whispered.

  Ember grinned back. “You keep saying that.”

  “It keeps being true.”

  “And yet, here we are.”

  “Here we are,” he echoed. He looked around, gaze snagging on the copters first as the primary thing in the room, but then drifting up toward the domed ceiling, where his own grin finally broke free of its restraints. “Oh. It’s just as beautiful on the inside.”

  Ember glanced toward the ceiling. It was high and painted with fading chips of color. Impressive, certainly, but she was much more interested in the broken copters than the ceiling.

  Felix took a few steps away, farther into the room, staring at the ceiling the whole time, and Ember didn’t try to pull his attention back.

  Both of them wanted to be here. The fact that they had different reasons for it wasn’t important.

  She focused on the copters. From the outside, they’d looked identically broken, stripped equally of their blades, but on closer inspection, she found one of them that hadn’t had the rotating mechanism mangled in the process, and the stumps of blades still clung to the mechanisms.

  Ember poked around the room, checking occasionally to make sure that Felix hadn’t wandered off entirely and left her — no, he was as engaged with the ceiling dome and faded old artwork as she was with the copters. In one dark corner, stacked in the space between a copter and the wall, she hit a real boon.

  Blades.

  Whoever had taken the blades off the copters had tossed those blades into one corner like they thought that would end their usefulness forever.

  Ember yanked and pulled and with great effort was able to get the stack a little away from the wall and toward the light coming in through windows and oculi. Most of the blades looked as broken as the stumps left over on one of the copters, but a few seemed whole.

  “What’re you doing?” Felix asked. He came over from the far southern wall where he’d been staring reverently at some portrait or something, upon hearing the sound of metal blades scraping over stone.

  “Some of these aren’t broken.” Ember held out one blade, a quarter of the total for the tail, but that had an untouched latch for securing it into the rotating bits.

  Felix looked over the pile with one eyebrow raised. “You think you can find a whole set?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s junk.”

  She smiled. “And this building is an abandoned pile of bricks.”

  He straightened as if to start in on her about how terrible that opinion was, but then blinked as understanding spread across his face. “Ah. Point taken.” Still, his skeptical eyebrow remained. “What are you going to do with all this totally-not-junk?”

  “There’s really only one thing to do, isn’t there? I’m going to fix up a copter.”

  Felix shifted back like her words were a physical blow. “What? Why?”

  Ember returned to rummaging through the bits of broken blades, looking for another one with an intact latching piece. Maybe there was a way for her to combine the broken pieces for some length if she needed it, but the bit that fit into the rotation piece needed to be manufactured if she could ever hope to trust flight in one of those things.

  Then, realizing that Felix was still waiting for an answer, she gave him one. “I’m going over the wall, of course.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Days passed. Night was coming increasingly quick and lingering increasingly long, so that even if the sun did come out, Ember wasn’t able to see it from her place in the doll workshop.

  A few times, the queen came for her and demanded that she fix her wall machines, but with each visit, Ember became increasingly sure that whatever was causing the ice to crack, it wasn’t the fault of the machines.

  On the third visit, she made another attempt to tell the queen just that. “I can’t find anything wrong with them.”

  The queen frowned and paused at the door between the dark little hallway and the rest of the palace, her fingers just grazing the knob. She didn’t answer.

  “The machines,” Ember prompted. “There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with them.”

  The queen’s frown deepened. She turned the knob and stepped into the palace, still without answering.

  Ember followed, unsure of what else she could do. A part of her felt sorry for the queen — it must seem to her like everything she’d spent her life building was crumbling around her ears.

  The other, larger part of her was frustrated with being told to fix things that weren’t broken.

  “I didn’t want to say until I was sure,” she hedged.

  Again, the queen didn’t answer — she just kept walking, her pace as brisk as it ever was, her eyes forward and unmoving, forcing Ember to either keep up or fall behind and making it perfectly clear that the queen herself didn’t care which one Ember chose.

  Ember elected to fall behind, and when the queen tu
rned a corner, she didn’t follow.

  After her hours in the workshop, Ember took a trolley to the old city to work on the copters. She’d found the one she wanted, where both top and tail mechanics were relatively intact, and she’d managed to scrounge up enough blades with the proper hooks and anchors to reattach them. But a few of those blades were cracked or broken, and it took her a couple of days to smuggle out the right tools from the doll workshop so she had everything she needed to repair the broken spots.

  She wasn’t entirely sure that she needed the blades to be a particular length, but it seemed like a good idea to match them as best she could. She drilled and screwed and hammered at the blades long into the night, often stopping only when Felix, who always came with her, warned her that if they didn’t go now, they’d miss the last trolley back.

  Ember wasn’t entirely sure why Felix came with her to the cathedral. Of course she understood that he had his own fascination with the building itself, and a lot of times, she would look up from her work to stretch out a kink in her neck and find him gone, wandering into other rooms, and when he came back, he would be shivering with delight about what he’d seen. But he must’ve looked at everything there was to see after a couple of visits, yet he still elected to come with her, and increasingly he would sit beside her, holding her tools or helping her with an unwieldy piece of blade, while she worked.

  “What do you think is on the other side?” he asked one night when they both sat back after a tricky bit of repair.

  Ember wiped the sweat from her brow and looked over at him. Felix so rarely mentioned even the possibility of something existing beyond the wall, usually trying to insist on the Frost party line that there was nothing, that the question felt significant, and she wanted to answer it right. Honest, doubtful, but without toggling his curiosity switch.