Queen of Frost Read online

  And yet…

  Frost sat there, sparkling in the twilight not a hundred paces away from where they’d dug in to wait out the storm, like a mockery of all her most sensible thoughts.

  Ember was finally able to detach her gaze from the sight long enough to crawl back into their little cave. Eli was still asleep in the bag; she shook his shoulder. He groaned and rolled over. “Few more minutes,” he mumbled into his pack.

  “Eli, get up. You’ll want to see this.”

  He cracked open one eye. “See what?”

  She couldn’t hold back the smile. “Frost. Eli, we’ve found Frost!”

  He sat up. His head brushed the top of their little hole, powdering him with crystalline specks of snow and ice. “What?”

  Ember didn’t wait for him to finish waking up or struggling to understand what she was saying. She just crawled back out of the hole, gesturing for him to follow. And a moment later, he’d slid into his boots and was scrambling out after her, one arm stuck through his coat and the other reaching blindly around his back for the other sleeve.

  He stopped worrying about the coat when he got out of the drift and saw. His eyes, usually narrowed against the glare, grew wide, and his jaw came unhinged. “Mother Atalanta,” he breathed.

  His eyes scanned all the way to the left, then to the right — both directions were entirely taken up by the tall, blank-faced, blue-tinted wall that surrounded the spires behind it. He glanced at Ember long enough for a smile to start forming on his face, but then he went back to staring at the wall. His breaths puffed into the air like the beginnings of a laugh.

  Ember cleared her throat and tried to shake away her own shock and awe long enough to figure out what they should do next. Her eyes caught on Eli’s coat, dangling from one shoulder as he’d abandoned his attempts to get both arms inside it. She grabbed the dangling side and looped it around his shoulder so at least the sleeve cuff wasn’t hitting the ground. “Don’t tell me we’ve come all this way just to look at it,” she said briskly.

  Her words shook Eli out of his trance. He glanced down, seemed to notice that it was cold, and put his arm into his sleeve. “No. No, of course not. C’mon.”

  He took a step toward the wall; Ember whistled once, a short, sharp sound that broke through whatever thoughts were cluttering up his head, and he glanced back at her. She bobbed her head toward the snowdrift — and, more specifically, their packs and thermals and the bag still scattered around the shelter.

  Eli grinned a bit sheepishly and turned back toward the drift.

  Ember slithered back in and shoved their stuff out. “We should wrap up. We don’t know how long we’ll be out here.”

  Eli didn’t protest. They both wrapped themselves back up in their layers of knits and thermals. The darkness was coming in a hurry now, and the bluish light coming from the city was too dim to see by. Ember dug around in the front pocket of her pack, through the dried — and frozen — meat and extra knitted layers of clothing, until she found the small oil lamp and tin of oil she’d brought along for just this sort of thing. She filled the lamp and lit it with one of her five remaining matches, then put the tin and the four other matches back in the pack, burying them between layers of clothes in an attempt — so far successful — of keeping both dry. Then, shouldering her pack and holding up the lamp to light their way, she started toward the wall.

  Walking was easier now that the wind and the weather had died down. Even though night was coming fast enough that Ember could actually see the light fading, the lamp flame was steady and bright enough to light their way.

  They reached the wall in minutes. Eli went right up to it and touched it softly with one mittened hand, then let out another almost-laugh when that hand actually bumped against the solid wall. He tilted his head back and looked up at the wall, which went up to a dozen or more times his height and now obscured the buildings behind it from view. “I’m not dreaming,” he whispered to himself.

  “Do you need me to pinch you?” Ember whispered back.

  He waved a silencing hand at her without looking over. She could almost hear the way his thoughts turned slightly sour towards her. How could she be so cavalier right now?

  In truth, Ember was no less awed by the fact of this wall, this city, than Eli was. But something was bothering her again. Like the bluish tint of the light that had made her unable to close her eyes back in the drift. Something was not quite right. She couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

  The wall in front of them was as smooth and clear as ice on still water, but when she got close to it, she realized she couldn’t see through it. Everything behind the wall was concealed behind a clear blue tint that seemed to waver as Ember shifted the lamp from right hand to left. It was impossible to tell how thick the wall was, and there didn’t appear to be any way through.

  Eli seemed to be noticing the same things she had, only slightly belatedly. “How do we get in?”

  “I don’t know.” Ember turned from side to side, shining the lamp as far in either direction as the light would go. “I don’t see any door or archway or anything.”

  “Maybe on the other side?”

  Ember frowned. The wall continued in either direction as far as she could see. There wasn’t an “other side” they could get to. But she just nodded. “Maybe.”

  “C’mon. Let’s go see what we can find.” Eli turned left, probably at random, and started walking, leaving Ember to catch up.

  They walked in silence. Ember was tempted to suggest that they stop for the night, but one glance at Eli’s face told her that would be a losing proposition. “We’re outside the walls of Frost, and you want to sleep?” she could imagine him saying.

  But the farther they walked alongside the smooth wall without any way to get through it, the less hopeful Ember became. It would make sense, in its way, if the walls had no door. This was Frost, supposedly the last place in the world with light and warmth and industry. The only place in the world that had recovered, even a little, from the death of the Engine. If it had a door, surely it would be hounded continually by people trying to get in.

  Dusk had a wall with doors, but there was nothing in Dusk worth protecting, and the wall had long ago fallen into disrepair. This wall was clearly not so ill cared for, which suggested to Ember that there were some things inside it worth the effort to protect. A door would be a weakness.

  Ember was about to revisit her idea of suggesting they stop for the night, this time with the added force of the fact that they’d been walking for hours without finding a way into the city. And it had been hours. The lamp burned for six hours when it was full. She filled it before lighting it, and now it was three-quarters empty. She had just opened her mouth to break the silence and say she was tired, and they were wasting oil doing something they could just as easily do in daylight tomorrow when Eli suddenly bounded forward. Ember scanned ahead and saw what he saw: a break in the icy smoothness of the wall a hundred steps in front of them.

  A door? Ember couldn’t quite tell, but the target pushed her forward, making her jog behind Eli on legs so tired that her knees trembled with every step.

  They reached the break and saw that yes, it was a door, but a door unlike anything Ember had ever seen. It was huge, as tall as the wall itself, and made like the wall out of clear, blue-tinted ice. Intricate designs were carved into the ice, stretching up its entire length. Arching across its top was a massive curve of ice. Ember thought she could see words carved into the arch, but when she stepped back and held up the lamp in an attempt to read them, her eyes caught instead on the shadowy figure of someone standing on the arch looking down at them.

  Ember pulled down the scarf and thermal across her mouth. “H-hello?” she called up to the shape.

  The figure didn’t move. Didn’t answer.

  “Hello?” Her voice was a little stronger the second time, and she was sure now it was loud enough to be heard. “You up there!”

  Eli stepped back and looked up. “Wha
t are you—” he began but was interrupted by a loud noise from the door itself.

  The ice moved slowly, scraping harshly against the snow piled up against it, and from the center of the massive space, someone poked their head out. It was tiny against the backdrop of the gigantic doors: a woman with long, uncovered hair and bare shoulders.

  Ember stared at her for a long moment. She’d never seen another person’s uncovered shoulders. What could this woman be thinking, wearing such a thing outside and away from a roaring fire?

  The woman stared back. Ember could see her eyes sweeping up and down the length of her body, then Eli’s in turn. Finally, she called out to them, her voice barely tinted with something that might’ve been either exasperation or amusement. “Well, come on, then. You’re letting in the cold!”

  Chapter Three

  Ember and Eli glanced at each other, Eli suddenly looking as uncertain as Ember felt. It didn’t seem like the sort of greeting they, as mysterious strangers, should be receiving. It certainly wasn’t the sort of greeting anyone approaching the walls of Dusk would receive.

  Eli cleared his throat. “Should we…?”

  “Well, we didn’t come all this way just to look at it,” Ember said.

  His eyes crinkled at the corners with the smile hidden behind his scarf. “No, I guess not.”

  He took a step toward the woman and the doors, once again leaving Ember to follow.

  The woman stepped aside and waved them through. “Quickly, now, if you please.” She had a strange accent, thin and liquidy, one word barely ended before the next one began, as though they couldn’t wait to be spoken. “We mustn’t keep the doors open too long.”

  Ember slid through. She tried to ignore the flash of fear that rose up inside her as she hurried through the tunnel of ice that made up most of the trip through the door. As she scurried through, she realized just how thick the wall was.

  That was why they weren’t able to see through the clear bluish ice to the other side. Even the purest, clearest ice obscured vision when it was thick enough. It startled her to realize just how thick it was. She’d seen ice before — she’d never really known much else. But this much ice, so smooth and flawless, without any cracks or seams from building with ice bricks, was a marvel. It was like the entire wall had risen from a single gigantic sheet of pure water.

  Was it magic or science? Ember didn’t really believe in magic, but she’d heard the stories, same as everyone, of science so advanced that it might as well be magic.

  Her father always told her that magic was science waiting to be understood.

  And Ember wanted to understand. She’d been uncertain about this whole trip, but now that she was here, and she could see with her own eyes that it was all real, she wanted to understand it.

  She made it through the tunnel in a few moments, and the woman hauled the door shut — apparently, it was as heavy as it looked. Inside the wall were the buildings of the city. The spires that had first caught Ember’s eye were behind the rows of shorter buildings immediately before them.

  Eli stepped toward the nearest building two paces away and put his hand on it. “Wood,” he muttered, then turned to Ember with another smile lighting up his eyes. “They’re made of wood!”

  “Like from trees?”

  He waved her forward, then grabbed her wrist and pressed her hand to the side of the building. “Do you feel that?”

  She did, even through the thermal layer of her mitten. The slight bumps as her fingers ran down the side of the building, the tiny snags in her mitten like miniature hooks grabbing at and releasing the fabric. She let out a breath like the ones Eli had made at the first sight of the wall, little noise that could’ve turned into an awed laugh if she allowed it.

  She’d heard of wood and trees the same way she’d heard of warmth and industry, as memories turning to fantasy in the stories of Dusk’s oldest residents. One of them had even had some wood: a spoon, split with cold and age, that she’d let Ember hold once. She couldn’t imagine using such a thin thing to build with, but Korrah had sworn it was all true, that in the time Before, they’d built buildings not only with wood but with metal and rock and dirt.

  The woman at the door cleared her throat softly. She smiled brightly, so brightly that the blue tint that curved up above their heads was reflected on her teeth. “Follow me, if you please. I’ll show you to your apartments.” She swept forward, down the street between the rows of wooden buildings, the hem of her dress swishing lightly against her knees.

  Eli hurried after her. His gaze had moved from the buildings to the woman, and he stared at her with an expression that made Ember want to wrinkle her nose in disgust and then tease him about it so he would be embarrassed and stop staring at her.

  Though Ember couldn’t deny that the woman was worth staring at, she was just as novel as the wooden buildings and the flawless ice wall. The way she was dressed was absurd. It took a few minutes of following her for Ember to notice that she was growing too warm inside her thermals, that the temperature of the air around them had changed. She began to remove her layers, stripping off goggles and scarf and hood as they walked, and found that there was actual warmth inside the walls.

  Even still, the woman’s dress was absurd. Yes, there was warmth in the air, but it was chilly enough to keep the wall of ice and the buildings well frozen. Ice melted to water at a temperature that even people in Dusk considered cool enough to warrant long sleeves and long leggings — not that Dusk ever got warm enough to melt ice — so what was this woman doing walking around in a thin dress that covered neither her shoulders nor anything past her knees? Couldn’t she feel the chill in the air just as much as Ember’s newly bared hands and face did? And yet, she walked along just a step ahead of them with bare legs and even barer arms, making Eli ogle like the stupid boy he still was.

  They turned down a new street. As they went deeper into the city, away from the wall, the squat wooden buildings were replaced with taller, spikier ice buildings. The air was warming more as well, and soon Ember was sweating beneath her shirt. This worried her: sweat turned to ice, and that could drop a person’s core temperature almost before they knew what was happening. She tried to remove more layers as she could — first the outermost thermal ones, then unwrapping the next inner knitted layers. But the air continued to warm, somehow not melting the buildings around them.

  Magic or science?

  Finally, the woman paused at the bottom of one of the tall ice buildings and turned her too-wide smile back at them. “This way, if you please.” She opened the door to the building and waved them in ahead of her.

  It was only as she stepped through the door that Ember realized the building wasn’t made of ice: it was made of glass.

  She wasn’t sure if this was true about all the other buildings they’d passed, but she saw it now clear as could be. Huge panes of thick, transparent glass that offered the building as clear a view to the street outside as if they weren’t standing inside a building.

  Glass, like wood, was one of those items that Ember knew about and had even seen bits of, had heard stories about people using it to build with, but had never actually thought those stories were really real. In Dusk, you made your shelters of snow and ice. More permanent places, ones made Before, were made of animal skins and furs, with bone or ice supports to keep the skins from collapsing. But no new places made with such materials were possible because animals had been gone for as long as Ember could remember — all frozen or starved to death. What they had was all they would ever have.

  But that wasn’t so here. She’d barely stepped into the building when she was struck again by how different the people of Frost lived. The air in the building was warm — not just not cold like it was outside, but actually warm, though she couldn’t see any evidence of a fire pit. The floor was thick with furs and rugs, so numerous that they practically overlapped.

  The woman shut the glass door behind them and marched on ahead. Her choice of clothing made a b
it more sense now. She paused when she noticed that neither Ember nor Eli were following her this time and returned to them, still lingering just inside the door.

  The woman smiled broadly — that seemed to be the only expression she had. “It’s all right,” she said. “We have apartments prepared for you upstairs.”

  Upstairs? And prepared for them? Ember shot Eli a worried glance and saw, for the first time, a similar hint of worry reflected back in his eyes. He was the first to turn away, to look back at the woman. “Were you…” He licked his lips. “Were you expecting us?”

  The woman’s smile somehow, impossibly, got wider. She had large, square teeth that glared almost as brightly as snow in sunlight. “We have apartments prepared for all our visitors. Follow me.”

  Which was not an answer to the question, but Eli nodded as though it was and followed the woman. Ember hesitated, torn. The initial awe was starting to wear off. She felt suddenly suspicious of this oddly friendly woman with her bare shoulders and bright smile. And the fact that she hadn’t given a proper answer to Eli’s perfectly straightforward yes-or-no question turned that vague feeling of something-wasn’t-right into active suspicion. Because, if she was actually as friendly and accommodating as she wanted to appear, why not just say yes, someone had seen them as they walked for hours along the length of the wall, or no, they were being taken to apartments that were held in a state of readiness for anyone who might come by. Either one would’ve made perfect sense to Ember and would’ve answered the question without being suspicious.

  Only people with something to hide dodged questions with shifty answers.

  And yet, Eli followed her as though his own suspicions had been alleviated by the woman’s non-answer. He glanced back at her now, grinning, and waved her after them.

  Ember let out a breath. It seemed that her primary goal of keeping Eli safe and out of trouble hadn’t yet been achieved.

  The woman led them to a large staircase at the back of the room. It was made of metal spiraling up around a thick central pole and then disappearing into the thick glass ceiling. The rail on the outside of the spiral was smooth, as though worn by thousands of hands, and each of the evenly spaced spokes that held the railing attached to the stairs were actually hundreds of tiny black filaments, each barely thicker than a hair, woven together in a massive, intricate braid. Two steps above her, Eli had his eyes fixed on those braided struts. His jaw was hanging loose in wonder.