Queen of Frost Read online

  Ember clenched her own jaw as tight as it would go and followed up the stairs.

  At the top, they found a long hallway carpeted with furs and lined with doors. Glass had been replaced by wood here, painted the same kind of bright white as the snow. The woman led them a short way down the hall, then gestured to one of the doors. “Here we are.” She backed away a few steps, back toward the staircase. “If you need anything, you can ask for Maudie.”

  Eli smiled back. “Is that you? Maudie?”

  “Thanks be to the queen,” the woman answered and turned that overly bright smile onto him.

  Ember cleared her throat. “Thank you.”

  The woman smiled. “Thanks be to the queen,” she said like she was correcting her.

  Eli set his hand on the knob and nudged open the door. “C’mon, Ember. I’m ready to get some sleep.”

  She nodded, but her eyes stayed on Maudie and that unnaturally bright smile until Eli opened the door, put a hand on her shoulder, and drew her inside the room after him.

  The door slammed shut behind her, and Ember thought she heard the click of a lock against the frame.

  Chapter Four

  Ember spun toward the door, her heart thundering in her ears.

  “What?” Eli asked, startled.

  “Did you hear that? She locked us in!”

  Eli turned to the door, too. He dropped his hand to the doorknob and gave it an experimental turn. The knob turned without resistance, and the door popped open a finger’s width. He pushed it the rest of the way and glanced out into the hall. Maudie was gone.

  Ember’s heart stopped throbbing, but the rush of adrenaline that had come with her spike of panic lingered, zipping down her arms and making her veins feel like they were being frozen into threads of ice.

  Eli chuckled and closed the door again. The latch clicked into place. “Is that what you heard?”

  Ember frowned but had to concede the possibility. “Maybe.”

  He shook his head and looked around the room. Like the place downstairs, it was large and open and warm despite the obvious lack of fire, the floor layered with rugs of fur so thick their boots made visible indentations. The wall farthest from the door was all glass and looked out over several other buildings on the road they’d been walking down before turning inside. Sitting just inside the glass wall was a large couch and, in front of the couch, a low wooden table. On the center of the table was a tray made of silver metal buffed to a mirror shine and holding a bright white teapot and two small white teacups.

  Eli flopped into the couch, letting out a low groan of pleasure and relief as he got off his feet. After a moment, he opened his eyes and smiled over at Ember, who still hadn’t moved from her spot just inside the door. “Come. Sit. It’s really comfortable.”

  Ember walked over to the couch and lowered herself gingerly into one of the cushions. It was thick and soft, begging for her to flop back into it like Eli had done, but she didn’t dare sit back.

  She wasn’t sure why. Her body ached with exhaustion, and her muscles trembled with the desire to relax. She wanted to sit back and soak in the warmth of the room, not centralized at a small oil fire but diffuse and everywhere, like the cold she was used to. But she couldn’t sit back. If she did, if she settled into the warm, soft embrace of the cushions, there was no telling when she would be able to get back up again.

  Eli sat up and reached for the teapot. He poured something thick and brown and steaming into the cup, then lifted the cup to his lips.

  “Don’t!” Ember protested. “You don’t know what that is!”

  He lifted an eyebrow at her in the expression she hated the most, the one that said she was being paranoid again — and that stubbornly ignored the fact that she was just trying to look out for him. “You think Maudie brought us into the city and all the way to this nice and unlocked room just to poison us?”

  “I don’t know what I think,” Ember shot back, more harshly than she meant to speak to him. “But this place.” She hesitated, glanced around. “It’s weird.”

  “It’s different,” he said, stressing the word as though him saying it with deliberate firmness would change the way Ember felt.

  “It’s weird,” she said back in the same tone. “Did you see how she was dressed? Like a picture of a woman from Before. Like the world isn’t all ice and snow and cold everywhere.”

  Eli snorted. “Is that what has you so worked up? Seeing a woman’s ankles?”

  She flushed but lifted her chin and answered between tight lips. “If I’m worked up, it’s because you don’t seem to be taking this seriously.”

  “Taking it … Ember, we did it. We found Frost!” He took a sip from the teacup. His eyes closed, and he groaned again. “You have to try this.” He opened his eyes and held out the teacup.

  She took it and peered into it warily. The liquid inside was so thick that it left a trail up over the rim of the cup where Eli had sipped it. It steamed gently, and the steam smelled sweet and rich.

  “Go on,” he urged. “You’ll like it.”

  She looked over at him for a long moment, waiting to see if he would fall over poisoned and trying to decide what she could do if he did. The hallway appeared empty — not that it was necessarily so, but she doubted there was anyone near enough to hear her scream for help. But Eli just looked straight back at her, his lips starting to tip up into a mocking little grin until he finally broke the silence. “I feel fine,” he said like he was answering a question.

  “I didn’t ask you how you felt.”

  “You wanted to.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not poisoned.”

  “I never said it was.”

  “Try it. It’s good. I don’t know what it is — not broth or tea — but you’ll like it.”

  He wasn’t going to let it go, not until she took a sip. So she did, at least as much to prove to him that she didn’t think it was poisoned as because she was curious.

  It was good. Thick and sweet, just hot enough to sting the inside of her mouth and soak through her throat and stomach when she swallowed. She’d never tasted anything like it or anything close enough like it to even begin to understand what it was. A noise escaped her throat, a sound of pleasure that didn’t wait for her permission to be uttered.

  And, even as the flavor lingered, she didn’t feel poisoned.

  “Told you.”

  Ember opened her eyes. She didn’t recall shutting them. “I wasn’t arguing with you.”

  He grabbed the pot again and filled the second cup, then sat back and sipped at his own drink. His eyes kept moving around the room like he was expecting any moment to be awakened from the dream, and he wanted to hold onto this place for as long as he could. “We did it,” he muttered, apparently more to the teacup in his hand than to Ember beside him. “We found Frost.”

  “Yeah.” Ember set the cup back on the tray. She wanted another sip but couldn’t help feel that one was already too much. “Now what?”

  He frowned at her.

  “What?”

  “Can’t you just relax? Just for a minute? You’re making me anxious sitting like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you keep expecting someone to break down the door. We’re in Frost, Ember! The last great city in the world. It’s not imaginary. They have buildings made of wood and glass and rugs made of fur and drinks made of … whatever this is. If you aren’t excited to be here, why did you even come?”

  Ember sat up a little straighter. “Because you begged me until I said yes.”

  “That’s a lie, and we both know it.”

  “Because you would’ve died out there on your own.”

  He took another sip of the drink. There was something profoundly insufferable about the way he was not quite grinning over it. “Try again.”

  “Because…” A dozen other reasons crowded into her head. Because he wasn’t the only one who longed to believe there was more than just ice and snow and cold in t
he world. Because there would be nothing left for her in Dusk if Eli left.

  But she couldn’t say those things; they smacked too close to the truth.

  “Because it’s none of your business.”

  He grinned. “I know why. It’s because you were curious, too. You wanted to know if the stories were true. But you don’t want to admit it to yourself because that would mean you’ve been taken in by old Korrah’s mad stories.”

  “She isn’t mad.”

  “Clearly. She’s old. She remembers things. Things from Before. This!” He gestured expansively around the room with the hand not holding the teacup. “This is what the world could be. We don’t have to sit around in the cold and dark, pretending that our rations won’t run out before we do. We can have hope now.”

  Ember scowled. “You’re not a storybook hero, Eli. You won’t be able to bring the world back to the way it was before just because you survived a trip through a blizzard.”

  She knew she was hitting him in the place it would most hurt, that tender part in the center of all his dreaming, but she couldn’t stop herself. Finding Frost wasn’t going to solve the world’s problems or save Dusk from its inevitable slow, frozen, starving death.

  Eli went quiet, his jaw tightening. Ember did feel bad about saying things so bluntly — he didn’t deserve her attitude or suspicions. The fact that he got them anyway was just an unfortunate byproduct of the fact that he’d been the only other person she could talk to for the last several days, and really most of her life. She knew what she said was true, but she wished she didn’t have to say it.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, her eyes falling to her hands.

  They were quiet for a while. Ember fiddled with the cuffs of her long shirt sleeves, tugging them down over her hands and pushing them back up, mostly because it gave her bare, too-warm fingers something to do.

  Finally, Eli set down his teacup and looked at her. “I’m not trying to change the whole world. I know I can’t. But I was hoping to save our lives. There was nothing for us back there. You knew that. You saw it. That’s why I needed you to come with me. And that’s why you came.”

  Ember let out a breath, and slowly, so slowly that the motion actually hurt, she leaned back into the couch. “You’re right. That’s why I came.”

  “And we did it,” he whispered. “We made it.”

  “We did.” She glanced over at him and smiled just a little. “And now what do we do?”

  He smiled back, just as small but with absolute sincerity. “Whatever we want. We make our own lives now.”

  Chapter Five

  A knock on the door startled Ember awake. She didn’t remember falling asleep on the couch, or even at what point she’d closed her eyes and let her head fall against Eli’s shoulder. But obviously she had, and now she groaned as she sat back up, blinking hard to try and make her surroundings come back into focus. Couch. Low wooden table with a teapot and two cups coated with a layer of the thick brown beverage inside the pot. Eli was on the couch, too, his head tilted sideways so it had until a moment ago rested on the top of hers.

  The sense of a voice, pulling at her, begging for help, was just a dream. It flickered away in the sudden reality of the room.

  Another knock. Eli got to his feet, stretching, and went to the door. The woman, Maudie, stood on the other side, already smiling her too-bright smile.

  “I must apologize for neglecting you all this time,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and strained, though Ember couldn’t tell if that was because of the smile that stretched her lips as tight as a drum over her teeth. “It’s rare for Frost to receive visitors.”

  She stopped as though waiting for an answer, but Ember didn’t know what there was to say to that.

  Eli shook his head, dismissing the woman’s apology. “It’s fine. I think we both just fell asleep.”

  “You must’ve come a very long way.”

  Ember stood. Her muscles all ached, but she didn’t want to shake them out in front of the woman and reveal any kind of weakness. She didn’t join Eli in front of the door, but hung back, watching and waiting.

  For what, she wasn’t sure, but she felt she would definitely know it when it happened.

  There was a beat of silence, a moment stretched just a little too thin. Eli cleared his throat. “Do you need to come in?”

  “If you please.”

  “Sure. Um … come in.” He stepped back and held open the door.

  Maudie went straight for the couch and sat herself down. She was holding a thin board with several sheets of paper clipped to it. She flipped through the papers, though Ember suspected that gesture was an affect, since she didn’t seem to see anything in them and immediately turned her attention back to her and Eli. “As I said, we don’t often have visitors in Frost, so protocols have become somewhat confused. I must apologize for this and will see to it myself that it will not happen again.”

  “It’s really fine.” Eli came away from the door and set himself half a step forward of where Ember still stood, as though he was preparing to take the brunt of whatever this Maudie woman was about to throw at them.

  He could say what he wanted about how there was no need for any of Ember’s instinctive suspicion, but it was clear to her that he felt something odd about this, too, or he wouldn’t’ve snapped into protective-big-brother mode quite so fast.

  “There are a few details to handle in order to settle you in properly, so I was sent to handle them.” Another shuffle of papers, though this time Maudie’s attention actually focused on them and she seemed to consider something on them. “You have an appointment tomorrow at sunrise to pay your tribute to our queen. Until then, you are free to move about as you please. Here are your tokens for the day.” She reached into a pocket sewn to the breast of her dress and pulled out a small bag that jingled as she set it down on the table in front of her. “You will be given a per-diem salary of ten rubuls apiece. If you wish to contest that, you may file a complaint with the treasury, though” — she leaned forward, her voice dropping as though sharing a secret — “you ought not to expect your complaint to be addressed for six to eight weeks. It is the treasury, you know.”

  She paused like she expected them to laugh and nod and agree with her. Oh, sure, we know all about the treasury. Eli shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other; Ember crossed her arms over her chest and frowned.

  Maudie cleared her throat and replastered her smile, which had begun to slip just a notch, back on her face. Ember couldn’t help but wonder if the woman’s cheeks ever got sore. “After you’ve spoken with the queen, I imagine there will be work found for you. Do you have any special interests or talents that could be used in service of our queen?”

  There was another pause, longer than the awkward silence from when she first came in. Eli glanced at Ember, who didn’t dare take her eyes off of Maudie in case the woman was still trying to get up to something.

  It was the smile, she’d decided. Not just that it was too big and overly bright, but that Maudie seemed determined to hold onto it even when the moment didn’t actually call for it. Her eyes stayed so empty, with only the smile stretching her lips so thin that Ember wondered how they didn’t crack and split apart under the strain. It wasn’t natural.

  “I don’t know,” Eli answered.

  “Think hard. Surely there is something.”

  “Well, Ember’s good with machines.”

  Maudie’s smile turned to her. Ember glared at Eli, who shrugged helplessly. “You’re good with machines?”

  “I-I don’t know.” Ember didn’t mean to stutter and could’ve kicked herself for doing it. “I tinker sometimes.”

  “She’s being modest,” Eli cut in. “She’s been building things since she could bash two stones together. Remember Korrah’s clock? That mechanical plow you got running again? Even your compass — you’ve been tinkering with that for years.”

  Maudie’s smile remained unflappable, though her voice, dropping into
a whisper, sounded like a frown. “Are you a scientist?”

  Ember laughed, one hard single-syllable noise escaping the grip she’d been keeping on her feelings. But that word — scientist — tangled up in her already-snarled thoughts and threatened to drag along with it thoughts and memories she didn’t want to deal with, especially not in front of this strange Frost woman. “Oh, no, nothing so formal as that. I’m a tinkerer at best.”

  Maudie looked back down at her papers, and this time, she pulled out an ink pen and made some marks on the topmost one. Then she looked up again and beamed. “I’ll be back tomorrow to take you to the queen.”

  She slid out of the room and closed the door softly behind her.

  Eli was already investigating the contents of the bag when Ember, sure that Maudie had left, turned away from the door. He tipped the little drawstring-closed bag over his palm, and several small copper-colored coins spilled out from it.

  Eli’s eyes widened, and Ember could feel her own doing the same even as she fought against the sudden flush of wonder those coins inspired. She peered at them, a little uncertainly. “Money?”

  “I think so.” He tipped his hand this way and that, watching the coins as they sparkled dimly in the faint sunlight coming through the window-wall behind the couch.

  Ember had never seen money before. She’d seen coins — she used to play with her father’s handful of coins when she was little, lining them up in various arrangements or putting them into a little bag and shaking them around to make noise — but money was a thing of the past, a relic of Before.

  “This place is weird.” She was pretty sure that she’d said that, those exact words, before. “How can they just give money to strangers?”