Queen of Frost Read online

  But it was the color of his hair that kept pulling at her attention. Like tongues of fire curling over his ears and spilling across his forehead. She wondered, fleetingly, pointlessly, if it would be hot to the touch.

  Ember flicked her head to knock away such a thought and dropped her hand from his throat, suddenly aware of the other people in the square, a couple of whom standing at the other side of the Atalanta statue were openly staring at the commotion.

  She wished she had her knife, but already her thoughts had switched to the ways she could incapacitate someone without it, at least for long enough to get a solid head start back into the safety of the crowd. A fist to the nose, an elbow to the stomach, a knee to the groin. She was smaller than him, but he was clearly much softer than her. If it came to a fight, it was a fight Ember was pretty sure she could win.

  “It’s okay,” he said. His hands were still up in that I’m-not-armed position even as she let go of him. His voice took on a soothing tone, the sort a parent might use on a child who’d just screamed themselves awake with nightmares. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Ember frowned, not sure if he was telling the truth. “Did Maudie send you?”

  “No. There was no sending, no following. I live a few blocks away.” He lowered his hands only slowly. A smile tugged at one corner of his lips. “I was out shopping.”

  Ember let out a breath and felt the tension in her shoulders ease just a little. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

  His lips twitched upward again. “Most people don’t react quite so violently to someone trying to say hello.”

  “Is that what you were doing?”

  Another twitch. After looking at the unnaturally bright smiles of the strangers around her, Ember found this boy’s attempt to still his own smile oddly genuine. “Yes.”

  She huffed. “Well, you went about it all wrong.”

  “Noted. I’ll be more considerate next time.”

  They were quiet for a moment. The boy lifted one hand and ran it through those fire-orange curls. “Name’s Felix.”

  Another silence. He looked at her like he was expecting something.

  “What?”

  “And you are…?”

  “Is this an interrogation?”

  “It’s called an introduction. Do they not have those in the outworld?”

  “Outworld?” Ember repeated, uncertain.

  He waved a hand in a vague gesture she assumed was meant to indicate everywhere outside of Frost. “Beyond the walls.”

  She didn’t realize how much she’d relaxed until all the suspicions came flooding back. “How did you—”

  He interrupted her with a soft, surprised laugh. “You don’t hide it well.”

  She glanced down at her sweater, pants, and boots. And, probably even more than that, his shock at her reaction to being approached from behind made her wonder if the people of Frost were just used to strangers innocently coming up to them and talking, just to say hello. “Oh. Right.”

  “I told you my name. It seems only fair that you tell me yours.”

  Her gaze returned to him. There was something warm and genuine in his expression, not like Maudie who was clearly putting on a show. The cold knot at the center of her stomach loosened. “Ember.”

  The boy — Felix — laid a palm flat against his chest and dipped his head. When his head came back up, he was smiling, though without the face-splitting wideness of other’s smiles. It was just a nice smile. Normal and warm. “I’m sorry again for scaring you.”

  A smile of her own flickered across her face. “Me, too.”

  There was another, slightly longer, pause. Felix dropped his hand from his chest and used it to adjust the bag slung across his shoulder. “So. Is this your first time here in Frost?”

  Ember nodded. “My friend and I got here — mmm…” She squinted up at the sky, trying to string together all the moments she’d been inside the city and decide how long it had already been. The sun was sinking quickly toward the horizon; apparently Frost’s days weren’t much longer than Dusk’s this time of year. “Last night, I think?”

  “Your friend?” Felix repeated, glancing around the square.

  “He’s still back at the apartment. Sleeping. It’s been a long trip.”

  There was a small change in Felix’s expression, a subtle brightening of his eyes and a straightening of his spine. “Where are you from?”

  A new suspicion prickled at Ember’s skin. Why should a random Frost boy care where she was from, or what she was doing here, or anything at all about her?

  The irony of her feelings wasn’t lost on her. Ten minutes ago, she was suspicious because no one seemed to care who she was or where she was from; now, she was suspicious because someone did.

  “Never mind. You don’t have to tell me.” Felix glanced around the square as though hoping to find his next words sitting at Atalanta’s feet. One hand fluttered, uncertain, against his bag, and he smiled suddenly and reached inside. “Are you hungry?”

  Could he hear the way her stomach was complaining? She hadn’t had anything in it beside a mouthful of that thick brown drink since she’d left home.

  Felix pulled out one of the colorful foodstuffs that weighed down his bag and held it out to her. It was bright red and sort of round, about the size of her two fists pressed together.

  She stared at it, wary, and he grinned and took one small step toward her, the food held out like an offering of peace. “Go on. It’s not poisoned. I just bought it from the store not twenty minutes ago.”

  “What is it?”

  His grin widened. “An apple.”

  Apple. She knew the word, one of the hundreds she’d read in her father’s books but never really understood, because such things didn’t exist in the permanent snow and ice of Dusk.

  She took the apple from his offering hand and twisted it around between her own, examining it from every angle. “How do you…?”

  “Bite it.”

  Ember obeyed, taking a small chunk out of the side of the apple. The skin snapped between her teeth, barely a barrier at all, and a sweet, sharp flavor unlike anything she was familiar with bloomed inside her mouth.

  She took another, larger bite. The apple had a delightful soft crunch.

  When she had finished chewing and swallowing a couple of bites, she turned her attention back to Felix, who was grinning at her, obviously amused. “Good?” he asked.

  “Very. Where do you get such things?”

  “They grow in the fields east of town.”

  He said it so casually, as if growing things was just the normal course of life, and she felt kind of foolish for being so amazed by it.

  She’d expected Frost to be different than Dusk. It was a city that maybe didn’t even exist, full of people who maybe were just the souls of the dead — of course it would be different. But at every turn so far, the realization of how different things in this city actually were kept slamming her in the face.

  People who weren’t trying to rob or kill her would come up behind her in the street to say hello. Buildings were made of wood and glass. There was warmth and light. Food grew here.

  It was staggering and, frankly, a bit upsetting. Ember and Eli and everyone either of them had ever known — they all had next to nothing. Dwindling rations of food and light, all of it carefully controlled by the elders, and none of it enough to do more than barely scrape by. And here was Frost, with its conspicuous abundance — so much that a boy Ember had only just met offered her food without a hint of worry about where his own next meal might come from.

  “Is there someone showing you around?” Felix asked after a moment, interrupting her thoughts.

  “No.”

  “Oh.” His expression brightened subtly again. “Do you want there to be? I’m not as good a guide as my father would be — he could take you all around the palace — but … I can show you around a little. If you want,” he added, probably in response to the frown s
preading across Ember’s face. “Only if you want.”

  Did she want a guide? She wasn’t entirely sure. He could probably show her things she wouldn’t think to look for and answer some of her questions, but could she trust him to not lead her into a trap?

  She looked him over for what was probably the dozenth time. There was no guile in his eyes, only a spark of hope, a warm and friendly smile, and it occurred to her that he might be as interested in showing her around as she was in looking around.

  Ember pulled in a breath, weighing her desire against her suspicion. Perhaps, in this case, Eli was right, and the people of Frost didn’t need to live in fear of others. Felix certainly didn’t seem afraid of her, even though she’d been one stupid oversight away from sticking a knife in his belly.

  She wasn’t ready to head back to the apartment. She still wanted to look around, and maybe even find out something about the city they’d stumbled into. And she was fairly confident that she could hold her own in a fight if Felix tried something.

  She let out her breath. “Alright,” she said, more as a sigh than a word. “Yes. Show me around.”

  She smiled, and Felix’s face lit up like the sun emerging from behind a cloud.

  Chapter Eight

  Ember munched on her apple as she followed Felix around the square.

  “This is the town’s main square. You can get to the palace by going two blocks that way.” He waved in the direction she’d come from.

  A crunch on her apple. She’d gotten down to a thin strip in the middle that was studded with seeds.

  They passed the Atalanta statue again; without pausing in his steps, Felix leaned to one side and brushed his fingertips across the smooth place at the statue’s feet where her name had been worn almost entirely away by thousands of similar gestures. He barely seemed to notice himself doing it, like the way Eli’s mother Asha rubbed at her prayer bead with Atalanta’s name on it, an unconscious sort of fidget.

  Ember glanced toward the statue’s face again. Light sparkled against the glass of the other buildings and the Atalanta statue, and her breath caught at the sight of it.

  Felix looked at her, grinning again. His eyes flickered up toward the sky. “Just wait. The moon will be up soon. You’ve never seen anything like Atalanta in moonlight.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like anything here.”

  He reached into his bag and offered her another apple. “You didn’t tell me where you’re from.”

  “North,” she said, hoping that was vague enough.

  “Well, of course north.”

  Ember book a bite of her fresh apple. Something about the way he said those words raised her suspicions again. “Why ‘of course north’?”

  Felix gave her a look. In the low light, she couldn’t decide what that look was supposed to mean. “There’s no other direction you could’ve come from. Our outer wall runs the entire way east to west.”

  “What about south?”

  The smile slipped from his face, leaving his expression oddly blank. “There is no south.”

  Ember made a confused noise that never quite formed into a word. She’d never seen anyone’s face change like that, so fast.

  But Felix only repeated the words like saying them would make them true. “There is no south of Frost.”

  She looked away, uncomfortable under the sudden blankness in his stare. “Dusk,” she said at last.

  And, just as fast as it had come, the blankness was gone, replaced by his smile. “Dusk,” he repeated, saying the word with the tenderness of a lover speaking the name of his beloved. “What’s it like?”

  Ember snorted. Imagine, a Frost boy wanting to know about Dusk! But when she looked back at him, the curiosity in his eyes hadn’t dimmed.

  This was perhaps the strangest thing of all the strange things about this place. She’d expected suspicion and wariness from everyone inside the walls. Hostility. Perhaps even interrogation and imprisonment. Those things made sense to her. But interest? Curiosity? Maybe eventually, after she’d found her way inside the city, but certainly not as she was first setting foot on the street, from the random boy she’d met in the crowd.

  “I don’t know,” Ember said at last when Felix remained quiet and eager. “Dusk is … cold. Dark. Dying. No one wants to admit it, but everyone knows our rations are running out. We’ve been living on a decreasing supply of food and warmth and light since … well, since Before.”

  “Before?”

  “You know. Before.”

  His eyebrows pulled together, making visible creases in his forehead and a single deep line between his brows, just over the bridge of his nose.

  “Before the death of the Engine. Before all of this.” She waved her hand up at the sky, the cold, the snow and ice that pressed up against the outside of Frost’s walls. She’d never met anyone who didn’t understand “Before” — it was such a universal concept in her world.

  But the frown on Felix’s face didn’t change.

  She wasn’t sure what to make of this. He himself was too young to have been alive Before, so of course he wouldn’t remember it, but surely there were people in the city — his parents, perhaps, or certainly his grandparents — who remembered, who told stories of Steppe when it was green and flourishing.

  People who actually remembered such things were few and far between, and increasingly so as the years passed, but in a city this big, surely there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of people old enough to remember. Did they not talk about it? Were there no books that described it?

  How could Felix have no concept of Before?

  But she sensed that to press this issue would be rude, so she filed that question away to ask later.

  They left the square behind and merged in with the crowd at a different spot than where Ember had come from. There was direction to Felix’s steps, and he moved with the speed and decisiveness of purpose, eating up the ground with a stride that had Ember nearly jogging to keep up with.

  The streets were lit now with small glass bulbs set at regular intervals at the tops of metal poles. As Ember passed beneath one, she could hear a faint but distinctive hum coming from the bulb. She stopped, distracted from the effort of keeping up with her local guide. Her bare fingers touched the pole with the gentle reverence of Atalanta worshipers brushing fingers across her name.

  Felix noticed that she had paused and looped back to her. She smiled at him. “Electric?”

  He smiled back, amused. “Of course.”

  Question bubbled in her mind. How did Frost distribute electricity? Where was it produced? She didn’t know much about electricity — Dusk never had it — but that only made her want to understand. The machines needed to make usable electricity were supposed to be large and complicated. Surely they couldn’t be hidden, even in a city this size. Were they something Felix would be able to show her?

  She settled with, “Do you know about electricity?”

  No point in getting her hopes up if Felix wasn’t someone to ask about it.

  He squinted up at the bulb. “Not really. These lights are triggered by the dark, same as in the palace, I think.”

  “What about the machines that make it? Where are those?”

  “Machines?” he repeated, with the same confused frown he’d worn for the mention of Before.

  “There must be machines. Probably great big ones. Do you know where they are?”

  He shook his head, slowly, not understanding. “It’s not machines that make all this. It’s the queen.”

  This pulled her attention down to him. “The queen?”

  “Yeah, her magic. It’s why we have everything we have. Everything inside the walls is thanks to her. The warmth and light, the food. Even the electricity.”

  Ember frowned. “How’s that possible?”

  He shrugged, as though the answer to that question was the least interesting thing in the world. “It’s magic. C’mon.” His tone flipped back to enthusiastic, and his smile returned as though it had n
ever left. “I wanna show you the old city. It’s my favorite place.”

  She followed, but her thoughts were trapped back at the first electric bulb. Her father used to say that magic was just science that wasn’t understood, but clearly someone somewhere in the city understood electricity. Someone had to have built and maintained the machine that created and distributed the electricity.

  But Felix didn’t seem to even understand what she meant when she asked about them. He didn’t even seem curious, even though he’d been just about bursting when he asked about Dusk. The difference was so complete and obvious, it was like someone had toggled a switch inside him.

  Here are the things you can be curious about; here are the things you can’t be.

  But, again, Ember sensed that to press would be rude, and Felix’s friendly, talkative switch had flipped back on anyway. “The old city is on the south side of town, but I think there’s a trolley stop at the next corner.”

  He frowned at the intersection ahead, his eyes focusing on a small pattern of little glittering circles arranged into a small triangle, and his expression brightened again. “Yes, the Queen’s Line. That’ll take us to the cathedral.” He smiled at her. “You thought the square was impressive? Just wait until you see the cathedral.”

  They paused at the next intersection, moving a little ways toward the nearest building, where a handful of other people stood in a loose clump facing south down the north-south road. One or two of them glanced their way as they joined the group. They caught Ember’s eye, smiled wide, bobbed their heads, then turned away again with their smiles still firmly in place.

  Ember turned her attention to Felix. “What’s a cathedral?”