Queen of Frost Read online

“It’s a building.”

  “Like theses?”

  He nodded. “Only bigger — and much older. It’s got this domed roof that…” His words faded, and he held out his arm, covered now in the tiny bumps that people in Dusk called gooseflesh, which Ember had intuited was some kind of comment on the way a bird looked when plucked. Not that she knew what a bird looked like, plucked or otherwise. “It gives me the shivers just thinking about it.”

  “You like buildings?”

  “Architecture, yeah. There’s something about the way we used to build buildings that’s been lost since we started using glass instead of wood or brick. Mind you, I’m not saying it wasn’t the right thing to do,” he added with a furtive glance toward the other people nearby, a glance that Ember suspected she wasn’t supposed to see. “Obviously, Frost would’ve never become what it is if we hadn’t made the change. But I still like the old city.”

  One of the people in the crowd shifted. It was a man, pushing up against the others, jostling them enough to tug at the crowd’s attention. Ember glanced at him — he was one of the smiling people. He met her eyes and beamed, pushed again to take a few extra steps toward her.

  Ember shifted away, fresh suspicion washing through her. She didn’t like the look of the man’s smile — it was too big, like so many of the Frost people’s smiles, but there was something else behind it, a strange, almost unhinged expression buried beneath the stretched-tight lips and gleaming white teeth.

  The man didn’t seem to notice her pulling away, but Felix did. He caught the man’s eyes and frowned a little. “Something wrong?” he asked, his voice newly flat.

  The man didn’t take his eyes or smile from Ember. He leaned forward and whispered to her under his breath. “The wall is cracking.”

  Ember took another step back, letting Felix come between her and the smiling man. Her fingers ached for the heft and safety of her knife but closed around empty air instead.

  “Step back,” she hissed.

  The man froze, but his eyes and smile didn’t waver, didn’t stray from the place on her face they’d latched themselves onto. When she took another step away from him, though, he remained where he was — not stepping away, but not pursuing her, either.

  A rumble of wheels echoed down the street, and by the time Ember had turned her head in the direction of the sound, a squarish open-sided vehicle had pulled to a stop at the intersection. The driver at the front yanked back on a lever that must’ve been some kind of brake and nodded to the loose clump of people at the intersection. One by one, they stepped onto the doorless step into the vehicle, dropped a coin into the small glass box sitting at the driver’s right hand, and took a seat among the dozen or so empty ones inside the vehicle.

  Felix touched Ember’s elbow, encouraging her to follow him into the vehicle. He dropped two coins into the driver’s machine. They clunked as they fell through the slit in the top and again, softer as they hit the small pile of coins at the bottom of the box, and Ember was suddenly very aware of how little she understood of the workings of the city.

  “You don’t have to pay for me,” she whispered as she followed Felix toward the back of the trolley.

  But he only shook his head and sat. “It’s my pleasure. Do you want another apple? Or…” He glanced down at the bag. “I’ve got apricots and plums, too.”

  Ember sat beside him. “That’s okay. But thank you.”

  “Anytime.”

  The trolley pulled away from the intersection. Unable to help herself, Ember glanced back toward where they’d left the strange man at the intersection. Three men in pressed white suits and gleaming black shoes surrounded him, their hands tight around his arms. He yelled something, but the words were lost to the rumble of the trolley.

  Ember turned away and tried to dismiss the strangeness of the encounter.

  The air spun around inside of the trolley, rippling hems and hair; Ember had to keep shoving her own wayward black strands out of her eyes. Glass buildings and electric lights blurred together as they passed street after street, sometimes stopping to exchange passengers.

  Felix would occasionally point to one building or another. “That’s the main office of Envoys. My father’s head of the doll division, and he mostly works at the palace, but sometimes, if they’ve got a new doll…” He squinted at one of the spots along the glass exterior for a moment as the final passenger paid and sat down, then he leaned back and shrugged. “Well, he’s not there now. But that’s where his desk is.”

  Or: “That’s the theater. You’ve probably never seen a moving picture?”

  Ember shook her head.

  Felix smiled. “It’s closed now, but you’ll have to go sometime. They’ll make you laugh, or cry, or scream, or whatever it is you want to feel at the moment.”

  This was interesting enough that Ember didn’t want to let it go as the trolley zipped by the building. “How does it do that?”

  “Oh, it’s more of the queen’s magic. Like the electricity, you know?”

  She didn’t, but the reference to the queen’s magic shut down any further questions about moving pictures.

  As the trolley continued through the Frost streets, the number of people getting off increased and the number getting on dropped, and by the time Felix mentioned the next stop would be theirs, they were the only ones besides the driver left on it.

  “The route loops around the old city before going back downtown,” he said. “We should be able to catch it on its way back. That’ll give us about twenty minutes — which I know isn’t long, but I don’t want you to think I’m trying to kidnap you.”

  Ember grinned. That worry had left her head by the time they’d gotten on the trolley. She wasn’t sure why — it was still entirely possible that Felix was just hoping to lure her away from the crowds. But she realized that she trusted him. Perhaps that should worry her — he was still a stranger, a Frost boy taking her around a strange city — but it didn’t. “Just go ahead and try,” she said, her voice teasing. “I’d knock you flat and be back in my bed before you even came to.”

  “I believe you,” he answered, a hint of laughter in his voice.

  The trolley slowed. They’d left the busyness of the palace square well behind, and the electric lights appeared much dimmer as the amount of glass around them lessened from full buildings to just windows and doors. At the intersection where the trolley was preparing to stop, a few people waited and a few more people sat at a smattering of small round tables and sipped steaming beverages out of white porcelain teacups.

  Felix stood. “Here we are.”

  Ember followed him off the trolley and then down a road that was much narrower than the streets around the palace, and not quite as well-lit. The air was noticeably colder here, too, as though the force field was weaker this far away from the palace. The buildings were wood and just a bit fallen down. Not quite decrepit, but without the shining newness of the other buildings she’d seen in the city.

  Weathered, Ember decided. The wooden buildings around here had stood for a long time, and they were showing their age.

  And then, much like it had in front of the palace, the street spit them out into an open space lit silver with moonlight.

  Ember sucked in a breath. The square had certainly been a sight, and she couldn’t imagine how glorious it might be to see now, but this … this was something else entirely.

  It was the cathedral. She didn’t need Felix to tell her that, though he did whisper it with reverence. Ember didn’t know what cathedrals were supposed to be like, but this was certainly it.

  It was massive, not as tall as the tallest spires of the palace, but much wider, and made of material she didn’t recognize. It gleamed like fresh snow and was capped by a dome in great stripes of color that wound in an increasingly tight spiral as they twisted from the building to the peak in its center.

  “It used to be the altar to Mother Atalanta,” Felix said. His voice was still barely louder than a breath, and when she look
ed over at him, she saw that his arms were once again speckled with gooseflesh. “People would come from every part of the city to worship and pray. The priestesses lived in the dome.”

  “Used to?” Ember whispered back.

  He smiled sadly. “The altar moved to the palace after it was built, and the priestesses live in an apartment in the square now.”

  “Why?”

  He looked down at her like she was asking a stupid question again. “To be closer to Our Mother.”

  Ember felt something snap into place, an understanding forming out of the messy confusion in her thoughts.

  The queen, whoever she really was, whatever she could really do, had the people in Frost believing that she was Atalanta.

  Ember had never been particularly religious — her father had taught her to be skeptical, and to him, that extended to being skeptical of religious claims as well. But Dusk was overall pretty religious, and Ember could see what the queen must’ve wanted to do by claiming that she was Atalanta, moving the altar and priestesses, putting a statue in her square.

  She was trying to tell the people of Frost that she was their goddess.

  Ember shook off the thought. She didn’t have anything else to do with it, and there was something much more interesting facing her right now to think about. She took a step toward the cathedral. “So what’s in it now?”

  Chapter Nine

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to go in there.”

  Ember agreed. It wasn’t the sort of place that looked especially inviting or like it would be okay to step inside and have a look around, but she couldn’t help wanting a closer look. The cathedral was magnificent from the outside, perhaps the most magnificent thing she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t understand why getting a little closer to it would be a bad thing.

  “You’ve never gone in?” she asked conversationally, as she stepped toward the cathedral.

  Felix followed behind her, the reverence in his voice shifting into nervousness. “I … no. Of course not.”

  She glanced over at him, one eyebrow raised at the obvious lie in his voice.

  He grimaced, caught. His eyes swept the area around him as if confirming that they were alone, then smiled just a little, with just the corners of his lips. “Well, just the once. When I was little. I only peeked through the window. There wasn’t anything there but a big empty room. Couldn’t even see the dome from there.”

  Ember was close enough to the building now to search for a window. There were several low enough to see through, and in the moonlight, they looked like mosaics of glass colors. She ran one finger across the bottom of the nearest, liking the cool, smooth touch of glass against her fingertips, the little bumps where one colored piece was joined up with another and melted smooth.

  “We don’t have glass in Dusk, except for the trinkets that have survived from Before,” she murmured, almost to herself. Then, recalling that Felix somehow didn’t have a concept of “Before,” she added, “They’re really old. From our grandmother’s grandmother’s generation at least.”

  “What do you put in your windows?”

  She laughed. “What windows?”

  “You don’t have windows?”

  “A window is just a fancy word for a hole in your house where all the heat can escape.”

  “Huh.” Felix glanced at the window they were in front of now, another of the multi-colored mosaic ones. “No windows. No wonder you all go mad.”

  “Mad?” Ember repeated.

  “Not you, I mean,” Felix added, his face growing flushing. “Just … you know. Outlanders in general. Before they become dragons, they go mad?”

  His last word tilted up until it became unmistakably a question. But it wasn’t the mad part that was confusing — it was that strange word he used, “dragon.”

  It sounded almost familiar, tugging at Ember’s attention like a forgotten dream, like a word she used to know but could no longer remember where she’d seen it or what it meant.

  She turned toward the window again, knocking the itchy sense of missing something away. Dragons could wait; the cathedral couldn’t.

  The coloring of the glass, the mosaic construction, plus the dim silvery moonlight, made it hard to see clearly through, but Ember squinted, determined to see past the colors and her own reflection into the building itself.

  She wasn’t sure what she expected to see — probably just a large empty room like Felix said, or maybe the inevitable dingy chairs and cold, ashy fireplace of a long-abandoned space.

  What she saw was neither of those things.

  It was a large space, the walls stretching into darkness to both the right and forward — less to the left because she wasn’t far from the front door, a massive, elaborately carved piece of wood worth attention in its own right. But it wasn’t empty. It was full practically to bursting.

  What it was full of, though, Ember couldn’t tell.

  They were clearly machines of some sort, with rounded metal fronts and protruding tails on the back. At the very top of the rounded area were jumbles of gears and belts clearly meant to serve some kind of purpose, but the room was too dark, and she was too far away to even hazard a guess at what the machines did.

  Felix leaned in to look, too, apparently over the uncertainty of whether they should be here, at least enough to once again take a look inside. “Are those … copters?”

  Ember wanted to take a closer look. There were a dozen of them or more, all lined up neatly in the room but smashed so close together that some of their gears touched their neighbor’s. She traced what she could see of the nearest one’s gears, trying to figure out what they were for. “What are copters?”

  “They’re broken,” Felix said like it was an answer. “But … why?”

  He backed away then, and when Ember didn’t follow him, he reached for her sleeve and tugged. “We really shouldn’t be here.”

  Ember frowned. He’d been the one to bring her out here, and now he wanted to go back, just like that? Because the cathedral was full of broken copters?

  He readjusted his grip so now he had her elbow, too, not hard, but with a firmness that was impossible to ignore.

  Fear shot like ice through Ember’s veins. Had she been wrong to trust him? Was he going to harm her now?

  Fist to the nose, elbow to the belly, knee to the groin. She tried to calculate the distance between them and the nearest lit intersection a quick sprint away.

  But when she jerked her arm free, he let it go without a fight. “C’mon. The trolley will be back around in a few minutes.”

  He stepped back toward the street, away from the cathedral and the broken copters inside it.

  * * *

  “Who would stuff a room full of broken machines?”

  The trolley had indeed come back around a few minutes after they returned to the corner. Felix had paid the driver again, even though it was the same driver they’d seen just a few minutes before, and there was no way he didn’t recognize the fire-haired boy and the strangely dressed girl that got aboard.

  But the driver’s eyes were vacant, the only spark in them coming from the too-big smile he gave them as the coins dropped into his collection box.

  They’d taken the same seat they’d had on the way up here, and after a couple of trolley stops and a few more passengers, the stiffness in Felix’s shoulders began to relax. Now, almost back to the stop where they’d first gotten on, Ember asked the question.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Felix answered.

  “The copters. They were broken, but why?”

  “They…” He hesitated and shot a glance around the trolley. Most of the other passengers were engaged in their own low-voiced conversations — only one, a woman, met Felix’s eyes and smiled.

  He faced the front of the trolley. His fingers tightened subtly into each other on his lap. “I don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “You do so. You asked the same thing, about why—”

  �
�No.” He spun halfway around toward her and fixed her with a look that seemed to carry a significance she didn’t understand. “I didn’t see anything, and neither did you.”

  “But—”

  “Ember,” he interrupted with absolute seriousness, his voice falling to a whisper, “you didn’t see anything inside the cathedral. Just a big empty room.” His eyes flashed once more toward the smiling woman, who only smiled wider, showing teeth. “Right?”

  “Oh. Right,” she agreed slowly. Maybe it was just the intensity of his own stare that made her feel like she was being watched.

  She glanced at the smiling woman, too, and suddenly wondered if letting it go was quite enough. “Sorry. Sometimes I … make things up. Outworlder, you know.”

  Felix nodded once, a short, almost invisible nod, then smiled wide and deliberate, and his voice went almost a little too loud, as though he wanted to be heard clearly over the rumble of the trolley’s wheels. “The old city’s not entirely abandoned, obviously, but when the queen moved the altar to the palace, it fell out of favor with the businesses that were supported by worshipers. It can be annoying to take a trolley all the way out there to buy food.”

  There was a new tone in his voice now, an overly pedantic one that had her thinking his words were more for the trolley passengers than they were for her.

  Ember tried to school her expression into polite, but not excessive, curiosity and reached for something that might be safer than whatever was spooking him about the copters in the cathedral. “So the food moved toward the palace?”

  “Right.”

  The trolley pulled up to the intersection where they’d first gotten on. Felix stood and led Ember back onto the street. The strange formal tone melted back into what she was starting to think was his normal warm, interested voice. “Do you need me to show you back?”

  She shook her head. “That’s not necessary. I can find it.”

  His grin slipped a little. She could see him struggle to catch it before it vanished entirely, and when he did, it was much smaller and more forced than before. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want you to get lost.”