Queen of Frost Page 9

  “… Excellent for … and such a remarkable … much obliged…”

  She wished they would either speak loud enough to cut through her churning mind, or they would be quiet and let her think. This in-between neither-nor was extremely annoying.

  A few minutes of conversation with Eli, and then the queen was standing and motioning them to do the same. She took their hands one at a time again, first Eli’s, then Ember’s, squeezing them gently between both of her own hands. “It’s been such a pleasure, my friends,” she said once she’d dropped Ember’s hand. “I’ll send for you in the morning.”

  “Goddene, ma’am,” Eli answered in his most respectful tone.

  Ember didn’t say anything. She couldn’t with all the questions clogging up her mind and throat.

  Maudie, who must’ve been waiting, and maybe even listening, at the door, came in as though those words were her cue. The queen nodded at Maudie, and then Maudie led them out of the room, down the hallway, and through the front doors of the palace.

  Ember let out a breath as the front doors closed and she took her first step onto the slick glass bridge. Somehow, the bridge felt like the least treacherous thing she’d had to navigate so far, and judging by the relief that crossed Eli’s face, he felt similarly.

  “How did it go?” Maudie asked, and for a moment, her smile seemed almost genuine. A flash of real curiosity beneath her usually off-putting, manufactured manner.

  “Good, I think,” Eli said, and Ember didn’t bother to contradict it. “She’s…” He hesitated, took a couple of steps on the bridge, watching his feet to keep from fumbling. “Nice?”

  “Oh, yes. The most kind and generous queen we could ever hope for. It’s thanks to her that we have all we do.”

  Maybe it was just that Ember knew Eli so well that she’d heard the way his voice turned up at the end, making what should’ve been a statement into a question. Maybe Maudie just didn’t know how to pick up on those sorts of subtleties. It would hardly be the most surprising thing about the Frost woman.

  Ember had never felt more grateful for solid ground beneath her feet. The last of the tightness that had gripped her shoulders and back since she woke up this morning eased as they made it safely off the bridge and back into the palace square.

  A voice called her name. She turned and saw Felix jogging toward her, grinning bright enough to rival the sunlight streaming into the square. He slowed when Eli turned toward him, too. “Sorry,” he said, glancing at Eli like he’d just realized he was interrupting. “Is this not a good time?”

  “It’s fine,” Ember answered before Eli could say otherwise. “We’re just coming from the queen.”

  A bit of that brightness returned to Felix’s face. “That’s right. How is she?”

  “Good?” She didn’t mean for her word to tilt up at the end like she wasn’t sure of her answer. She coughed and tried again. “She has work for us.”

  Felix smiled in response, apparently either fooled or willing to pretend he was fooled.

  Eli cleared his throat, a pointed noise that made Ember recall that he hadn’t been with her yesterday when she met Felix — and, she remembered, she hadn’t told him about her new Frost friend, either. “Eli, this is Felix. Felix, my friend Eli.”

  Felix held out his hand just like the queen had. “Also from Dusk?”

  Eli accepted it, but he wasn’t smiling. “Of course.”

  “A pleasure.”

  “Mm.” He dropped Felix’s hand.

  “Felix showed me around town a bit yesterday,” Ember said into the moment of awkward silence that settled over them.

  Eli lifted an eyebrow. “You didn’t tell me you’d made a friend.”

  “You didn’t ask.” She would’ve said something about Felix if Eli had asked — but he hadn’t, so she didn’t. She still wasn’t sure why she’d chosen not to volunteer it and didn’t want to think about it anyway.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, turning away from Eli and his annoyed little frown.

  Felix shrugged. His face was shifting toward red. “Honestly? I was hoping to see you.”

  Ember swallowed. There was a lump in her throat, but she wasn’t sure where it had come from or what it was doing there.

  “But I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he added hastily. “If you have somewhere else you need to be…” He glanced at Maudie as if the question were for her.

  Maudie smiled. “There is nothing else for now.” She bobbed her head to Ember and Eli and backed away. “You are free to do as you please.”

  Felix grinned and turned back to Ember. “Do you want to do something?”

  Ember glanced at Eli, who was still frowning slightly as though unsure of what to make of her Frost friend. Felix followed her gaze and redoubled his smile. “Either of you,” he added, trying, and mostly succeeding, at sounding like that was what he meant the whole time, that he hadn’t totally forgotten that Eli was there. “I took Ember around a bit last night, but I’d be happy to show you, too.”

  Eli shrugged. “Whatever you want.”

  “You mentioned something about moving pictures?”

  Felix’s face brightened. “Oh, you wanna see one?”

  “Can we?”

  “Yeah. The theater’s this way.” He gestured for them to follow, and Ember stepped eagerly forward, but Eli caught her arm and stilled her feet.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed.

  Ember frowned. “Going to find out what a moving picture is?”

  “By following a stranger into an unfamiliar city.”

  Oh. That was what Eli’s scowling was about — not the chance to look around Frost, but Felix himself. She smiled and hoped she looked reassuring. “You don’t have to worry about Felix. He’s a nice boy.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve already met him.”

  “And so you know you can trust him?”

  Ember sighed. For the first time, Eli was having some kind of healthy suspicion, but it had to be about Felix?

  “Coming?” Felix asked over his shoulder.

  “Yes,” Ember answered, glaring at Eli as she pulled away from his grip. “We are.”

  * * *

  Eli continued to shoot Felix weird looks all the way down to the theater and then still after Felix bought them tickets and they settled into a dark room full of soft, upholstered chairs.

  Ember mostly ignored him. He’d picked a strange time to switch on the worst of his skepticism, but that was his own problem, not hers, and she kept up a light stream of conversation with Felix instead as they waited for the moving picture to begin.

  “What is this?” she asked, keeping her voice down as seemed appropriate for the room but unable to stop her fingers from stroking the upholstery on the chair. She’d never felt anything so soft and luxurious and wonderful.

  Felix glanced down to see what she was asking about and grinned. “Velvet, or something like it, anyway. Probably from the garment district.”

  Ember remembered the trolley ride yesterday, how fast it moved and how she’d seen only the square and the old city. And now there was a garment district? And fields to the east where they grew their food? It seemed impossible. “How big is Frost?”

  “Well, it stretches from the north wall to the south, and then from the Eastern to the Western Sea. There aren’t even trolleys that go all the way out to its edges.”

  Ember marveled. She didn’t know what that all meant — she had no idea what the Eastern or Western Sea were — but the idea that a trolley couldn’t cover all the distance was remarkable anyway.

  And the marvels weren’t over. At that moment, the moving picture began, and for the next hour, Ember couldn’t say anything at all.

  She’d seen pictures before, in the couple of books that had survived the years, and even one framed in wood that Korrah had showed her of someplace she claimed to have gone to once, with metal buildings even taller than the ones in Frost. Taking what she knew about
pictures and trying to imagine them moving so they became a moving picture was something she could kind of wrap her head around.

  But her imagining couldn’t prepare her for what she saw. Because it wasn’t just a single picture that moved, but an entire sequence of pictures so she was following a character through an adventure. It wasn’t just a picture — it was a story. A fictional one, obviously, since the characters rode around on these big, four-legged, hairy animals that moved faster than trolleys through strange, unfrozen lands full of trees, but still a story.

  As the moving picture ended, Ember remained still, gaping at the now-blank screen in the front of the room even as the lights came back on and the other people started to talk and get up from their velvet seats.

  Felix glanced over at her, and his smile could’ve lit up the room all on its own with how big and bright it got. “Like it?” he ventured at last.

  “I … don’t even know what to say. That was…”

  Words failed her. She let them dribble into silence.

  “Interesting?” Eli offered from her other side.

  Ember shot him a look. “Interesting doesn’t even begin to cover it. It was like there really were people here. Like, like a play, but better. More. How do they do it?”

  “The queen likes moving pictures.”

  Which wasn’t an answer, but Ember decided not to push, worried about toggling that switch inside him that would turn off his answers completely.

  Felix stood. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  Ember and Eli followed him out of the room, Ember’s thoughts still spinning with how the moving pictures could work. Maybe, if there was a machine that flashed a lot of still pictures really, really fast, that could do it. But then how could someone capture that many still pictures? Was there someone inside the walls of Frost who just drew hundreds, thousands, maybe more, pictures to feed into a machine that ran them really fast? Was that even possible? The people had seemed so real, like they were actually in the room, even though there was no way they could be, not on their animals and shooting their guns.

  They left the theater and meandered down the street with no special purpose. Eli’s sudden grumpiness had been soothed by the excitement of the moving picture, and now he and Felix were talking with increasing ease, allowing Ember’s thoughts to drift.

  Maybe it was all just starting to sink in now: the fact that they’d left Dusk, found Frost. That it was somehow even more incredible than the stories had always said. It didn’t seem possible, and yet, here she was, walking down a street full of sunlight — albeit weak winter sunlight — where there was no snow on the ground and her exposed arms and legs hadn’t turned black and fallen off in the cold. Stepping out of a darkened theater where pictures moved and people rode strange hairy beasts and strangers gave away food just to be friendly.

  Everything else, the strange way the queen addressed her, the ominous sound of the I’ll-send-for-you-tomorrow, the dropping of her father’s name amongst everything — that was all behind her. Ember liked Frost, even if she didn’t like its queen, and now everything would be all right.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Maudie came for Ember before sunrise the next morning and brought her back to the palace, but not to the queen’s room like yesterday, instead leading her through hallways that looked pretty much identical to the ones she’d seen before around the palace, and only Ember’s decent sense of direction told her that she wasn’t actually just walking the same route as she had before.

  After a few turns, Maudie waved her into a busy room off the busy hallway and up to a red-haired man in a brilliant white suit and the shiniest, blackest shoes Ember had ever seen. He looked Ember up and down, then glanced at a paper he held clipped to a thin wooden board. “You must be our new guest,” he said, to the board rather than her. “Yes, the queen did mention you’d be coming.”

  Ember didn’t answer.

  “Come with me,” he said, finally looked up from his board. “The queen has some dolls that need fixing. They’ve started spitting nonsense and had to be taken out of rotation.”

  “Dolls?”

  “This way.” The man gestured for Ember to follow him. She did, slowly, wondering what she was in for. All the dolls she’d ever known about were ones made of scrap bits of cloth, maybe with button eyes or stuffing if there were scraps of either to spare. The fanciest one was an heirloom porcelain doll owned by Grieg’s family, and mostly his daughter brought it out to show off, because Masha Grieganova was that sort of obnoxious.

  They didn’t go far, turning off the hallway into a mostly empty room as nondescript and functional as the one they’d just come from, without the grandeur of the queen’s end of the palace and not at all the machine room of yesterday. There was a table of sturdy wood at one end, and it was covered with what appeared to be every sort of tool a person could ever need. Two people sat at the other end of the room, smiling widely at nothing.

  Ember ignored them, though she could feel their eyes on her — she doubted she would ever not sense those unnerving Frost smiles against her skin whenever she was in the presence of them. But the table of tools was far more interesting to her, and the redheaded man didn’t stop her from wandering over to look at them a little more closely, so she figured that was allowed.

  They were a glorious assortment. Pliers of every imaginable shape and size. Wrenches and solder. Wire-cutters and magnifying glasses and little lights that didn’t even seem to draw from whatever electrical sources that powered the rest of the city. Ember ran her fingers over the tools with the reverence a worshiper might across the bottom of an Atalanta statue.

  “Are these for me? To use?” she breathed at last when the man came up behind her.

  “If they aren’t sufficient, you need only ask for more,” the man answered. “The queen will have it made. Whatever you need.”

  Ember blinked up at him, startled for a moment at the idea of not finding this bounty sufficient. As if there was anything more that she could need.

  He didn’t respond to her surprise, only turned toward the people sitting at the other end of the room and nodding. “Well, then.”

  The words sounded like a summons, or an order, but Ember wasn’t sure what of. Perhaps to the people watching her, though neither of them moved at his comment. She waited silently, ready to have a look at the dolls she was here to fix, and for a moment, the room was still.

  Then the redheaded man turned back to her, eyebrows raised, lips pressing into a frown. “Go on, then.”

  Ember hesitated. Other than the table full of tools and the two other people, there was nothing in the room. She didn’t think she was missing the dolls, and another scan of the space confirmed that for her. “Go on what?” she ventured at last.

  The man’s lips quirked again, this time with definite annoyance. “The dolls, devushka.”

  “Yes. Where…?”

  The question died on her lips as she realized what she’d missed before. As it sunk in what exactly she was looking at. She pulled in a too-sharp breath and looked over at the people sitting in the room across from her.

  No, not people. Dolls.

  Something like fear, or maybe even panic, lanced through her body, splintering like ice into her veins, as she looked back at the dolls, their unnervingly wide smiles and fixed stares. She’d seen those expressions before on many of the people around Frost: the trolley drivers and strangers in the streets. Maudie.

  Were all of them dolls? Mechanical people, programming to look and behave like people, except for those unwavering smiles? Ember’s hands shook at the idea, and she reached blindly for something on the table to hold in order to keep that fact concealed.

  She ended up with a pair of little needle-nose pliers. Which was probably as good a tool as any to start with.

  But start with what?

  She took a couple of steps toward the dolls. They watched her curiously, smiling and still. “Um. Are you malfunctioning?”

  One, the man — c
ould dolls be men? Women? People at all? What should she call them in her own head and out in the world? — met her gaze, and somehow, impossibly, his smile widened, exposing teeth as bright white as fresh snow in sunlight. He stood up and came toward her, and she was suddenly reminded of her first venture into the city, the man — the doll? — who’d approached her while she and Felix were waiting for the trolley to take them to the old city, the way he’d bared down on her just like this.

  Ember clenched her pliers tight in her fingers. It wasn’t a knife, but just having something in her hands made her feel infinitely more prepared for whatever this doll might do.

  But would a knife, or pliers, or weapons of any kind, do anything against a mechanical person? Could they be cut? Hurt? Killed?

  She flinched away, from both the doll and the thought.

  The doll paused, just a little too close to her face for comfort. His smile never wavered. “The wall is cracking.”

  * * *

  Ember had never considered what made a person. That was the sort of question that wouldn’t have made sense to her before — if it looked and walked and talked like a person, then it was one, wasn’t it?

  She was wondering now.

  She stared down at the doll, crumpled gracelessly at her feet, its eyes staring as open and vacant as a corpse, and she had to swallow hard against the bile rising in her throat.

  The red-haired man had finally elected to take the chair the doll had vacated and have a seat a few paces away from where Ember worked. He got up again as the doll fell, expression alarmed. “What did you—”

  “I don’t know,” Ember interrupted. Cold sweat beaded at her hairline, and her stomach flopped over. “I just…” She couldn’t finish the sentence. What was the end of it?

  Killed someone?

  The other doll, the female-looking one, turned to Ember, and for the first time, her smile faltered.