I shoved my hands into my armpits, eyeing the grey haze blocking the Regent’s castle from our view. I didn’t want to go much further into the city in case we needed to make a hasty retreat. “Well, clearly they don’t keep trolls out, so safe is a relative term. The trolls are the immediate threat, and if we are to have any hope of winning this war, we need to know their plans. And we can’t talk to the fairies unless we’re somewhere they can reach us.” I started walking again, forcing her to follow. “We’re doing the right thing.”
“Which is why you didn’t tell Tristan where we were going?”
I stumbled over something hidden beneath the snow and fell, swearing as my borrowed skirts caught and tore. “He’s got his hands full with the Regent.” And judging from the emotions coming from him, it wasn’t going well.
“Time is of the essence,” I said, thrashing around in the snow in an attempt to free myself. “We can’t be sitting around waiting for Tristan’s permission for every move we make.”
“For goodness sake, what are you doing?” Sabine grabbed me under the armpits and heaved.
“My skirt is stuck on something,” I said, kicking my feet.
She pulled harder, and both of us inhaled sharply as a frozen corpse appeared from beneath the snow. Half of a corpse.
“The dragon,” I said, tugging my skirt free from where it was caught on the shattered ribcage, my plan suddenly seeming far more risky as we glanced skyward.
What felt like icy fingers brushed my brow and the world seemed to shudder. The sensation faded in an instant, but Sabine was also shaking her head as though to clear it. My spine prickled with unease. “Maybe we should go back.”
Sabine’s fingers tightened on my arms. “I’m not sure we can.”
I looked back and my stomach tightened. Shadows dragged themselves out from under the bridge, consuming the light from the gas lamps on either side of it until the route back to the castle became a yawning mouth of blackness. And over the wind, the skittering sound of things with claws filled the night.
“We’ll go into the city. Someone will give us shelter.” Sabine grabbed my hand and hauled me toward a café, but before we’d gone more than a pace, a gale-force wind blasted from above, driving the snow into drifts that blocked all the doors and windows from sight, leaving the center of the street bare. A pathway.
“I should never be allowed to come up with plans,” I breathed, trying to keep my fear in check.
“Maybe you should summon Tristan?” Sabine was digging at the snow bank, but the wind only pushed her efforts back in place, seeming to mock her with its little teasing gusts.
“No.” I needed to prove that my worth hadn’t ended the moment Anushka drew her last breath. Not to Tristan, but to myself. I’d unleashed the trolls, which meant I was responsible for everything that happened as a result. “If they’d wanted to harm us, they would have. This is… This is something else.”
Holding tight to each other’s hands, we followed the path through the streets, Trianon growing steadily less recognizable as we progressed. The drifts of snow blocking the buildings rose higher, turning to walls of transparent ice, swirling whorls and patterns forming before our eyes as though an invisible hand were scoring whimsical designs.
“It’s leading me home,” I said, averting my eyes from a woman standing utterly still behind the wall, her mouth open and fixed mid-sentence. There were dozens of others like her – men and women who appeared to have been frozen in place.
“Look.”
I followed Sabine’s pointed finger and gasped. Faintly illuminated by Tristan’s dome of magic, a palace of ice was rising up from the earth. Tower after tower materialized, each decorated with elaborate frozen cornices, delicate balconies, and transparent spires. And inside the frozen rooms, winged creatures danced, their motions jerking and strange. The walled street rounded a bend to where my mother’s townhouse was.
Or used to be.
The whole block formed the base of the palace, the row of stone townhouses coated in a thick layer of ice, doors and windows frozen shut. All except the door to my home, which was flung wide, barely recognizable beneath the icy ornamentation. I navigated my way around the fountains that formed out of nothingness, snow spewing from the mouths of fanged creatures whose frosted eyes seemed to follow us as we walked.
Sabine broke away from me, going up the steps to one of the doorways. The entrance was covered with a wall of transparent ice, but beyond, one of my neighbors appeared to have been frozen on her way out the door. “She looks alive,” Sabine said, resting a hand against the ice.
I peered through, watching the woman’s chest intently. “She’s not breathing.”
“You can’t tell that for sure.” Sabine picked up a brick and smashed it against the ice. Cracks radiated out from the impact, but seconds later, they retreated as though the ice were healing itself. She hit it again and again, but the result was the same. I caught her wrist and shook my head.